"While standing in my closet, I used to scream 'Freak Out' by Avril Lavigne [from her 2004 released sophom*ore album "Under My Skin"] into a karaoke machine."
In 2004, 27-year-old Bayboro, North Carolina native and rising country music star Kasey Tyndall was 8 years old and amid a childhood that ended up with her parents divorced and her frontotemporal dementia-suffering grandfather having many treasured personal effects stolen from him by his hospice nurse caretaker.
While describing singing in her closet, far away from the madness, Tyndall talks to The Tennessean about connecting with Lavigne's brand of post-grunge alt-rock. Her mother also loved Joan Jett's swagged-out, '80s-era hard rock and Alison Krauss' bluegrass stylings. Add in the radio-ready country of the era from the likes of Brantley Gilbert, Miranda Lambert and Keith Urban, and the musical Venn diagram that creates the artist knocking on the door of spending a decade in a 10-year-town emerges.
Tyndall's fishing on Harbour Island on Old Hickory, Tennessee's banks of the Cumberland River, when everything else that defines her life and success to date pours out. Tapping into how she's healing her childhood trauma while also making the best music of her career -- plus, to borrow a line from another radio-friendly country icon, Luke Bryan, "hunting, fishing and loving everyday" -- offers why she's a 2023 CMT Next Women of Country class member on the cusp of mainstream country music stardom.
Her 7-month-old baby bump appears, too.
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Yes, she's pregnant.
How she ended up here -- and how it's positively redefined her career -- is important to examine.
Much has occurred since studying to enter Raleigh, North Carolina's burgeoning medical industry as a nurse while winning a 2014 radio contest to sing "We Were Us" with Keith Urban on August 8, 2014, at Raleigh's Walnut Creek Amphitheater (now Coastal Credit Union Music Park at Walnut Creek).
Eight summers have also elapsed after singing with Urban. She's now in Nashville, 700 miles away from a difficult childhood that being a nurse, in her mind, would resolve.
"I was so mad at that hospice nurse for stealing the last thing my grandfather gave my grandmother while he was in his right mind. So, I thought I'd become a nurse to represent the kind of person that a nurse should've been," Tyndall recalls.
There's a discordant, unresolved blend of angst and empathy at the core of who Tyndall is as an artist and person. Unfortunately, nearly a decade in Nashville hadn't tempered her focused, honest determination into a weapon aimed at pop stardom.
Yes, her singles like "Jesus and Joan Jett," "Nothing Wrong With Being Country," and "Middle Man" authentically reflect who she is as a surface-level person. There's no digging required to note that Tyndall is the child of divorcees who grew up a rock fan and was separated from the farthest Eastern shores of North Carolina by Pamlico Sound.
Looking further into who she's become since meeting and exceeding her roots during a decade chasing country music success defines her best -- and most authentic -- material.
For some, a rock 'n roll lifestyle causing a blend of late nights at the downtown Nashville watering hole the Red Door Saloon mixed with sleepless nights in touring vans will cause the collision of hustle, place and time that allows for star-making opportunities to occur.
Regarding Tyndall's long-time and hard-working Nashville friends like Lainey Wilson and her manager Mandelyn Monchick, plus Ashland Craft, their moments, primarily defined by that recipe, are finally happening -- at varying degrees of acclaim.
In May 2022, after wrapping the spring leg of Drake White's Optimystic Tour, Tyndall returned to Nashville and released the single "Babies."
The lyrics smack of sad frustration and guilt over being at a career crossroads while not fulfilling a stereotypical path from marriage to childbirth.
"Another day, another sun, always on the run 'cause / I ride the wind like a feather / Got a dream that I can blame / Maybe one of these days I'll finally get it together."
Even deeper, the song's video uses a dollhouse to show the different visions of her life, one with a husband and kids and the other as an artist. By the end of the video, she's burned the dollhouse to the ground.
She might've wished she hasn't done that.
In August 2022, she became aware that she was pregnant with her first child.
"My parents would call me while I was partying on weekday nights, spending weekends on the road and jokingly wondering when they would get to be grandparents. Then, surprise, they were," jokes Tyndall.
She notes that after so long in Nashville, the singer/songwriter grind had rendered her "robotic. However, being pregnant has reinvigorated her creative process and sparked her in exciting, full-circle directions.
"If my granddaddy could get into heaven, so can I," says Tyndall about her lead single for 2023, the Dylan Marlowe duet "Place For Me." In many ways, it's emblematic of the vocalist beginning the slow process of emerging past trauma and looking forward, in an unprecedentedly unrestrained manner, to a bright future ahead.
"I've written more songs while fishing and waiting in deer stands than in writing rooms. Connecting spiritually with the outdoors allows me to shut down all of the distractions in my life and give my brain the space it needs to create new material."
"Growing up, everyone in my community wanted me to be a big country music singer. Now that I'm here, trying to [be a country music star], it's been an emotionally, mentally and physically draining process -- that I've almost ruined a couple of times," Tyndall says. "Now, add into that being seven months pregnant and having an unborn child stepping on your lungs while you're throwing up before stepping onstage."
Her latest coping mechanism also highlights where her career is headed and how fast stardom could be approaching.
"I'm running on adrenaline and Jesus."
