Dylan Conrique Talks Her Shift From Pop to Country Music and Finding Her Voice in Nashville

Meet Dylan Conrique: a 21-year-old singer-songwriter whose journey has taken her from the pop world of Los Angeles to Nashville, where she has found a home in the heart of Music City. With each step of her path, Conrique has brought her knack for songwriting to life and her latest release, “A Little Like You”, is a perfect example of that.

While growing up in Northern California, artists like Rascal Flatts and George Strait became the soundtrack of her upbringing. By third grade, she leaned into that passion for music and began taking vocal lessons and performing around the area with a small group of other aspiring performers. On top of her passion for music, she also discovered a love for acting, inspired by Disney Channel stars at the time like Zendaya and Selena Gomez.

Her parents supported this new dream and moved her and her brother out to L.A. when she was just 12 years old and went on to earn screen credits including a recurring role on ABC’s The Rookie. 

“The acting took over. When I came to L.A., I had 23 followers. My account was private. I did this YouTube series, it blew up. I made my account public, changed my username to my name, and the rest is history. And that’s kind of… Honestly, I would say the fans and everything, I wouldn’t be here without them because it’s given me so many opportunities to pursue music,” Conrique shared with Country Now.

But that music bug still stuck around through it all. She finally made her music debut at age 15 in the pop scene. During this time, she signed to her first label and began writing songs for the first time in her life. While she was finally finding her footing in the industry, there was still something missing that Conrique was looking for to make her feel more fulfilled in her artistry.

“I loved being in the studio and being a part of it. And then as time went on, I started to get a little more…it’s like a muscle. It’s like you’re working a muscle in your mind when it comes to writing. And so I was doing that a lot and I wanted to go to Nashville because I just heard it was the place to be for country music and I grew up listening to country music all the time,” she explained. “So I did a trip and I was supposed to only write pop music and I came out with country music.”

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The California native naturally fell right back into her roots during her visit to Music City, giving her the confidence to officially move to the Volunteer State and embark on the next chapter of her career.

“From then on I was like, ‘This is my place. This is where I want to be.’ And yeah, I just fully did the move. Most of my family moved out of California, long drive to Tennessee and now I’m fully here,” she revealed.

During one of those eye-opening writing trips to Tennessee a couple years ago, she penned her latest release, “A Little Like You” with co-writers Sam Ellis and Lydia Sutherland. The mid-tempo song taps into a personal experience in Conrique’s dating history with a guy who everyone in her life had fallen in love with. Being a daddy’s girl herself, the songstress found that the thing she admired most about this man was that he reminded her of her own father’s kindness, humor and hard work ethic. Her father was the one to set the standard for the kind of love she deserves, and because of that, she finds herself hoping that the two men in her life can accept each other

“I was telling them about this guy that I met and we had already been like eight or nine months into this. And I was kind of just talking about how my parents love him. He’s great. Everyone gets along. And there’s like similar things that he does that my dad does, but maybe different career wise. And I just really look up to my dad and love my dad so much. And yeah, I’m just also like a daddy’s girl. So that’s why I also wrote that song about him as well,” she shared.

With her gentle vocals, soft instrumentation, and strong storytelling, Conrique fits right into country music. She has particularly found that writing songs from her personal experiences that offer vulnerable lyrics and unfiltered emotions is what has helped her build an impressive community of fans in such a short amount of time.

“I feel like when I write music from the heart, it’s something that I’ll love for the rest of my life. It’s a song that I’ll love and I’ll want to perform for the rest of my life. And then I also noticed a pattern of when I did speak my truth, there were other people who also felt the same way, it’s helped people,” she admitted. “And so that’s kind of been my biggest thing is like, I want to write from the heart, and I want to write from personal experiences because other people are also going through or have gone through the same thing. So in a sense, it’s like I’m kind of like a therapy session.”

She truly began speaking her truth in 2022’s “Birthday Cake” followed by “Polaroid,” which stemmed from a particularly hard period that left her in tears. Walking into the writing session that day, she chose to address the sadness on her face instead of burying it and the result was an incredibly striking track that captures that feeling of watching everyone around you figure life out when you’re still finding your own path.

That idea was compared to the process of a polaroid. When you look at the picture after it’s first taken, it’s impossible to see it clearly until it’s fully developed. Conrique’s co-writer Nicole Beaubien pitched this idea saying, “’It’s kind of like your life. You’re on your own path. Your picture is going to become clear at some point, just maybe not right now.’”

Once the story came to life, Conrique gained a whole new perspective and finally stopped putting so much pressure on herself to be someone that she wasn’t ready to be yet.

“I’ve learned to just be patient in the music industry and just people will find me at some point. So yeah, that song overall was just a good song for me to write for myself and I felt like I had the need to put it out as well,” she added.

That idea has carried over into the making of her next collection of songs, which is slowly coming to life through her latest string of releases, including “Written In Stone,” “Polaroid,” “A Little Like You,” and more.

“I’ve been writing and not having too much pressure on myself to, I guess, put an album or an EP out, but that would be a dream of mine. So that is a thought in my head right now, for sure.”

Fans can keep up with Dylan Conrique on Instagram.