“I’m not from a musical family, none of them can carry a tune in a bucket,” laughs country rocker Kasey Tyndall, who wrote her first song at the ripe old age of 13. “We’ve looked all the way down the family tree to try and figure out where I got it.” The Nashville-based native North Carolinian had always dreamed of a music career, but was unsure how to pursue one. “I figured if I ever got an opportunity one day, I’d take it,” she adds. “In my mind though, it wasn’t a realistic thing for me.”
Little did she know how real her dreams would soon become; Tyndall, a nursing student at the time, entered a radio contest—the grand prize winner got a chance to perform onstage with the legendary Keith Urban. She won. “I got to sing with him a Walnut Creek Amphitheater in Raleigh. It was awesome,” she recalls. “It was an out-of-body experience—I’d never done anything like that, getting up in front of 25,000 people. I thought winning the contest and singing on stage with Keith would just be a passing moment though, that people would soon forget about me.” However, Kasey Tyndall is one unforgettable lady; her now manager happened to be in the audience that night, reached out, and signed her. “He asked me if I’d ever been to Nashville, and I said no. He invited me out and set up meetings for me. I decided to move here, and I ain’t been home yet,” she says with a laugh.
While a conversation with this fellow Tarheel, whose honey-coated accent is familiar music to this writer’s ears, brims with signs of what we refer to as “good home training” blended with sweet Carolina charm, make no mistake—this southern belle is no shrinking violet. When most folks say who they are, Tyndall has the courage to declare who she ain’t (literally, she wrote a song about it). Already, the young artist has shared writing rooms with some of Nashville’s songwriting heavyweights, locked down a publishing deal with Sony/ATV, and has an EP on the way. It’s no surprise that her star is blazing—even a cursory listen to her songs unrelentingly grabs the heart and refuses to let go. like her break-out single, “Everything Is Texas.”
“‘Everything Is Texas’ is about a real person, poor guy. I hope he doesn’t hate me,” she reveals. “When I first moved to Nashville about two years ago, I started dating a guy from Texas. Everything was going good, and then he disappeared on me, moved away from Nashville, just left. At the time, my heart was broken, and when your heart is broken, everything reminds you of that person. All of a sudden, everything was Texas—I’d see every other person wearing a Texas t-shirt, every car on the road had a Texas license plate. My favorite show was Walker, Texas Ranger, and I couldn’t even watch it,” she continues. “So of course I sat down with two friends and wrote a song about it. The fans loved it so much, we put that song out first.” Imagine Tyndall’s surprise when the song’s subject showed up at one of her CMA Fest performances. “I thought I had seen me a ghost! I hadn’t heard from him in at least a year. I was playing at The Wild Horse during CMA Fest, and he was there,” she recalls. “I’d been playing the song and telling the story in front of it every night I played it. I told that story onstage and he stood right there and listened, and took it like a man,” she continues. “It was a Taylor Swift moment.”
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