Indie artist chrysalis is ready to take off

The road to Indigo Ansin’s first big gig was a little unorthodox. During their time at Berklee, Ansin routinely reached out to bars to play, but no one got back to them.

“I didn't have anyone representing me, and my friend had told me that she had made up a manager to email the people, and I was like, ‘That's genius. I'm doing that,’” they said. “So I became Sophia Marino. She was Italian-American, a business student at Berklee, but then I made her a man, because people were really sexist to her.”

Ansin’s alter-ego emailed Faneuil Hall Management to request to busk, and they said yes at the end of May 2022. Playing one of their two-hour time slots, Ansin met a booker from Boston Calling who dropped his email in their guitar case. A year later, they hit the Orange Stage at the festival.

“It's easy to feel a lot of imposter syndrome, but I do work really hard,” they said.

The artist, who releases under chrysalis, grew up in Lincoln, Massachusetts and recently graduated from college. Now, they’re onto the next adventure — moving to Nashville with their bandmates and close friends. But they will be playing the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge on Saturday, Aug. 24 before they go.

Ansin recalls the first song they ever wrote. It was April 20, 2020, and they had just engaged in a socially distanced weed smoking session. They drifted off to sleep and dreamt of their friend singing a tune in the middle of a field.

“I woke up and I still remembered the song, just the chorus, but I wrote the rest,” Ansin said. “And it wasn't very good, but I finished it, and I was like, ‘Whoa, this is something that I created. This is my baby.’”

Ansin was a self-described theater kid and initially attended American University for one virtual semester as a musical theater and political science major in fall 2020 before transferring to Berklee for songwriting.

They write indie-folk songs that lean into despondency.

“It's like when you're journaling. You're not going to journal when you're feeling perfectly content with your life, because you're going to experience life,” they said.

Ansin’s debut album “i’m on my way,” released in October 2023, chronologically staggers through an unhealthy relationship.

“That album is just about figuring out how to be a person in the context of a romantic relationship and what that looks like,” Ansin said.

Now in a stable, loving relationship, they are writing about other tensions like family dynamics and the guilty jealousy of watching fellow musician friends take off in their careers.

Their latest single “pay it forward” details people repeating toxic behaviors they suffered. Ansin described it as a “BoJack Horseman song.”

“He's a protagonist that you don't really like. He does s----y things and can be really selfish and awful,” they said. “But then also you understand why he does them, given the way that he was raised.”

Ansin is currently working on a new album and will release the single “how much longer” on Sept. 27. They make the move to Nashville in about a week to continue pursuing their music career.

“I feel good because I’m excited, but also weird,” they said. “As much as I have a love/hate relationship with Boston, I did come into myself here.”