AUSTIN, Texas — Chelsea Pribble is an Austin-based musician and dancer by nature. Her deep love of ballet, which she found at a young age, still influences her music today.
"I think some of that classical music influenced the overall feel of my songs,” Pribble said.
Pribble describes her music now as "cinematic jazz." She studied ballet at the University of Texas at Austin, but she now wears several different hats. She teaches ballet lessons, works on her music and has a full-time marketing job.
"You got to make a living, especially if you're an independent artist," Pribble said. "So I started dabbling in marketing to kind of understand how to market myself as an artist."
Pribble wants to make music her full-time gig, but that comes with a steep price tag. She said the average cost to record and produce one song is about $1,000. For a full album, she’s looking at anywhere from $7,000 to $10,000.
This year, she received a $10,000 grant from the City of Austin as a part of its 2023 Live Music Event Program. The City gave 368 local musicians and producers a total of $3.5 million, in grants of $5,000 or $10,000.
Pribble received a $10,000 grant, which she said will be crucial to her music career taking off.
"I've only done one release prior to this, and it was a smaller EP and I didn't have as much artistic control as I would have liked for it,” Pribble said. “So this is kind of a great opportunity for me as an independent artist, to just kind of fully realize my artistic vision.”
She said the program gives artists a timeline to use the grant, so she will start recording her songs by February and release her album in the early summer. She plans to keep her ballet roots with her when she releases her debut album.
"For the live show, I'd love to see how I can integrate like, you know, more concert-style dance," Pribble said. "It would be an interesting blend of kind of like cinematic jazz with very traditional ballet, contemporary-style dance."
Pribble said dance and music have always been her outlet to deal with the struggles of life, and she wants to express that with her new album, "Stay Gold."
"All these songs are just kind of a collection of songs I've written over the past decade, but I felt like the underlying theme was … that like, youthful innocence and wonder of the world," Pribble said. "We learn so much and we go through so much, but it's, you know, just keeping that joy in life."
That joy for Pribble is evident every time she's on the dancefloor or in front of a piano.