Anthony Chavez
Audio By Carbonatix
Denver hip-hop artist Jelie finds the recording studio to be her metaphorical spaceship – a way out whenever she needs an escape.
The Denver rapper is releasing her latest single, “Spaceship,” and its B-side, “Put in Work,” on Friday, August 26. She wrote the lyrics and made the beats for both songs.
“I wrote [‘Spaceship’] in 2020 along with many of the other songs I am releasing,” says Jelie, whose real name is Bradlie Jones. “A lot of people were stuck or had other things they had to focus on. I was able to say, ‘I’m just going to go to the studio’ – just fly away if I wanted to.”
The year 2020 obviously sucked on multiple levels, but Jelie (pronounced “Jel-eye”) found a silver lining. She had been working at a call center, and the pandemic allowed her to work from home. No more office politics. No more commuting. Just more time to make music, which is her primary pursuit in life.
“It was amazing,” she recalls. “I started getting a bunch of opportunities to create content. … I had nothing to do but be creative, and I had nothing but time to do what I wanted to do.”
Jelie has since moved on from the call center gig (she jokes that she’s the worst employee ever because she can make money pursuing her passion, so she called quits on the day job) and is doing a variety of gigs related to her education in music production and sound engineering, including some teaching. She’s still working from home, where she keeps a studio. She works in multiple studios around Denver, too.
Staying in works for her, because in her early days of learning to make beats and rap, she did most of that from home anyway. “When I was a kid learning to freestyle, I was doing it in my grandma’s basement to instrumentals on 50 Cent’s video game,” Jelie remembers. “I had a little karaoke machine I got for Christmas, and I’d dub over everyone’s tapes.”
Jelie is releasing “Put in Work” as a B-side and considers the track a “zone song.” To her, getting “in the zone” means focusing and taking care of herself, physically and mentally. She draws from her life when she writes her songs, and she touched on her mental health struggles in her single “Cope,” released during Mental Health Awareness Month.
“‘Yeah, I care for myself; got a personal trainer and therapist’s help,'” she says, repeating a line from the song. “I literally have a personal trainer and I have therapists and people I talk to to make sure I’m 100 percent so I can give 100 percent. You can’t pour with an empty cup.”
Jelie is working on a full-length album to be released, she hopes, later this year. She’s been dropping singles on a monthly basis, so it’s been a productive year for her.
“I’m looking to host a dance competition for my next single release,” she says. “I want to collaborate with some sort of dance studio or b-boy group.”
In the meantime, she’s performing on stage with EDM musician Maddy O’Neal in September. The show, called the We’re Here Fest, benefits Beats by Girlz, which teaches girls and gender-expansive people how to make music, the end goal being greater access into the tech world.
Jelie has volunteered with the organization for about two years and teaches hip-hop production techniques, but she says Beats by Girlz also teaches other genres.
“Some of them are making country,” she says. “Some of them are making EDM. Some are crossing over between different genres of hip-hop. There are some singer-songwriters. It’s everything imaginable.”
We’re Here Fest, 3 p.m. Saturday, September 17, The Lyric 1209 North College Avenue in Fort Collins. Tickets are $35-$45. For more music, visit jelie303.com.