When Chance Peña joins the Zoom call for our interview, he’s dressed in what he jokingly calls his “artist clothes” – a stark contrast to the hoodie and sports shorts he says he wore that morning. It’s a small, telling detail about the singer-songwriter.
Over the past year, his life has accelerated in ways that would overwhelm most. His viral hit “i am not who i was” has amassed more than 450 million streams since its release in 2024, while “In My Room” trails close behind at 440 million.
His debut album Ever-Shifting, Continual Blossoming (2024) announced him as a modern folk artist with unique emotional clarity; then his second release, 2025’s When I Change My Mind I Don’t Mean It, cemented his reputation as a songwriter unafraid of contradiction. He’s toured arenas with The Lumineers, supported Tom Odell across the UK, and now finds himself performing his own headline shows on the other side of the world.
At 25, the Texas native is in Australia for the first time, fresh off his debut When I Change My Mind I Don’t Mean It tour and appearances at Spilt Milk festival – something he never really imagined he’d get to do. The day before our interview, Peña visited the Sydney Opera House – a landmark he’d seen in movies growing up, something he had only dreamt about seeing himself. Sitting nearby afterwards, eating lunch with friends, the scale of how far music had carried him briefly landed.
“We were just sitting there, looking at it,” he says. “And we were like, how crazy is it that music brought us all here?” Peña doesn’t linger in awe for long though. By his own admission, he rarely does. “I typically don’t think like that. Not in a way where I don’t appreciate it, but in a way where I don’t pat myself on the back enough.”
But that’s something he’s working on changing. He’s learning to step back and trust the process, to recognise when to let go, rather than control every detail.
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“I think I’m a perfectionist,” he admits plainly. “Especially because I care a lot about what I do. My brain has always been trained to do the best you can possibly do in every aspect of this, and I still believe that, but I’ve learnt to give myself permission just to exist. I have to remind myself because I catch myself fixating on things that don’t need to be fixated on, you know?”
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Early on, Peña’s performances meant scanning for flaws instead of being in the moment. It took time for him to realise the “magic” happens when he lets himself go. The shift didn’t come until earlier this year, while touring with The Lumineers, a band Peña has loved since he was a teenager.
“My biggest takeaway was just watching them on stage and how free they all are while they’re performing,” he says. “Watching them and talking to him just helped me shake that, to be more present in the moment and be focused on having a good time. I learnt this year to remind myself that that’s the only constant. Because everything changes night to night, there’s so many different variables, but the constant is the music. Because it’s in your heart.”
While Peña has now sung in front of 44,000 people without nerves, give him a thousand people in an intimate room and the pressure sharpens. “It’s funny,” he says. “The fewer people there are, the more nervous I am.”
Push through the nerves, and he can see a positive – the intimacy of those spaces demands honesty, which is the very thing Peña’s music is built on. That’s evident on his latest album, which embraces inconsistency, weaving together songs that sound different but feel spiritually aligned.
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Written and recorded alongside collaborators Hayd and Sarcastic Sounds, the title came to him during a late-night drive home, after abandoning the idea of releasing multiple EPs in favour of something larger. “The songs I had in mind for the album, when I started working on them, felt so different from each other. That’s why, initially, I thought they should be different EPs, but then I decided, no, the point is the inconsistency. But with it all coming from me, my voice, my mind, my heart, there is consistency in that.”
With his career moving so quickly, it would be easy for moments to blur together. Still, there are some that cut through: seeing fans in Australia sing along to the new album, standing onstage and remembering the 13-year-old version of himself watching The Lumineers from the crowd, realising that what once felt impossible is now routine.
“Young me would be losing his mind about this,” he reflects.
Chance Peña’s When I Change My Mind I Don’t Mean It is out now.
