KELS

KELS is a jazz and soul singer who booked, promoted and drove her own 52 show tour of the United States.

Gina Boykin at Live Music Junkies told Brad Banyas he had to hear her. KELS came into the studio for the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast, cut a song live, and Banyas kept asking her to sing it again, which she had no problem with and which had nothing to do with the take. Handed two hats to pick from, she went straight past the one he offered and took the black one, on the grounds that most of what she writes is about somebody who made her angry.

Her father sings and never did anything professional with it. He worked out what she was when she was four, after pausing an Andrea Bocelli track on the way into a Chuck E. Cheese and hearing her pick the song back up on the same note and cadence when they got back in the car. She was thrown out of the church choir early for refusing to sing what was on the page. She took voice lessons from thirteen and her teacher told her to pick a genre. An Ella Fitzgerald CD at eleven had already settled that. She studied music in college for a year and dropped out because the theory was taking the love out of it. She is her own booking agent and promoter, and she says a musician has to love it enough to become a business person.

The tour was 52 shows in 28 cities across about 22 states, eight months from February to October, alone in her car with no money and no backing. She had no fan base going in. She had been putting music out to the void until a one take video of Just Let Me Go, her and a guitar in a cafe, went viral on TikTok, and she read a thousand comments naming cities and built the route out of them. Before that she spent Friday and Saturday nights on the Atlanta BeltLine with a sign that read you're listening to my music, playing her songs and handing out cards, because people kept asking whether it was really her singing. She learned what her fans wear and what shopping bags they carry that way.

She tells other artists to stop waiting on the producer or the studio. She sang covers a cappella in a garage until she had the people she needed, and her line is that you can show people you are serious without having everything you need. She invites any artist who does not know where to start to message her, and she will tell them all of it, including the part they may not want to hear. Her focus at the time was a 90 minute set at the Atlanta Jazz Festival, main stage, Piedmont Park, with Andre 3000 on after her.