Nashville dream-pop artist Arily Michele was recently the recipient of a well-deserved high scoring review in these pages, based largely on the three songs from her “Silver Dollar” single, her latest release at the time of writing. Her debut album, Echolalia, dropped in 2021, with the sophomore Highway Hypnosis coming out in ’24. But the entirety of her musical journey is a much longer story.
“I started singing around age two, and writing around age eight,” Michele says. “Singing and writing songs has stayed with me my whole life, but I started taking singing more seriously in high school. I was heavily involved in chorus and theater, and I finally started taking voice lessons when I was 17 to help me prep for college auditions. I started taking songwriting more seriously after I graduated from college. I studied classical music, and music theory helped me to extract ideas from my head and materialize them into written songs. After I graduated, I wanted to rebel against my classical training a bit, so I started a dream pop band in Denver. I had probably written hundreds of songs at that point and scrapped most of them, but the few that I kept are the first songs I ever recorded.”
The artist describes her sound as “dreamy neo-psychedelic pop that is heavily inspired by the lofty peaks and sweeping valleys of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. I am also a classically trained operatic soprano, so I like to incorporate some coloratura vocal layers for a more cinematic feel.”
The “Silver Dollar” single is the third taken from her forthcoming album. “It’s inspired by the story of a girl named Rosemary Echo ‘Silver Dollar’ Tabor,” Michele says. “Her family was absurdly wealthy when she was born, but lost their money a few years later, and she spent the rest of her life chasing after fame and fortune as a result. I felt like Silver Dollar’s story reflected my own personal fears of failure, and also society’s tendency to emphasize wealth and notoriety over joy and connection.”
To Michele, DIY means “don’t wait around for someone to do it for you.”
“When I moved to Nashville, I couldn’t afford to hire professional recording and mix engineers, so I recorded myself and taught myself how to mix,” she says. “If I hadn’t done that, I would have waited until I could afford to hire people, which might not have ever happened. So not only would I not have been able to release any music, I also would have missed out on what turned out to be a truly enjoyable experience, as well as the chance to learn some valuable audio engineering skills. I believe that sometimes it’s best to just get things done and figure the rest out as you go along. Part of being an artist is embracing that you are on a journey. A journey becomes so much more interesting when there are unexpected twists and turns.”
Michele has a bunch of shows and festivals lined up for the summer, with that third album due in September. Keep your eye out for her!
Visit arilymichele.com
