Chelsea Lynn La Bate - (New York, New York)

Folk music - http://www.myspace.com/chelsealynnlabate

It was inevitable that Chelsea Lynn La Bate would end up an artist in New York City. On a sunny day in June of 2004 she arrived in the city toting a kids guitar and a tiny suitcase of acrylic paints. Wearing a hibiscus print skirt and straight out of the tropics of Florida, she would spend the next three years writing songs about her disfunctional love affair with the city and her heart ache for the open skies of her homeland.

Chelsea Lynn grew up in the humidity of Miami swatting mosquitoes and eating mangoes off the trees. Born to a family of painters and artists, crayons were put in her hands as a baby. Her long time companionship with words began in grade school when she compiled her first book of poetry.

At eleven, having interest in singing, she auditioned for the Dorothy role in the Wizard of Oz and to her disappointment was cast as one of twenty munchkins. Chelsea moved on to sing in the shower for the next fifteen years (mostly to Disney movie soundtracks like The Little Mermaid) and buried all aspirations to be a singer. Still, she actively wrote poetry and used writing as a vice to digest the pains and pleasures of growing up in small town America.

After graduating college with a BFA, she traveled the US for a year, painting large scale murals and picking up guitars at bonfires and potlucks. It wasn't until she moved to the big apple to pursue a career in painting (with hopes of seducing a longtime crush) that her buried longing to be a performer sprouted. She was rejected by her falsely predicted soul mate and at the same time discovered that the city's gallery scene was not a place for her. Turned away by graduate schools who found her painting style "too illustrative," she wrote most of what would become her first album while squatting in an attic in the Lower East Side. These early pieces explore suffering, failure, displacement and taking refuge in one's imagination.

In the summer of 2005 she took her songs to the infamous Sidewalk Cafe. After playing just a single song during an open mic, Chelsea was offered a show and won the support of the anti-folk community. It was here amongst songwriters that she finally felt a sense of belonging. Having just moved into an ashram in the West Village in pursuit of becoming a monk, she discovered that she was one of the few young people in the Western Hemisphere with the desire to live a life of celibacy and prayer. She decided not to take the vows to be a lonely, endangered species and is happy to be sexually active again and with a wardrobe of multiple colors. Still, seemingly bound to a path of beggary and endless offerings, she has left the monastery and the city equipped with three albums and a book of poetry to tour the US and Europe with her music.

Songs:

1. Sweet Temporary

2. Fifty Foot Flames

3. Galileo (w/Tom Hayes)

4. The Snail Song

5. The Ocean Has No Silly Name

Purchase Albums
www.cdbaby.com/seasong