INTERVIEW: Chapel Hart on Family, Success and Next Steps

Chapel Hart are a family trio from Mississippi, who’ve seen their career rocket in recent months – joining CMT’s Next Women of Country Class of 2021 and with the release of their new singles ‘You Can Have Him Jolene‘ and ‘I Will Follow.’ The trio’s energy exudes through their music, full of joy and expression. Here, we interview the trio about what it’s like to be in a family band, what the last year has meant to them and what’s up next. 

Hi guys! How are you all doing? 

Well thanks! How are you?

Yeah getting through the end of lockdown and looking forward to the prospect of live shows I think… 

It’s the same thing here too. We’re at the point where it’s so close that everybody’s like, we’ll be opening soon and stuff is open back.

Can we just speed up time? I’d quite like to see live music again soon.

We’re so ready to play shows and festivals and fairs.

Well first of all, congratulations on all the amazing things that have been happening for you guys recently. It must be kind of weird because you’ve had all this progress and all these amazing things happening but during a very weird time. 

Definitely, I think it makes it a little more unbelievable in a sense, like how in the world are we doing this in the midst of a pandemic. Somehow, we have just been running since last summer non-stop, boots to the ground, wherever we can play. We played everything we could and we planned our whole life to be ready to be rolling by summer. We were going to shoot ‘Jesus and Alcohol’ and start booking radio tours and everything and then we realised we couldn’t move. We had already planned to do this big huge video and tour with Billy Gibbons, so we just kind of kept moving and found open dates in the diary. 

I feel like we’ve all given up predicting anything. I know you guys grew up in Mississippi, but can you talk a bit about what it’s been like singing with your family. It’s very different singing with your family for fun to deciding to do this for a living – that’s a different conversation…

150%, it’s a little bit different for us because our family was huge – our grandmother had 17 children and there’s 108 first cousins, so it’s a big family. We’re up to five generations, so our family is huge. I would say we’re a musically based family because pretty much everybody in our family plays an instrument or sings.

It’s more a case of picking your favourite cousins then..

Danica: (laughs) Yeah, Trea and I started out as a duo. It started out with the two of us busking around New Orleans, but then we had a third singer. She was here from Australia and was on the cusp of ‘should I stay and do the music or should I go back?’ So, she ended up going back home, but we had already got a taste of three-part harmony. You can’t really go back. 

It’s one of those things where you can’t unhear it once you’ve heard that part.

Danica: Right, and so then this lovely here [Devynn] called me crying hysterically one day.

Devynn: I don’t know if I would say ‘hysterically.’

Danica: She’s a professional crybaby, too – the Queen of Emotions. She called me one day after she lost her job. and I was just like, ‘why don’t you come sing with us.’ I was pretty confident because our dad’s a pastor in a little church in Mississippi – we would go off and sing, and he would always be like ‘and my daughter Danica is here to sing a song.’ So finally, there was Devynn and we have a little brother, younger than her, and I was like ‘Well if they’re going to be there, I’m going to make them sing too.’ So I would teach them these really hard church songs. I was pretty confident, because technically I kind of trained her and I thought ‘Okay, I think she can catch up to speed fast. She can do this.’ When I told her, I was like ‘no pressure, if you want to come and sing…’

But also a lot of pressure?

Yeah, right because it was like if you can sing, you can’t be amateur. You can go but you’d better be great. 

You’d better not get a single note wrong?

Devynn: Since then, I’ve just been tied down, I say I was kidnapped – she called me and then suddenly we’re on CMT and the single is blowing up and I’m like ‘Oh this happened.’ She told me I had a choice, but I really didn’t, once I was there, I was there. 

Danica: I mean, anytime you get kidnapped and then you get famous, come on that’s a good kidnapping.

Devynn: I guess so.

Obviously there is so much spotlight on you guys now and it’s easy to see it as an overnight success story but it’s actually years of grafting. You put out an independent album in 2019, so what’s that journey been like?

Danica: I definitely do appreciate the kind of slow build because I think in that time we learned so much. I’m kind of glad that we didn’t have that overnight success where we went into it and we were completely clueless of everything. This period of time has been super helpful for us. 

Devynn: We haven’t learned everything, of course, you can never learn everything, but you know, we understand how it all kind of works. We’ve learned enough about us so that we can say, ‘Okay, we don’t like this at all. This is a no, yeah, this works. This is perfect.’ I think we’ve had enough time to learn that.

I think that there’s such a strong sense of self with you guys, you understand who you are and there’s clearly this vision of who you are as people and artists. I do think that happens when you have a slog, and you have years of finding out who you are without a label.

Danica: I think we started back in 2014 or 2015. I don’t really remember. I’m terrible, but I do love that though, people have been like ‘y’all just came up overnight.’ There’s so much more to it and that’s one of the things that people ask if we could give them any advice, I’d say ‘don’t look for the shortcut.’ It may seem like it takes long, but I know we live in a kind of instant generation. If you want to build a fanbase, don’t skip any sets – if you’ve only got 20 followers on Facebook but you can get 18 of them to engage and come on every time you go live, that’s better than having 5000 engaged. It’s making everything count, making music, engaging and loving your fans.

I think that has a lot to do with it, and even the music you put out feels very authentic to you guys as a band.

We have a hunch of how best to put it out to them. I think that there is an era of emerging African American country artists, and I’m so glad for that, because I think for so long there hasn’t been.

It’s refreshing to finally have that recognition, because historically the genre has been so whitewashed.

Part of that coin though is that it kind of feels like you’re pigeon holed into this category – African Americans trying to emerge into country music. 

Whereas the breadth is so broad really, you can’t compare Carrie and Maren in the same way you can’t compare Reyna Roberts and Mickey Guyton – it just doesn’t work.

Right? I think the one thing that we’ve done has been consistent, put in hard, hard work and it’ll pay off and it’ll it’ll rise to the top, the cream of the crop.

I wanted to talk about the first single which I heard from you guys – You Can Have Him Jolene – the gateway drug. I feel that title alone is enough to draw people in, but can you talk a bit about the creation of that track?

Well, of course the concept was inspired by the one and only Dolly Parton. We were shooting a music video for a cover of ‘9 to 5’ and Dev came in and her shirt said ‘You Can Have Him’ signed Jolene. Danika had this look on her face like, ‘You know what, how can you just give me my own man and then we’re gonna add on to the story, but then we don’t even need him anymore.’

I feel like that’s a good tagline for every girl out there.

I know right? We’re not going to fight over him, just take him, but good luck because just like you’ve stolen him from me, somebody can steal him from you right? It’s so crazy though because we all had this big CMT zoom and it was funny because, right before the Zoom came on, I was like all right y’all, it’s just us and Leslie Fram that’s just the conversation stay calm. We logged on, and we were playing live to 30 people. She said ‘I’m so sorry,  I told them I was meeting y’all and everybody wanted to come meet y’all. So, we played ‘You Can Have Him Jolene.’ Afterwards, there was a hush over the Zoom. She said ‘in 50 years of country music, we’ve never had someone say that, no one has ever said you can just have him.’ I’m sure at some point we’ll have a ‘He’s My Man and I’ll fight for Him’ song coming around, but that can come later. This is a great thing to sort of have the big push behind – got to get rid of the bad ones first.

How did it feel to have the support of CMT, they’ve had such amazing artists come through that program, so it must feel great to be a part of?

I mean, I’m pretty shocked about it because even to be considered in the same platform as so many women who are now just kicking butt in the charts is crazy. I think it all started from the ‘Jesus and Alcohol’ video, which caught CMT’s attention. When our management said they wanted to premiere it, we were like ‘what?’After a few months of interviews – people want to know, you know, how do you work with ZZ Top? – our management tells us. They said, ‘Well, guys, we just wanted to say congratulations,’ we’re like ‘For what?’ They said, ‘you guys are a part of the 2020 CMT Next Women of Country class. We just kind of laughed. I was like, ‘What? What a horrible joke to play on us.’ It’s like telling somebody they have cancer and then saying, ‘I’m just kidding’ – that’s horrific. They’re like ‘no, we’re serious. Here’s the email.’ We read it, we screamed and screamed and screamed. I think we almost got kicked out. Everybody was speechless once we realised it was really real.

I mean, way to make 2020 great? So, the follow up to that one has been your more autobiographical track – ‘I Will Follow’ – can you talk a bit about that one? How did you decide to go with ‘I Will Follow’ as the next track?

We had a tour booked with Jesse James Dupree and we were on the road – it felt like this is us, this is a win win, the entire world is shut down. We’re in our – we call her Vanna White – our band van. So we’re in Vanna White riding around from Kansas, Kentucky, and Indiana, that was just a song for our hearts, and I’m so grateful that we were able to shoot the video during tour. It showed a lot of our road life – a lot of it is just stopping here and there to use the bathroom. We get a chance to make friends. I just kind of make friends everywhere that we go. But, ‘I Will Follow’ was just one of those songs – it was written by Nick Brophy and Jennifer Hanson and we heard it instantly and thought this is it. This is the song.

It’s an amazing track. So, what’s up next for the rest of the year? I know we’re in the ‘who knows’ scenario, but what do you guys have planned? 

On March 17, we will have the CMT premiere of our video for ‘You Can Have Him Jolene’ and we’re so excited to release that. We’ve been sitting on it and we had so much fun recording the video. I feel the energy you feel in the song release in that video. I’m super excited for everybody to see it. We asked at the end of 2020, ‘What do you want to see from Chapel Hart?’ and everybody was consistent. They were like we want more music. So, in January we released a song, in February we released a song, so looks like from March we got to release a song.

Well we’re looking forward to more music and we’re just hoping when the pandemic is over, hopefully we’ll get you over to the UK soon. Thank you so much guys for taking the time to chat today and have a lovely rest of your morning, it was a joy to chat with you.

Thank you so much for taking the time!

 

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