Homegrown country singer-songwriter Kaylee Bell has just broken on to the United States country music charts with her song 'Keith'.
'Keith' is currently sitting at Number 12 on the US Billboard Charts and has put her at number 41 on the Emerging Artists Chart. The song is a celebration of Keith Urban's music.
Playing music since she was four, Bell is now living the dream in Nashville.
Kaylee Bell with Keith Urban. Photo: Kaylee Bell / Supplied
Making the move to Nashville was a huge, but necessary decision, Bell tells Jesse Mulligan.
“America, with country music, is just the Everest, it's the one everyone wants to climb. And it's also the hardest.
"You've got to be in to win here, you've literally got to spend time in this town. And that's what I'm doing now and it's amazing to see that in the way of something like the Billboards happening right now, I feel like that's so much because I'm based here now.”
She is working with some of Nashville’s finest players, Bell says.
“I've been back and forth for 12 years working out who I want to work with and write with and to be in the same rooms as you know, the guys that are playing on the ‘Keith’ record it just It blows my mind that I get the chance to be in the room making music with these people. And that is the dream of being here in Nashville, is to be able to work with the best.”
The song that is making her a name on the country scene in the US is not a recent addition to her repertoire, she says.
“It was released in 2019 and did really well back then in New Zealand and Australia on radio. And then I went on the Voice Australia and got to play the song to Keith Urban, which obviously kind of set off another moment.”
She posted recently about the song on TikTok, she says.
“I was just reflecting on The Voice and I reposted the audition. And now that my algorithm is set in America, it just opened it up to a whole new audience and you've got all these Americans discovering the song for the very first time, which has been pretty wild to see.
“Because Keith, he's still not massively known in New Zealand as talented as he is for whatever reason, but in America everybody knows and loves Keith Urban, so I feel like that song’s been discovered for the first time again.”
After her post the song took off, she says.
“We posted the TikTok and I think it's had 20 million plays in the last two weeks or something wild. The whole thing just blown up again.
“And that's what has driven that song to now be charting on Billboard. When I got tagged on it the other day, I thought it might have been a mistake.
“And I clicked through the link and was like, 'are you kidding me?' To me Billboard are the Grammys, are like those unreachable things in life that we look at from New Zealand.
“To have that happen to an unsigned, self-managed artist, I think it's unheard of, honestly, which is the wildest thing.”
The next move is to go out on the road and consolidate on the success of ‘Keith’, she says.
“I think that's what the song is teaching me, anything is possible right now and it just feels like the universe is at play here.”
