Abbie Roper, senior business major at The King’s College, released her first single titled “Heartfelt” on November 15. This release marked her debut on Apple Music and Spotify.

The release of “Heartfelt,” written in December of last year, marked a significant step in Roper’s career. Though it had been released on various streaming websites like Soundcloud and YouTube, its most recent release marked a milestone on her path to professionally producing music.

“Heartfelt” was originally written after Roper attended a music program during the fall semester of last year, called the Contemporary Music Center, Nashville. Her experience reflected well on her musical career and has since been open to talking with any other aspiring musicians at King’s about the program. After attending the program, she went on tour and began playing the songs that she had written to hundreds of people. Her single is based on a fling she experienced while on tour at her friend’s college.

“While we went on tour, we went to my best friend from the program’s school, and her best friend was really cute,” Roper said. “Then, he wrote me a note that was just like, ‘Hey! I’m really proud of you! You did a great job! I’m proud to see how hard you worked,’ even though we didn’t really know each other that well. The song was just inspired by that. It really wasn’t that ‘heartfelt.’ It wasn’t romantic in any way, but it was really sweet.”

The single helped guide Roper to find her ideal sound: indie rock. The song led her to determine what she wanted her band to sound like. She wrote the lyrics and music, but her band helped her bring the song to life.

“My whole band is from Hillsong, and I’m dating the drummer. He’s head of drums at Hillsong and the bass player is one of the music directors and the lead electric plays electric at Hillsong,” Roper said.

After months of performing “Heartfelt,” Roper decided that she wanted to professionally record the single.

Roper was introduced to Dalton Hayes, a top worship director at Hillsong, who also owns a recording studio called Staircase Studio. After getting in contact with Hayes, Roper and her band went into the studio and recorded the single in a day.

“I’ve just been dying to put out a song professionally,” Roper said. “I’ve sent him [Hayes] stuff before that I had recorded in my room, but I was like, ‘wait what if we actually recorded.’ And he was like, ‘yeah let’s do it.’ We just did it all in one day.”

Roper singing LILLIE$, an original song. || Photo credit to Shannon Mason

After Hayes finished mixing the single, Roper was able to find a distributor and get her music released on premium platforms. Now, almost a week later, “Heartfelt” has over 1,500 listens on Spotify.

“I feel like it’s being received well just by the reactions I got on Instagram,” Roper said. “A lot of King’s people supported me with it and a lot of church people supported me with it. I’m a youth leader at Hillsong so all of my youth kids listened and then we had youth group that night so we played it a bunch of times and we all danced. It was really cool.”

As Roper finds her way as an up-and-coming indie rock artist, she looks ahead to graduating in the spring and furthering her career.

“I’ll probably just get a job and work for a little bit, keep playing shows, and keep releasing,” Roper said. “I think the ultimate goal would be to get picked up by a label. I think with indie rock music, that’s really what you need.”

As Roper explores her own sound and the business of music, she reminds herself what she must do as a musician to stay on the path to success.

“To learn you have to do. It’s the same thing with music; to learn how to perform, you have to perform. To learn how to play, you have to play,” Roper said. “You need to build the performance skills, which is almost more important than the music. Once you draw people in with the music, you have to keep them. That’s where performance comes in.”

Abbie Roper Releases Newest Single “Heartfelt”