Country artists often paint fairly generic pictures of small-town, American roots, but Angie K brings a richer sense of context to her origin story. Her telling of family history includes rural settings as well as border crossings into different cultural and political realities.
“My mom grew up in New Mexico. My dad is from El Salvador. And they met at University of New Mexico,” she says matter-of-factly. “And I can talk about this now because there’s been a little bit of a change in politics down there — but my dad’s dad was kidnapped, and that’s why they had to come back down. There’s a lot more to that story, but I’ll kind of leave it at that. And that’s why we all were born there.”
Angie even wrote a song about migration forging family ties on her mom’s side.
It isn’t just the lyrics’ story of cross-cultural romance — whose epic, almost folkloric qualities echo the spirit, if not the traditional structure, of Mexican corridos — that reflects the breadth of her country sensibilities. In her virtuosic insertion of Spanish words in otherwise English lines and the flamenco guitar figures weaving around and through her thoroughly contemporary country-rock attack, you can hear how her country music vision centers Latin elements.
As the family moved from El Salvador to Georgia, Angie’s parents supplied country touchstones and paid for her voice lessons — on the condition that she take her singing studies seriously and practice on her own regularly, on top of her choir rehearsals. But she improvised her own savvy path into a music career.
She was working at a salvage yard in Georgia when she got the idea of searching for a gig performing on a cruise ship. Then, she booked her own tour of dive bars, crashing on couches along the way, and went on TV singing competition “The Voice” in 2016.
That show-stopping moment made three of the show’s four judges, Blake Shelton, Adam Levine and Pharrell, turn their chairs and try to recruit her for their teams. Back then, she was still going by her full name, Angie Keilhauer, and she chose Shelton, the one country star in the mix, as her coach.
After Angie got to Nashville, she aimed for a breakthrough at country radio and streaming platforms with “Real Talk,” a bilingual country-pop single with a syncopated, loosely reggaeton-influenced groove that she’d recorded with one of the biggest producers in town.
For an independent release, it did respectably well. But it wasn’t what the industry defined as a hit, and she came face to face with blanket bias: To Nashville, a country single by one artist with Latin roots stood in for all Latin country performers.
“I remember hearing that it was their thought that that failed, failed to break me (as a mainstream artist),” she recalls. “So they were less likely to choose other songs with Spanish in it. It’s hard to even talk about, but it’s important to talk about. It broke my heart.”
Angie didn’t allow that to limit her approach to writing and recording her new self-titled EP. In fact, it’s her most musically expansive and emotionally complex project to date. There’s muscled-up honky-tonk and soul heartache; a galvanizingly anthemic ballad about savoring lasting connection; sultry, Spanish guitar-accented reassurance of romantic devotion and plenty else. The way she moves between English and Spanish in the latter track, “Stay,” conveys a feeling so deep and consuming that one language simply can’t contain it.
“If I tried right now to write a song that included my Latin heritage,” she reflects, “I don’t think it would be as good as if I just wrote how I was feeling that day and said, ‘I really want to say this phrase in Spanish.’ I took the pressure off myself. There’s so much of an identity crisis (for) people that are from different countries that live here because ‘multicultural’ isn’t something that comes naturally for Americans to understand, necessarily. I try not to think too hard about having to represent a bunch of people and, instead, hope to send the message that you can represent yourself in any way you want.”
Last year, as a member of the Equal Access program that makes way for marginalized voices in country music, Angie witnessed Carín León, a superstar of both country and Mexican regional music like banda and norteño, make his debut on the Grand Ole Opry.
“I stood backstage, and I watched an entire crowd of what looked like Mexican vaqueros watching him just yipping and hollering. And when he finished his two songs, I mean, they were just screaming, ‘¡Otra! ¡Otra!’ To the point where the Opry was like, ‘Please, another one.’ He turned the entire Opry into this whole other demographic. Carín is like — I don’t know how to say it in other way — Justin Bieber status for the rest of the world.”
The country music industry has long operated as though Nashville is the center of the country music universe. An analytical problem-solver by nature, Angie contemplated the divide between León’s massive, enthusiastic audience and Nashville’s centralized business, and decided to take action. In January, a month before her EP came out, she launched the Country Latin Association with a clear sense of the issues her advocacy would tackle.
“I mean, there’s so many people right now that have massive followings that are in country music, but we’re not hearing their name because they don’t even know about the industry here,” she notes. “They’re just out there getting their crazy numbers and doing their tours in Brazil or in Spain or wherever they are, and we have no idea. And what if we did? Like, what if we made the world a little smaller?”
Angie spent a year in Equal Access, which is as business savvy in its approach as it is intersectional. (She’s both queer and of Latin heritage, and many of her fellow participants have been people of color, members of the LGBTQIA+ community or both.) In it, she took note of the strategies that enable the program to make headway, and incremental change, in the industry. Her new organization’s website speaks a language that Nashville understands: chart stats. And they show that Brazilian stars Ana Castela and Jorge & Mateus are right up there with León.
“Three of the top 10 artists in country music are Latin,” Angie points out. “And I’d be shocked if the CEO of Sony Music Nashville, of Universal Music, of Warner knew their names. There’s a market now. It’s not one we have to create. ”
Follow the Country Latin Association on Instagram and TikTok and you’ll be introduced to the music of a different artist every day. There’s a podcast too, Latina in Nashville, hosted by another artist, Andrea Vasquez. And Angie’s approach to all these platforms makes clear that these are distinct voices working in different traditions. In other words, they’re not a monolith.
@countrylatinassoc
“The goal is to start creating stories so that people that are in big positions (of influence) have an easy way of looking at the differences between a Cuban heritage or a Mexican heritage or Salvadoran heritage. It’s important to hear the story, so we start understanding the nuances; because if you don’t understand the nuances, you’ll never be able to market a Latin artist.”
This is just the first phase of Angie’s plan. She’s got her eye on sponsorships, showcases, increasing the Country Music Association’s Spanish-speaking membership and so much more: “That’s a massive dream. I hate saying it out loud, but I’m just going to do my little steps and see where that takes us in the next year.”
On Air - 90.3 WPLN-FM