Rising star Chloe Styler on country music’s chart-defining moment

There’s no denying the pure passion that drives Australia’s growing country music scene.

Last week, four of the Top 5 songs on the TMN Country Airplay Chart were by local acts, which is a monumental homegrown success story that proves all eyes and ears are truly listening.

Chloe Styler is a 22-year-old country-pop singer-songwriter from the Gold Coast who’s love for storytelling is the driving force for the next chapter of her career. With the current focus on Australian country music, she hopes that her new single ‘Patient Heart’ will introduce new listeners who are actively discovering the genre. 

“It’s a huge thumbs up to all of us in the industry by reassuring us that we are doing the right thing and that we can be welcomed in the Australian music scene, and not feel like we have to go overseas. Everyone always tells me to go to Nashville but it’s not like we have to anymore,” she explains to TMN.

“I want to give back to my community, I want to make a home here and I want to feel welcome in the Australian country music industry. And I definitely that with Australians dominating the charts, there is no reason I have to go to Nashville anytime soon because it is possible to get recognised here,” she adds. 

Citing Kacey Musgraves as a major influence for the artist she wants to be, and the impact she hopes to make, she applauds how the Grammy Award-winning artist has opened the flood gates to country music to so many new listeners who are genuinely interested in discovering new acts. 

“There is a socialised stigma around country music where people only associate phrases like ‘yee-haw’ and artists like Billy Ray Cyrus within the genre. But there are so many other avenues of country music, and I’m so excited because there is so much room for country artists in the commercial and mainstream scene now because it’s so variant. From the likes of Morgan Evans, Kacey Musgraves to Kelsea Ballerini, there really is a commercial sensibility there.”

In the Australian scene, Styler looks to Melody Moko as a big inspiration for breaking the international market through touring her music in Australia. 

“She’s a mother of two, and she tours a lot and she’s just been to Nashville and is really becoming prominent in the country folk and Americana scene. She’s sort of like Kacey Musgraves because she speaks her mind, and she’s definitely an artist that I look to for inspiration and is someone who I could imagine myself following the same path as.” 

Styler’s new single ‘Patient Heart’ was a track that came together during a songwriters retreat in rural NSW in July 2018.

“We were on this little secluded sheep station and we were very cut out from the world. There was no phone service, no wifi or anything like that. I sat down with two of my really close friends, Jenny Mitchell and George Goodfellow, and started talking about how weird it would be if something was to happen in the outside world as we had no connection to it.

“That conversation of seclusion turned into a really sentimental chat about our feelings towards our complicated relationships at the time. I was having a really on and off again relationship and we were all in situations where we were being the patient hearts,” she explains of the situational experience.

It’s a reflective song that highlights a mature growth since her last release ‘When Your Light Burns’ and opens the meaning up to interpretation from the listener.

“It’s a song where you can make your own ending. If you aren’t happy then you can make the move. If you don’t want to keep waiting for this person to tell you that they love you, then you have to tell them that they aren’t treating you how you want to be treated and walk away. But we let the listener choose how they want the story to end,” she says. 

With the country-pop song coming together in two hours, it was put into the vault before she finally recorded it in February this year. The song is being released through ABC Music/Universal Music and marks her first major label release.

Chloe Styler will be performing at the Deni Ute Muster over the weekend alongside Tim McGraw, Lee Kernaghan, John Williamson and Beccy Cole, which she admits is another massive reassurance that she’s doing the right thing creatively. 

And with the recent success of the inaugural arena festival C2C in Brisbane and Sydney and the yearly success of CMC Rocks, she hopes that more people will start attending country music events because of the increasing accessibility of them.

“I hope people will just go to an event like CMC Rocks and experience it, allow themselves to fall in love with the music, and then buy the music and support the artists and the local musicians who are just doing this because they love it.”