About

From a young age, TAELA knew she wanted to pursue music. Growing up with a difficult home life, the Missouri native says she witnessed the power of music firsthand at five. The singer vividly remembers how listening to a Joss Stone record transformed her mother.

“​​Every time she listened to it, everything would disappear,” TAELA recalls. “She would start smiling again. I clocked, ‘This woman who’s singing is healing my mom. This is the only time I see her happy, and for some reason, this music is doing this for her.’ I realized then that’s what I wanted to do for people.”

TAELA began listening to Stone as a coping mechanism herself. The up-and-coming country singer-songwriter says she was always passionate about how music heals people.

By the time she was 8, TAELA was writing stories, books, and poetry on a typewriter her mother bought from a thrift store. Soon, she was coming up with song concepts, melodies, and choruses. Homeschooled, TAELA sparked a friendship with her 70-year-old neighbor Murray. He’d pay her to watch his dog, help around the house, and do yard work. All the while, he’d remind TAELA that she was never alone.

When Murray was diagnosed with cancer, TAELA wrote her first complete song for her friend and mentor. Titled “You’re Not Alone,” TAELA performed the song for Murray the day before he died. In that moment, TAELA says she felt the energy in the room shift and she realized how important it was to write about “real things.”

“That was another one of those pivotal moments for me,” she says. “I was like, ‘Okay, this is what I need to do. I need to write about real things, and I want to save people through music and heal people through music.’”

With a guitar gifted by Murray, TAELA began to do just that. Her parents’ tumultuous relationship caused her family to move around a lot, so TAELA wrote songs to escape her chaotic childhood. Her parents ultimately divorced and at 14 she finally felt at home when her mother remarried and relocated the family to a farm in Missouri. TAELA’s stepfather taught her to hunt and fish and she fully embraced the country lifestyle surrounded by cows, horses, goats, and chickens. She recalls listening to ’90s country music and cites George Strait, Hank Williams, and Johnny Cash as favorites.

Soon, TAELA began to share her music with the world. Many of her early songs went viral on Facebook, prompting a country manager to invite her to Nashville in 2017 for a writing session. A chance meeting with twenty one pilots drummer Josh Dun promptly landed TAELA a management deal. She moved to Nashville in 2021 and signed a publishing deal with Kobalt shortly after. A record deal with Capitol Records followed with two pop albums.

Her 2023 debut album life’s a bitch… but it gets better features her song “trophy,” which debuted in the Top 10 across all genres on iTunes in March 2022, and “unforgivable,” written with hit songwriter and artist JP Saxe. To date, TAELA has amassed more than 65 million global streams and continues to build her following on socials with over 26.5 million likes on TikTok.

While TAELA is grateful for her success in the pop world, her goal was always to be a country songwriter. Having spent the majority of her teens and twenties living on a farm, she relates to the country lifestyle and is ready to introduce herself to the genre.

“I feel, for the first time in my life, fully myself and capable of being who I am,” TAELA says. “I’ve always had my certain way of writing and creating, but I felt like I was losing myself a little bit trying to do pop music. I craved that peace so badly that I knew existed here.”

“Rollin’” marks a new chapter for TAELA. The anthemic track is the lead single from her upcoming debut country album, set to be released in 2025. The song was written by TAELA, Kendall Goodman, Jorge Garcia, Alex Armenis, and Sofia Donavan-Lafuente, with production by David Mescon (Megan Maroney, Tigirlily Gold, Reyna Roberts). On the track, TAELA channels her youth and embraces the country lifestyle driving around the backwoods in a Chevrolet.

“It feels nostalgic, and it feels happy and giddy,” she says of the song. “It feels very freeing to come out of the gate with. I feel like it’s reintroducing myself and manifesting a better situation for me. It’s fun and it reminds me of my hometown and what I grew up around.”

The music video for “Rollin’” was directed by Acacia Evans and stars actor Steve Howey (Shameless, True Lies) as TAELA’s love interest. The singer sorted through the contacts in her phone to decide who would make the most sense for the “Rollin’” music video and longtime friend Howey was an obvious choice.

“He’s been a constant person in my life and special to me, and we have a really, really great friendship,” TAELA says. “I called him out of the blue. In a week, we planned everything, got him involved, flew to L.A., and it all came together.”

“Crocodile Tears” is the follow-up single to “Rollin’” and has TAELA looking back on her divorce from actor Peyton Meyer. It was the first song she wrote for her upcoming country project.

Frequent collaborator Goodman came in with the title “Crocodile Tears.” TAELA says it immediately inspired her and the song was written in five minutes. Lyrics like you went and did me dirty on purpose paint the picture of betrayal while TAELA’s powerful vocals further showcase the pain she went through in the relationship.

“I didn’t hold back on my vocal performance, but I also didn’t hold back on my artistry and the concept of it,” she says. “It’s very personal to me, and it’s about my divorce, my ex-husband. I hadn’t been able to get all of that off my chest in the way that I did with ‘Crocodile Tears.’”

“Rollin’” and “Crocodile Tears” are just a taste of what’s to come from TAELA’s country project, which she describes as a redemption album. Due out in 2025 on TAELA’s own Lucky Panther Records, the album promises to be a vulnerable and honest glimpse into the singer’s life.

The proud mom of two young boys, TAELA says everything she does is for her children. Living in Nashville, she’s now able to create and be a mom. Along the way, she found herself.

“I’m really looking forward to staying true to myself and continuing to tell my story, but mainly looking at the outcome of everything, and how I ended up on the other side, and that joy that I’m experiencing now,” she says. “There’s a lot more joy.”

TAELA says the biggest message she wants to give listeners with her new country music is that there’s always hope. Much like Joss Stone provided an escape to the singer and her mother decades ago, TAELA wants her music to bring comfort.

“Even when it feels like there’s nothing left to live for, there is something to live for,” she promises. “Music is the closest thing we have to magic.”