Kelsey Montanez

Kelsey Montanez is a singer/songwriter born out of Chicago, IL. Raised into a family of musicians, from an early age she has been exposed to the passion and pleasure music can bring and that joy can be heard in each delicately crafted song she writes. She began singing when she was merely four years old when her father would bring her to band practices and let her sing into the microphone. “ I remember sitting on the basement steps and watching my dad and his band build all these beautiful sounds. It felt like I was in a whole other world. That’s when I really began to understand that my purpose was to create music and that desire never left me.”

As Kelsey grew older her devotion to music remained and grew stronger. For years Kelsey played her fathers instruments in the small recording studio that he had set up in the basement, often times avoiding social situations and family events to continue experimenting with music. And seeing as Kelsey’s passion for music was not just a phase, her father and step-mother decided to buy her first electric guitar when she was thirteen years old. “ I was so elated I cried!” muses Kelsey. “ I began trying to form bands with friends in school. We would all sit in my room with our little amps and talk about how we were going to dominate the world with our music.” She reminisces. She began to write songs of her own since she first got her guitar and realized that she wrote the best when she was alone. The more and more Kelsey began to write songs, her father recognized a gift for writing as well as singing and bought her an acoustic guitar a year after she had picked up the electric. Kelsey had felt an instant connection with the acoustic and began to write more songs than ever before.

She was 14 when she played her first show at an empty little coffee shop in Lombard IL and has since worked her way up to headlining major venues in Chicago like the Elbo Room, The Beat Kitchen, Lakeshore Theatre, Kinetic Playground, Uncommon Ground and many other places in and around the Chicago land area. She accomplished all of this while still in high school as well as winning first place in her high school talent competition. Being the youngest to perform at Chicago’s MOBFEST, she has many other festivals and showcases under her belt as well, including Decibelle festival, women with Guitars, Villa Park Summerfest, chix that rock, and singer spotlight unplugged. She has also worked with noted producers Chris Sernel and Andy Lagis and has done work with Chicago based publishing group KMA Entertainment. She has also had drum tracks done by famous heavy metal rocker Charlie Benante of "Anthrax".

After graduating high school in May of 2009, she took off on a cross-country road trip to the West Coast. “ I was never the kind of person who did well in predictable, routined patterns. Although I’m glad I graduated from high school I knew I wanted to experience so much more. So I left to play some of my music in a place I had never been before, surrounded by people and things I have never seen before” To her surprise she was very well received on the west coast where she had signed her first autographs and talked to so many people passionate in the same way she is! Being so far away from home she experiences a lot of things that is reflected in her music. She is currently in the studio preparing for her next demo to be released. In her new demo you will find the same experience driven lyrics and heartfelt vocals that is recognizable in every song Kelsey writes. For an 18 year old, Kelsey Montanez displays a profound amount of passion and a gift to infect her listeners with the same intensity, no matter where they came from or what stage of life they are in. As an unsigned, indpendent artist you can expect a long, and honorable career from this young