Secret life

She was a high school 16-year-old, and while the rest of the kids her age were getting their cell phones and car keys revoked for skipping curfew, Chandelle Gleed was getting her songbooks taken away, for putting her teenage emotions into words that her parents couldn’t take.

Music, they thought, was bringing out the worst in her.

“They saw problems with it,” says Gleed, now 21. “They thought I was going to do something bad and get in trouble.”

She was putting her emotions into songs in lieu of a diary. Feeling violated by having her lyrics unwillingly read, and worse, discarded, Gleed continued writing her heartfelt songs in secret. She began stashing her notebooks away, and singing the words only behind closed doors.

“That was the only way I could write,” she says. “I had to be completely alone.”

Despite being so young, Gleed had plenty of inspiration to put onto paper. Growing up in the small town of Dayton, her parents were strict at best, and not only with her music.

“I wasn’t allowed out of my house,” she says. “I couldn’t go to parties.

But on one of the rare occasions she did get to hit the town at night, she got to see her cousin Jack’s Las Vegas-based band perform.

The experience struck her, and changed the course of her quiet, meditative life.

“It was the first time I’d ever seen live music, in any form,” she says of her cousin’s show. “That was when I started writing and using it as an outlet.”

That outlet turned out songs that may not have necessarily been about rainbows and butterflies, as her parents probably would have preferred.

“I was 16,” says Gleed. “Everything pissed me off.” So she wrote about young love, the ease and the hardships, and also about her pent-up frustrations at being trapped at home in a slow-moving town, with, most importantly, no live music.

Although the first couple of song notebooks are gone, taken away, never to be returned—her parents thought it was just a phase she’d grow out of—Gleed does still remember her first song.

“It was a traveling song,” she recalls. “Because I was stuck in a room pretty much my whole life, at least that’s how it felt. It was about wanting to go out and explore the world.”

It wasn’t until the summer she turned 18 and moved down to Las Vegas that Gleed openly pursued her passion. Her grandma, whom she was living with at the time, took her to buy her first guitar—which she then taught herself to play. And her cousin Jack gave her the confidence to perform live.

“I played him a couple songs I was working on,” she says. “And he said, ’Actually, that sounds all right. You should do something with this.’”

The rest is history. Written down in fresh notebooks, turned into poignant songs, and sung with vulnerable emotions, reminiscent of Cat Power, and with vocals as pure and raw as Jessica Leah Mayfield. She performs using just her given name.

As for her parents? They saw her perform for the first time on her last tour, during a stop through her native countryside of Northern Nevada—at a Reno venue. “I pulled them aside and said, ’Hey, you know what these songs are about, so don’t get offended,’” Gleed remembers. “And to my surprise, they didn’t say anything [bad]. In fact, my mom was trying to promote me to people.”