Chase the Feeling has long refused to be confined to a single musical genre. The Disney Princess-esque “It’s a Beautiful Day,” the whimsical folk “Christmas Songs Weren’t Written in Texas,” the fast-pace phrygian “Razorblade,” the symphonic hard rock “Stranger,” and the 7-minute progressive ballad “In the End” all coalesce to form a varied, distinct, and unapologetically authentic discography.

Heavily featuring piano, Chase creates a very theatrical sound with quick and complex rhyme schemes reminiscent of musical theater. His ballads range from soaring and sentimental to eerie and augmented. His style is influenced by jazz, often utilizing descending basslines, 7th and 9th chords, accidentals, the harmonic minor, and syncopated rhythms. 

Chase was born in Houston, Texas, and grew up in the Webster area. He began playing piano at age eight. At the suggestion of his piano teacher, he wrote his first song “Worship Song” one year later. Having grown up in the church, his early music was mainly Christian; “What else was I gonna write about? Pain? Hardship? I was nine.” Pain and hardship would eventually make their way into Chase’s first secular song, “Made for the Better,” written about his parents’ divorce and his first year in public school.

Chase’s teenhood was colored by his fraught relationship with his emotionally abusive father. The abuse would go on to help shape Chase’s identity as an artist and become the subject of songs such as “Missing Out,” “No Winning With You,” “Walking Away,” and “I’m Not Sorry.” He also began experiencing anxiety and depression in 2017, which soon worked their way into his lyrics.

Chase knew early on that he wanted to have a stage name; “I don’t need people mispronouncing my last name” (Demel, pronounced DAY-mul.) After realizing his transmasculine nonbinary identity, he changed his name to Chase; “The masculine form of my birth name is Charles, and I wasn’t going to call myself Charles, so I looked up nicknames, and Chase appeared. And it just felt right. It seemed fitting since I’m a runner, and it feels aspirational and hopeful.” 

The “feeling” part came as an encouragement to seek out new experiences. “It’s easy to get shrouded in a fog of apathy and numbness, but you have to pursue the things that make you happy. Chase the experience, the joy, and even the pain, because it’s all part of what makes human.”