There are some friends that just ‘get’ my music taste. So when Korinne saw that I was looking for artists to interview and shoot for Dollhouse, she gave me a name and I didn’t waste a second before I was streaming their music.
That name was CHSKA (‘chess-kuh’). An 18 year old girl, just days away from releasing her very first EP. Tidal had 3 singles for me to listen to, the earliest from just May 2021. Falling in love right away, I shared a clip of her music on my Instagram story. I quickly got a few “wtf???”s and that’s how you know something is special.
I messaged Chska on Instagram and she agreed to meet up, chat, and take some pictures.
‘Chska’ comes from her real name, Francesca, which she says she just doesn’t resonate with anymore. Being able to choose a name to represent her was a self-empowering move.
Her sound is soft R&B but she says you can expect to hear more jazz influences in the future. So, the natural follow up: “Do you have more music already waiting to be released?”
“I don’t like scheduled releases. If I released this 2 years later, I wouldn’t be the same person.”
It’s something I talk about a lot, especially about younger artists who are just starting to discover the world (spoiler: it’s not pretty). Their perspective is going to shift so dramatically by the time they reach their late-20s, and I love following that growth.
Her EP, Love Letter, was released on February 3rd and it’s 3 love songs to her boyfriend. They met through an artist’s collective called Deadluv and haven’t even been together for a year and he has a whole EP dedicated to him!?
Ok, cute.
She teased us with a breathtaking single off the EP, i know you know, released on December 30, 2022. The cover art for it is perfect – a picture of shadow of 2 people, one kissing the other on the cheek. She said they took the selfie and she thought right then, “I’m going to write a song about this moment.”
In the song Love Language she breaks out her highschool spanish to speak his language and ugh, I die for young love :’)
When I asked her if releasing was scary, she said, “It was very scary, but at the same time I tried not to think about it too much because I wrote this for the person I love. I didn’t really want it to blow up, I just wanted it to mean something.”
But it did blow up. In early March, she celebrated her 19th birthday with 200K monthly listeners on Spotify. She’s lucky that the Almighty Algorithm did her music some favors on Spotify & Youtube, which is rarely the case for most artists. She also credits her small fan base for endlessly pushing her music to wider audiences.
She has 6 released songs and some days I play them on repeat for a full 8 hour shift at the cafe I work at. I’ve never done so without some unprompted feedback from customers; “this voice.. Who is this? Local!?” The vocal runs and production really stands out. I love telling them that she is an 18 year old girl that took a risk to focus on music.
“I was like, do I become a medical professional or be an artist? But I knew that I would regret not trying in 5 years.”
She did a semester at McEwan for music and she’s noticed that many of the creative people she knows don’t feel like they’re good enough to start; “They drop the ‘creating’ part of music to ‘be better’ but I don’t agree with that. I think you’re always going to feel like you’re not enough.”
We could almost pin her chill confidence to her being a naive 18 year old, but there wasn’t an ounce of cockiness when she spoke. I am just so impressed with her wisdom and views regarding this journey she’s on.
The cool thing about music (like most art), is that it can be whatever you want it to be. You can write a full album once you learn 3 chords on the guitar if you want. As you learn, your sound will change and grow. Who’s telling so many artists that they may as well not reach for the stars at all just because they can’t reach Earendel today?
If we box ourselves in, we will feel boxed in every step of the way. Release yourself.
Hope you give her a follow and stream her new EP. And I’ll make sure to let people know when she finally performs locally – hopefully very soon.
Bye,Dolls!