New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Rising singer-songwriter 23 year old Chance Peña will release his new EP Lovers to Strangers on July 14. The track listing includes his current single "In My Room," which currently has 107.5M streams on Spotify, 13.4M streams on Apple Music, 18.4 million views on YouTube and 5 billion views on TikTok, with 2 million video creations and counting. Peña played that song and other fan-favorites during his set at Bonnaroo
Music Festival last month as well as his shows supporting
David Kushner.
At only 23, Chance Peña might be one of the youngest music industry veterans you'll ever meet - an old-soul folk singer and producer who's been gigging and writing songs for the better part of a decade. Born and raised in Tyler, Texas, and now based in Los Angeles, Chance has been honing a sound that's effusive, unashamedly emotional and, above all, totally honest. With his new EP Lovers To Strangers, he emerges as a deft chronicler of the trials and tribulations of romantic relationships and life as a twenty-something.
Building on his early EPs Anxiety & Mixed Emotions and The Inevitable, Lovers To Strangers is a collection of richly-produced ballads that are equal parts rousing and heartbreaking, revealing a diamond-sharp artist moving with the utmost humility.
"When my last two projects came out, to be frank, I didn't know anything - I didn't know what anxiety truly was," says Chance. "After those records, I was ready to grow up, figure this life stuff out. During the last three years, I've learned a lot, but there's so much that I haven't learned."
Growing up in Tyler, TX was, by his telling, a lonely place for musicians and Chance didn't even consider that a career in music could be possible. Still, he was immersed in music from a young age, encouraged to pick up a guitar by his father.
At the age of 13, Chance experienced a transformative moment when his father took him to a
Lumineers concert in Dallas. Seeing frontman
Wesley Schultz encourage the audience not to film the show on their phones, and to instead experience the moment, he realized what a communal, devotional experience music could provide. "For my young little mind, that made a massive impression," he says. "Don't make a time capsule for something you haven't even experienced yet - just be present."
Just 2 years later, at the age of 15, Chance competed on The Voice and began to both understand the contours of the music industry and fall in love with the idea of becoming a musician himself. Surrounded by fellow musicians his own age for the first time, away from the day-to-day humdrum of Tyler - "I quit the football team to be a musician," he quips - he found within himself a hunger for the struggle and glory of professional music.
The experience also opened his eyes to how "fake" aspects of the music industry could be, and how he wanted to conduct his own career moving forward. "I realized how the industry actually works - it's not all petals and roses and the most talented person becomes the most successful," he says. "I learned pretty quickly that hard work pays off - it outdoes talent any day. The show showed me how fake showbusiness and Hollywood can be."
Shortly after leaving The Voice, Chance signed with a publishing company, and began working on music for film and TV, as well as for other artists. True to his word, Chance worked hard, and saw his talent begin to shine through just as much as his toil - evidenced by "
Conversations In The Dark", a single for John Legend's Bigger Love that he co-wrote. "That was such a surreal moment - I have a gold record on my wall because of it," he says. Of course, he didn't stop to smell the roses. "I put my head down for a couple years, and wrote and learned and grew."
All that hard work comes to bear on Lovers To Strangers, led by the massive streaming single "In My Room." The record chronicles the coming-of-age of a wise beyond his years talent, and all the contradictions that process may entail. He uses inspiration from his own life to tell stories of relationships that carry seeds of universal truth.
The EP's title track, a heartbreak song inspired by a rough patch in his own relationship, is defiant but totally generous in its outlook. "It's about when someone did you wrong and you're kind of telling them off, in a way, but in a heartfelt way," he says."That's one of my core beliefs, in romantic relationships or friendships or family, or even work relationships - I'm gonna treat you the way I wanna be treated. My heart's not fickle."
Lovers to Strangers announces Chance as a rare kind of songwriter, whose aim is not broad-based fame or monetary success, but human connection. "I'm ready to share this part of me, so that I can move on," he says. "I hope that these songs help somebody - that these lessons learned can help them deal with the things in their own lives, whatever that may be. At the end of the day, when I put a song out, it's no longer mine - it's yours."
