Coyle Girelli
Biographie Coyle Girelli
Coyle Girelli
Over the course of his kaleidoscopic career, Coyle Girelli has emerged as one of modern music’s last remaining true romantics, capable of bringing an otherworldly beauty and all-consuming drama to the most intimate of feelings. Since the arrival of his 2018 solo debut Love Kills, the British singer/songwriter has channeled his timeless sensibilities into a series of acclaimed albums and forward-thinking musical-theater projects, including the recently launched immersive-theater show True Love Forever. A first-rate melodist who got his start as frontman for beloved indie-rock band Your Vegas, the New York City-based artist is now set to deliver Out of This Town: a selection of gorgeously haunting country-folk songs co-written with the legendary Mac Davis, adding an entirely new dimension to Girelli’s wildly expansive body of work.
Released via Sun Records (the iconic Memphis label once home to Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and more), Out of This Town first took shape during Girelli’s stint as an in-demand co-writer (a turn of events that found him penning songs for the likes of global superstars BTS). After meeting up with Davis for a session at his Los Angeles home in 2014, Girelli felt an immediate connection with the Texas-born country hitmaker, whose own writing credits include classic songs like Presley’s “In the Ghetto” and “A Little Less Conversation.” Within a few months, the two musicians began working on a duet album, but failed to finish the LP prior to Davis’ death in September 2020. Completed by Girelli and featuring several songs from Davis’ personal backlog, Out of This Town ultimately centers on a stark but spellbinding sound that spotlights Girelli’s soulful vocals while preserving the visceral impact of the project’s demos—a fitting backdrop for the duo’s elegiac tales of shattered hearts, lost souls, and eternally restless dreamers.
Produced by Girelli, Out of This Town comprises 11 songs whose sparse instrumentation profoundly magnifies the raw emotion at the heart of every track. On lead single “Pretty,” for instance, Girelli presents a hypnotic outpouring of unrequited longing, achieving a cinematic grandeur solely through his pained yet soaring vocals and elegantly layered guitar work. Along with a number of A-list duets (including KT Tunstall, Jaime Wyatt, and Cassandra Lewis), Out of This Town includes standouts like “Already Gone”: the first song Girelli and Davis ever wrote together. “I had no idea what to expect before I met Mac—he’s written some of the most famous songs of all time, and I wondered if his process was going to be very methodical,” Girelli recalls. “But instead we both just sat with our guitars, and ‘Already Gone’ came together so quickly and naturally.” A testament to the extraordinary power of their musical chemistry, “Already Gone” arrives as a lived-in portrait of romantic tragedy, equal parts devastating and strangely glorious.
As Girelli reveals, the experience of collaborating with Davis indelibly reshaped his identity as an artist and set him on a whole new musical path. “I’d been in an indie-rock band since I was a kid, but I’d always loved the big heartbreak songs of the ’50s and ’60s,” he says. “The songs I wrote with Mac opened my mind in an incredible way, and I realized this was the type of music my voice was built to sing.” When it came time to create his first solo album, Girelli embraced the baroque emotionality of mid-century rock & roll while tapping into his own left-of-center musicality (an element informed by his ardent love for art-pop iconoclast Kate Bush). Not only a major artistic breakthrough, Love Kills led to an auspicious new chapter in his career. “When I was done with the record, I could clearly envision it as a piece of theater,” says Girelli, a lifelong theater enthusiast who’d previously co-composed a pair of award-winning French musicals (2013’s Robin Des Bois and 2016’s Les Trois Mousquataries). After partnering with immersive-theater company Third Rail Projects, he transformed a selection of songs from Love Kills into the foundation for True Love Forever—an ongoing show that opened with a run of sold-out performances in fall 2024, offering audiences a multilayered exploration of love and dating in the modern era.
Originally from Otley (a small town in West Yorkshire, England), Girelli partly attributes the moody temperament of his music to a childhood spent near the moors of the Yorkshire Dales—a majestic and rugged landscape that served as inspiration for Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. As a teenager he taught himself to play guitar and started writing songs of his own, drawing from an eclectic musical upbringing that included everything from Britpop to Bruce Springsteen to opera. (“As someone who’s obsessed with melody, I’ve found that Italian operas contain some of the best melodies ever written,” he notes.) Formed when Girelli and his bandmates were still in high school, Your Vegas relocated from their hometown to New York City in the mid-2000s, promptly landed a deal with a major label, and then made their debut with A Town and Two Cities—a 2008 release featuring the exhilarating “In My Head,” a No. 1 hit on SiriusXM’s Alt Nation.
After Your Vegas parted ways in 2010, Girelli co-founded The Chevin: an alt-rock band who toured with the likes of Franz Ferdinand and took the stage at leading festivals like Lollapalooza, Firefly Music Festival, and Live at Leeds. Following the release of their 2012 album Borderland, The Chevin made the late-night talk-show rounds and appeared on Conan and The Late Show with David Letterman (a performance that caught Davis’ attention and inspired him to contact Girelli about a possible collaboration). Before embarking on his solo career, Girelli also made his name as a co-writer, lending his lyrical and melodic talents to songs by artists like Daisy the Great and Echosmith and often working with such elite producer/songwriters as Linda Perry and Amy Allen. Over the past few years, he’s released a string of solo albums (including 2022’s Funland and 2023’s Museum Day) and expanded his work in the theater world—an endeavor that most recently found him composing the lyrics and music for a musical adaptation of Michael Poore’s cult-hit fantasy novel Reincarnation Blues.
With his latest output encompassing the True Love Forever EP—a 2025 release comprised of six songs from the show, including the exquisitely jangly lead single “You”—Girelli points out that writing songs for theater provides an increasingly rare opportunity to fully accommodate the scope of his vision. “Because of streaming, it’s impossible to guarantee that anyone will listen to an album in a particular order these days,” he says. “Theater feels like the last place that a songwriter can create a whole world for the listener, then walk them through that world in the way that you intended.” And for Girelli, that potential for transcendence has always fueled his creative impulses. “From the beginning I wrote instinctively, as therapy: writings songs made me feel euphoric, which was an amazing thing to have as an outlet as a slightly troubled teenager,” he says. “To this day I still write by pure instinct—I’ll be daydreaming and all of a sudden a melody will arrive, and I’ll build the song from there. It’s just a matter of staying open and letting it all come through.”
