Chance Peña immediately exudes the effortless nonchalance you’d expect of a Texan, much less one who’s been strumming a guitar since age four. Today, little has changed. Hard-working with a down-home charm, the singer-songwriter emanates a type of ease that can only come from a foundation of self-assuredness and resolve. But it turns out that being this chill takes work: Over the past few years, Peña has contemplated the impact of emotional unrest (specifically, anxiety) on his music, and he realized that being a tortured artist is pretty passé. In fact, Peña has devoted his entire debut album, Ever-Shifting, Continual Blossoming (out September 13 on OneRPM) — a soulful work at turns aching and empowering — to prove this.
Peña, a native of a Dallas suburb, has achieved what most musicians could only dream of. In 2015, he became a breakout talent on NBC’s The Voice. Four years later, his track “Up Up, & Away” became a hit after appearing in the Justin Baldoni movie Five Feet Apart. A year later, he penned “Conversations in the Dark” for John Legend’s Grammy-winning album Bigger Love. Just last year, his track “In My Room” garnered more than 245 million streams.
Despite this, a few years ago, Peña began to suffer from panic attacks. It was only after he joined his friends on a trip to Montana that he had a life-changing revelation: Looking out into the breathtaking vistas of Glacier National Park, he realized that he didn’t need to suffer to succeed. “Anxiety,” Peña says, “does not have control over me.” He went on to pen the meditative “Montana,” its guitar arpeggiating like a steady current, to capture that experience.
Ever-Shifting, Continual Blossoming is gratifying in its authenticity. Eschewing pop gimmicks and production trickery, it lends way to no-frills songwriting that simply endeavors to be beautiful and melodic, but mostly, relatable. It’s a remarkable example of Peña’s creative elasticity as a musician, one moment channeling The Lumineers’ bubbling optimism, the next summoning the spirit of doomed ’70s alt-country singer Townes van Zandt. Peña is curious and confident, riding through a sonic frontier of Americana, blues, indie folk, country — all living harmoniously here.
“The Mountain Is You,” a spacious contemplation about being our own obstacle, sits at the heart of this work. The song came to life in Portland, Oregon, in the green room at a venue where Peña was later performing. “It had this little pump organ. I was playing these chords over and over again,” he says. He captured it on Voice Memo (as he does with many of his songs), then looped it. “Through creating that song, I feel like I just stepped out of my own way, stopped being such a perfectionist.” He cites another track, “Is What It Is,” a galloping country singalong, as expanding on that thought. “You know, I think that’s the whole growth narrative of this project,” he says. “We may not be perfect right now, our lives may not look exactly how we want them to, but there’s no point in getting down about it.”
“I understood how hard you have to work if you want this to be your career, and you want to be successful at it,” he says, reflecting on his journey. After his appearance on The Voice days, he started going to Nashville and LA and New York to collaborate on composing songs for other artists. “So it’s like, every day at 11 am you’re going to this studio writing with these people. Tomorrow, at noon, you’re going here and doing it with these people. It’s very regimented like that.” Though it was a grind, those experiences shaped him into the prodigious artist he is today. Says Peña, “I really got my chops doing that.”
With his musical boot-camp days behind him, he now mostly writes with four of his closest musician friends: Hayd (David Kushner, Jonah Kagen), Sarcastic Sounds (Lil Wayne, Powfu), Lydia Kaseta (The Chainsmokers, Trey Songz), and naebird (The Wonder Years, The Early November). “We all have a relationship. We know each other, and there’s just some kind of intuition,” says Peña, who also co-produced the album with Sarcastic Sounds and naebird. “We could sit down, I could pick up a guitar, start mumbling stuff, and then 45 minutes later, there’s a cool song.”
He’s not exaggerating. If there’s an ethos driving Ever-Shifting, Continual Blossoming, it’s capturing lightning in a bottle. The epic, indie-soundscape “Nobody Likes Change” was an improvisation during a sound check in Dublin, Ireland. (You’re actually hearing the live take on the album.) The vulnerable, earthy-folk “I’m Not Who I Was,” about being accepted for who you are, was written in less than an hour during some studio downtime. (The track, already in radio rotation, has hit 250+ million streams.) Meanwhile, Peña laid down “Feel It All,” a poignant lament about growing apart from your significant other, in record time as well. Most of his songs feature live instrumentation to capture this in-the-moment feel. “That’s what I tried to do with a lot of these songs,” he says. “However it’s gonna sound live — I want to keep it as close to that on the record.”
These days Peña shuffles between Los Angeles and his home base in Tyler, Texas, where he’ll record guitars and vocals in his bedroom. “It’s home, it’s family, it’s peaceful and quiet. Though I do travel a lot for touring, every time I come home, I’m just flooded with inspiration,” says Peña, who’s done everything from opening for David Kushner to playing Bonnaroo to headlining his own tours. “Tyler is a constant reminder that there’s life outside of music in the music industry.”
This is why he never falls out of love with music. It also affords him the freedom to write songs such as Ever-Shifting, Continual Blossoming’s twangy outlier, “Whiskey Angel.” A love-on-the-run stomper that he penned on the fly with his family during a Fourth of July hang in his parents’ backyard. “Me, my uncle, my brother, mom, dad, cousins — we were all just throwing out lines and writing a song.”
Everything Peña puts into the world exudes this type of contagious warmth. “It’s been so cool to watch the music connect with people live. And to, you know, hear them sing with me,” he says. “I like to say music is a remedy for reality, because no matter what you’re going through — whether it’s happy or sad, good or bad — you’re not alone in that. Music is often a mirror, and I think that’s why it can connect with so many different people. They see a reflection of themselves in a song.”
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