Kalie Shorr - Awake EP (2018)

A country artist with a sweet voice but a strong work ethic, Kalie Shorr took the hard road to stardom as she first made her name in Nashville as a teenager. Shorr was born and raised in Portland, Maine on July 11, 1994, where she was the youngest of seven children born to a single mother. Shorr soaked up a rich variety of influences from her siblings, and at the age of six she began writing songs. At 13, Shorr learned to play guitar, and before long she began posting videos of herself singing cover songs online. Shorr's interpretation of Rebecca Black's "Friday" earned her an unlikely celebrity fan in blogger Perez Hilton, and after extensive correspondence with her, he booked her to play his 34th birthday party, where she opened for the Backstreet Boys.

By this time, Shorr had already gained experience playing in a rock band in Portland and winning a Maine's Got Talent competition in 2010. While she liked rock, R&B, and hip-hop, Shorr was certain that her future lay in country music. Determined to make her mark, Shorr took extra classes so she could graduate from high school early, and then held down two jobs at once so she could raise the money to move to Nashville. By the time she was 19, Shorr had settled in Music City, and she landed a job at a bar while she searched for an audience for her songs. Things began looking up for Shorr when she became part of a weekly songwriter's showcase, the Song Suffragettes, that highlighted the work of talented female singer/songwriters in Nashville. The Song Suffragettes helped raise Shorr's profile and they gained a loyal local following.

With two of her fellow Suffragettes, Hailey Steele and Lena Stone, Shorr wrote a song about resilience titled "Fight Like a Girl." Shorr released an independent digital single of "Fight Like a Girl" in January 2016, and the tune quickly won positive press and airplay on digital radio and social media sources. March 2016 saw the release of an eight-song collection of demos from Shorr, The Y2K Mixtape, and a second single, "He's Just Not That into You," appeared the following September. The independent success of Shorr's two singles spread the news about her and her songs outside Nashville, and in March 2017 she dropped an EP, Slingshot, that included "Fight Like a Girl" and "He's Just Not That into You" along with three new tracks. ~ Mark Deming