KAYLEE BELL, PROFILED (2024): A star has risen

When Kaylee Bell's new album Nights Like This debuted at the top of the New Zealand artist's chart recently and entered the main chart at number 3, few could have been surprised.

It wasn't just that her time had come, but her style of music – mainstream country, strong on choruses, hooks and narrative – had also been penetrating the charts and public consciousness.

American country artists who barely get any radio play can pull huge crowds of urban listeners, those perhaps weary of alt.whatever or AutoTuned r'n'b and are looking for music they can dance to and feel some connection with.

Songs with stories and raw emotions, music which doesn't sound quite so manufactured.

The irony is, that's exactly what Bell's music is: it is mainstream, streamlined Nashville country music. Not alt.anything, just straight-ahead heartfelt songs.

Or at least songs that sound like that, despite the emphasis on clean and loud production, and drums that cannon out of the speakers.

But Bell's time had also come.

Out of smalltown Waimate in Canterbury (population fewer than 3000), she won a Golden Guitar award when she was 18 and moved to Australia three years later.

She was young and ambitious, prepared to collaborate with other writers and in 2013 won the Toyota Star Maker award.

The song Pieces which she recorded with American-born Australian-based singer Jared Porter won the New Zealand APRA award for best country song in 2015. She'd already picked up the country album award for her debut Herat First at the 2014 New Zealand Music Awards.

And through hard work and tenacity picked up awards and increasing mainstream attention on both sides of the Tasman, notably appearing on The Voice Australia.

She successfully toured New Zealand as a headliner last year, opened for Ed Sheeran and recently completed another tour here.

Significantly however, Bell has permanently relocated to Nashville, the nexus of successful and aspiring country artists and songwriters.

It's a tough and competitive town – a guy living in his car there gave me his CD of demos, just in case -- but it is her natural home and where she needs to be as a proven, collaborative songwriter.

This new album recorded with top-flight session players and producers is quintessential Nashville country with a prominent backbeat.

Song titles include Take It To the Highway, When Summer Rolls Around and Boots'n All.

Bell covers key and often thematically familiar bases: country myth and nostalgia (Small Town Friday Nights), highway drivin' (Good Things) and a fine ballad Where Were You which could become a standard.

She adopts the argot of American country music but that too is sensible. That is her target audience.

There's a smart slice of genre-breaking electro-country (Life is Tough But So Am I with gifted Kiwi songwriter Navvy which has pop crossover potential) and a well-chosen Alanis Morissette cover (You Learn).

A stripped-down version of her successful 2019 single Keith – an open letter to country megastar Keith Urban which more recently made the US Independent Music Network chart  – closes a mature, empowered, American country crossover album hitting every target aimed at.

And the justifiably confident, committed Bell makes the familiar sound as if she'd just discovered it.

Quite an achievement on every front.

.

You can hear this album at Spotify here.