Chance Peña and the surrender principle

It was early 2025, and he was holed up in a remote California cabin with two close friends and collaborators — singer-songwriter Hayden Hubers and producer Jeremy Fedryk — working on what would become his second album. They’d gone to Running Springs, a tiny mountain community near Big Bear Lake. Their original intention was to focus on writing six songs, until the weather had other plans.

“I remember, I think it was the first night we were there. I was sleeping, and it just sounded like heavy rain pouring down,” Peña tells me from a studio in Charleston, South Carolina, where he’s currently recording. “I woke up and everything was covered. My car was buried in snow. The balcony had glass doors for the ceiling, and it was probably halfway up the glass door.” Given the conditions, the trio were effectively trapped. “We were just like, ‘I guess we’re not going anywhere for a couple of days!’” he laughs.

It’s fitting that Peña’s second album – and his Columbia Records debut – When I Change My Mind I Don’t Mean It was born out of forced isolation. The 25-year-old Texas native has spent much of his young career guided by intuition, allowing songs to reveal themselves on their own accord rather than wrestling them into submission. Being snowed in became a crucible for that process, stripping away distractions until only the work remained to flourish.

“There’s something about that isolation,” he reflects. “You have no other option, other than to do what you set out to do, and also to enjoy each other’s company and hang out. We would make dinner every night and talk, it was just nice. Versus when you’re home, you have the comforts and distractions of everyday life that can pull you away.”

During that storm-bound stretch, “My Mind Drifts To You” materialised, and would become one of the most intimate moments on the album. Peña describes the experience of watching snow fall outside the window, thinking about his significant other, about being distant from the people who are special to him, and how he couldn’t reach them even if he tried. “Snow falls, and the trees bear the weight / A light fog rounds the sky like a frame / Such a view is meant for two / That’s why my mind drifts to you,” he sings, with wistful longing captured in the warm, oaky quality of his vocals over slow-burn acoustic strums, the yearning amplified by the lonesome sound of harmonica. “That line came to me and we got the whole song down in a few takes,” he says. “It all felt so effortless and natural.”

Peña’s approach to his craft - relinquishing force and allowing ideas to flow - is a lesson that he’s had to learn gradually, through years of cutting his teeth alone in bedrooms and studios, obsessively tweaking guitar tones and re-recording vocals at 3 AM. “A buddy told me a long time ago, a song is never finished, it’s surrendered,” he says, holding true to this dynamic throughout When I Change My Mind, I Don’t Mean It. “You can sit there and you can re-record or change the guitar tone eleven times. But then you might listen back and find the first one was better than the eleventh one.”

For Peña, creative exploration began early. He started writing songs at eleven, though he can’t quite articulate what compelled him to do so. “I can’t remember why I wrote my first song song,” he admits with a laugh. “I’ve never actually thought about it but it is kind of funny to think about — what compelled me, eleven years old, to write my own music?” He says that at the time, he was listening to whatever populated his dad’s iPod: Coldplay, Guns N’ Roses, Eminem. “They’re all very different bands, but I would just listen to whatever he had on there.”

Eventually, Peña would find a new source of musical inspiration to connect with when his dad shared a recommendation from a friend: a band called The Lumineers, who Peña would develop an incredible appreciation for. “I think I was just drawn towards folk music for some reason, even though I did not grow up listening to it at all,” he notes. “Which is another thing. I’m like, ‘Why? Why was I drawn to it?’ I don’t know.” His love for the Lumineers’ work came to be fully realised when he saw them in concert for the first time at thirteen. “The lyricism, the guitar playing, all the little things that make up their music and their songs really stuck with me. And again, I don’t know why I felt that way. It’s another mystery,” he explains.

Yet, the mystery came full circle last year when Peña landed an opening slot on The Lumineers’ fall 2024 arena tour — a career milestone that he says still feels surreal. “The first time I was up there, I was like, I can’t just stare at them because I’m trying to take it in, but I wanna just stare them down,” he recalls. The stadium shows were particularly electric; amassing 40,000 people, with lights filling the stands as Peña performed alongside his favourite band. A friend pointed out later that they’d caught him on the big screen mouthing “wow” when he first stepped onstage. “I did,” Peña confirms. “Because it just hit me, I’m playing one of my favourite songs with one of my favourite bands.”

Peñas journey from being a thirteen-year-old in the audience to sharing the stage with his favourite band was hardly linear, and somewhat unconventional. At fourteen and fifteen, Peña was playing “little bars and swanky cocktail lounges” around Tyler, Texas — gigs his parents would drive him to every weekend. “Looking back now, I’m like, that’s kind of crazy,” he laughs. “If I saw a fifteen-year-old kid playing music at a cocktail bar, I’d be like, ‘What the hell is he doing here?’” Regardless, those early shows became crucial training ground. “That’s where I learned how to be confident in myself, in my abilities, and I started to pay attention to where I needed to improve,” he explains

His parents, both leading with entrepreneurial mindsets, never wavered in their support. Peña credits them with offering two gifts: love and encouragement. “They were always like, ‘If you wanna do music, do it. We’re behind you, go all in,’” Peña recalls. “Just watching them do their own thing showed me that no one is going to do it for me. No one is going to hold my hand and make it happen.” Peña’s self-reliance would become foundational. After those early cocktail lounge performances, he auditioned for The Voice at fifteen after his dad saw a Facebook casting call. Peña successfully made it through a few rounds, but returned to Tyler at sixteen to keep writing and playing live shows.

A year later came another pivotal moment, when Peña signed with Secret Road Music Publishing. “That was my real introduction to the music industry,” he explains. “That’s where I started learning how things worked. I was seeing the business side of the industry, learning how to write with strangers and do those kinds of sessions.” He was in writing rooms five or six days a week, absorbing everything he could. “I was learning. People would say that there are rules to songwriting, and I think there are — they’re just psychological things about the structure of any song that is will make it objectively better or worse.”

Crucially, those sessions also became his education in production. He’d watch producers work, standing over their shoulders, trying to decode how they made vocals sound so much better, what plugins they were using, how they approached EQ and compression. Co-writer Stephen Schmuldt (who goes by Beats by Breakfast) noticed Peña’s interest and offered to show him the basics on Logic. “That was like the gateway,” Peña says. “Now I can make stuff sound half decent. I know how to use a microphone.” From that point, he was producing everything himself, teaching himself to mix and master along the way. “By no means in a professional manner, but I always got the job done.”

Peñas’ years of nurturing his own skills paid off in unexpected ways. His co-write on John Legend’s “Conversations In The Dark” earned him a Grammy and went gold. His self-released tracks “i am not who i was” and “in my room” began finding audiences and also went gold. By the time he released his debut album Ever-Shifting, Continual Blossoming in 2024, which he solely produced or co-produced in its entirety, he’d already built a dedicated following and was headlining tours across the US, UK, and Europe. Collaborations followed with artists across genres — KYGO and Julia Michaels on “Louder,” country-rock singer Sam Barber on their duet “Better than the Floor.”

Throughout this ascent, Peña remained essentially a one-man operation, handling production, mixing, and creative direction himself. “I think for me, it was crucial to have those years of just figuring it out and not having any sort of crutch,” he reflects. But when signed with Columbia Records and began work on his second album, his perspective changed. For the first time, he began truly collaborating, particularly with Fedryk, his cabin companion and co-producer on several tracks. “If you wanna go fast, go alone. If you wanna go far, go together,” Peña quotes, crediting his mother for the words of wisdom. “I’ve spent the last year just paying attention to when special relationships come into your life.”

“In the past, part of the reason why I worked alone most of the time is because I had trouble communicating what I wanted,” Peña reflects. Learning to articulate his vision, to trust collaborators, to distinguish between productive perfectionism and overthinking —these have been recent revelations. A friend recently introduced him to a useful concept: “Don’t pre-reject yourself. Meaning, don’t go into a situation worrying, ‘What are people going to think? How am I gonna be perceived?’”

As a result, When I Change My Mind I Don’t Mean marks an evolution from Ever-Shifting, Continual Blossoming, a change in Peñas vision. He explains that for his his first album, he already had songs he wanted to record, assembled without a grand design. “I just wanted to do an album,” he says plainly. “I didn’t necessarily know what I wanted it to be about.” When I Change My Mind I Don’t Mean It emerged from a more decisive place, even if the path there was circuitous. The title itself reflects Peña’s process of cycling through various concepts, pivoting from four separate EPs to two EPs to finally, during a twenty-minute drive one night, landing on a complete vision. “I was texting a buddy about my changes of mind. And I felt bad. But then I was like, ‘Huh, I guess when I change my mind, I don’t mean it.’” And the phrase stuck.

The title is playfully self-aware, but it also speaks to something deeper about Peña’s creative perspective. “It’s not like a complete shift of course,” he explains. “It’s expanding on the idea. You could use the analogy of carving a sculpture out of a block of marble. As things start to take shape, you get a better sense of the end result. So it’s like you’re constantly working towards this one goal, though throughout the process, you can’t really name it in the beginning.”

The album that emerged spans moody instrumentals (“i promise i won’t let go,” repurposed from his beloved 2024 single “The Mountain Is You”), harmony-laced stomp-and-clap anthems (“Collapse”), and the magnificently sprawling alt-rock of “Peacemaker”, which addresses Peña’s tendency toward people-pleasing, “putting other people’s needs ahead of mine for the sake of keeping the peace, and how exhausting that can be.” When he listens now, he says, “the drums and guitar feel so visceral to me — if my heart could make a sound, that would be it.”

Authenticity, patience, and self-acceptance are core themes that arise for Peña, and they’re embedded within the heart of the When I Change My Mind I Don’t Mean It. “I think the message is to just accept yourself for who you are,” he offers. “I don’t feel like you have to change or rush towards the person you wanna be in ten years. Be okay with where you’re at, because you won’t be there forever. I hope the album helps other people to let go of any expectations that might be holding them back, so that they feel free to be completely themselves in any given moment,” he continues.

In giving himself the permission to be authentically free, Peña’s sound resists easy categorisation, spanning folk intimacy and alt-rock grandeur, bluesy confessions and ethereal instrumentals. But Peña doesn’t feel pressure to choose. “It kind of just comes naturally,” he says. “The common denominator for me is just, does it feel authentic? And if it does, that’s kind of all I need.”

Now that When I Change My Mind I Don’t Mean It is out, Peña is already moving on creatively. “Every time I finish an album, I’ve already immediately moved on to the next sound,” he says. “It’s not drastic, but I think that’s what keeps it fun.” This reflects the same restless creative energy that had him writing his first song at eleven, motivated his mysterious pull toward folk music that he still can’t fully explain, and underpins the same intuition that’s carried him from Texas cocktail lounges to stadium stages.

As for what comes next, Peña is characteristically unworried about having it all figured out. He wants to record his third album all at once, at the same same place, focused on the same ideas, making it cohesive from start to finish. But beyond that specific goal, he’s content to just see what happens. “I just wanna keep chasing what feels right in the moment, what feels honest, and not put too much pressure on myself to have it all figured out.”

The snow has long since melted in Running Springs, but Peña is still following the thread that first grew in the snowed-in cabin; learning when to push and when to surrender, how to balance artistic vision with collaborative trust, and chasing whatever feels honest in the moment. “As a creative, your intuition should guide you more often than your head does,” he says. “If your artistic mind is spearheading that endeavour, I think you’re gonna be all right.”