2025 Music City Mayhem Finalist

2023 Lightning 100's Local Artist of the Week

2023 Mid-Atlantic Song Contest Finalist

2020 International Songwriting Competition Finalist

2009 International Bird Call Imitation Winner
 

Kristen Englenz is an East Nashville-based indie singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist whose music blurs the line between Americana roots and unruly, wide-open pop. A classically trained pianist who studied Chopin before falling for John Coltrane, the Rolling Stones, Lucinda Williams, and Howlin' Wolf, Englenz built her sound the way she built her ear for birdsong outside her college art studio — by listening closely, then making it her own.

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Her 2020 debut album, ingénue, was produced by three-time Grammy nominee Ken Coomer (former drummer of Wilco) and recorded in Nashville and at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. It features a collaboration with five-time Grammy-winning gospel legends The Blind Boys of Alabama on the single "Pray for Rain," which the two acts have performed live together at Eddie's Attic in Decatur, Georgia. Roots music journal No Depression called her work "stream of consciousness Beat poetry imbued with good-down-home Southern sensibility," while Stomp and Stammer wrote that her live shows carry "a stirring intimacy... that holds you in their grasp."

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Englenz is also the 2009 International Bird Call Imitation Champion — a title she wears seriously and joyfully, often weaving birdsong into her live performances and hosting Caterwauling with Kristen, a web series exploring birds, their calls, and the people who love them. She co-founded the Feminist Bird Club of Nashville and plays French horn with the Nashville Civic Orchestra when she's not on stage with a guitar.

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Live, Englenz fronts a full band and turns big stages, to small bars and listening rooms into moments that feel like a communal secret. Her French horn sits in reach on stage even during her guitar-led songs, a small, visible reminder that classical training and rock-and-roll instinct are never really separate for her.

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With her latest single, "Silly Silly Silly," Englenz steps further into new territory: playful, genre-blurring, and unmistakably her own. The next chapter has opened onto a sound she describes as still unfolding.