By: Chris Berlein
For Eleyet McConnell, success hasn’t arrived as a sudden flash of good fortune. It has accumulated through years of writing, performing, surviving, and refusing to abandon a musical vision when others didn’t necessarily understand it. Now, with The Journey continuing to reach listeners, the tender new single “Your Eyes” revealing another side of their artistry, and an extraordinary seven nominations at the 2026 Josie Music Awards, Angie and Chris McConnell are experiencing a moment that feels both exhilarating and deeply validating.
The nominations didn’t arrive all at once, which made the experience even more intense.
“They came in one by one, so it was a few weeks of anxiety, anticipation and a whole lot of celebration,” Angie recalls. Even now, she says, the recognition feels “really surreal.” For independent artists accustomed to hearing no far more often than yes, the nominations carry meaning beyond trophies.
“The music industry is so difficult, and the road is paved with gobs of us who have been told ‘no,’ ‘not good enough,’ ‘not this or that,’” Angie says. Recognition from the Josie Music Awards, she adds, provides a sense of validation and motivation to work even harder.
Chris is equally stunned. “Seven is a big number for nominations and really hard to wrap your brain around,” he says. “We are beyond honored to have been nominated once, let alone seven times.”
Among the honors, Angie treasures the songwriting recognition because Eleyet McConnell’s songs are rooted in lived experience. But her favorite nomination belongs to Chris: Musician of the Year – Bass.
It represents considerably more than musicianship.
Chris has played bass for more than 56 years, a journey encompassing the decidedly unglamorous realities that rarely appear in romanticized accounts of a musician’s life. He remembers broken relationships, divorce, sleeping on friends’ couches, in cars and buses, and surviving on supermarket samples while trying to provide for his children and maintain a regular job.
“I’ve been blessed,” Chris says. “Tough way to build character, but God always has a plan.”
Those experiences inevitably find their way into Eleyet McConnell’s music.
Their album The Journey deals with perseverance, love, healing and redemption because those aren’t abstract songwriting concepts to Angie and Chris. They’ve lived them.
“We both embraced songwriting as a way to work through those moments,” Angie explains. Some compositions remain so personal that she doubts they’ll ever perform them publicly. At other times, she and Chris exchanged lyrics through text messages, using songwriting to express difficult emotions that eventually helped facilitate important conversations in their relationship.
Chris describes their process more simply: “We write what we feel.”
That philosophy makes the story behind “Your Eyes” particularly fitting.
Chris jokingly calls it “the Walmart song.” While shopping, he spotted an old high-school heartbreak from a distance and wondered whether, if he approached her, they might simply resume their conversation as though all those intervening years had disappeared.
By the time he left the store, he had essentially written the song.
He sent it, and the story behind it, to Angie. Rather than recoiling at her husband writing about an old flame, Angie contributed a bridge.
“When she sang it to me, it was beyond anything I could have ever imagined,” Chris says. “Her delivery is what makes that song.”
Musically, “Your Eyes” stands apart from the harder-edged “The Ledge.” Piano drives the ballad while strings provide understated emotional depth. Angie says there was little studio evolution because simplicity had always been fundamental to its design. Kimmi Samson contributed the strings through producer Patrick Himes.
“Sometimes less is definitely more,” Angie says, “and this song proves that.”
That same instinctive quality characterizes Angie and Chris’ marriage and musical partnership. There is little separation between work and home because music exists throughout both.
“We work together, live together, perform together,” Angie says. Disagreements happen, particularly when musical discussions become passionate, but their rule is essentially to listen to each other and keep the song at the center.
Chris describes the relationship more poetically: “It’s yin and yang. We are not one without the other.”
He also credits Angie with grounding him. Before their relationship, he says, he was “a bullet shot from a gun ricocheting off the walls.” Their beginning wasn’t exactly serene; they jokingly describe those early days as “a Jerry Springer show, but what emerged was a partnership in which personal life and artistic identity became inseparable.
That authenticity also explains why classic-rock influences can be heard throughout their work without Eleyet McConnell becoming a nostalgia act. Chris says the couple maintains an extraordinarily diverse daily playlist. New music keeps inspiring them, while the sounds that shaped him decades ago remain embedded almost subconsciously in his playing.
“We never try to sound like anyone or any style,” he says. “It’s just what it is. It’s very organic.”
Some of their songs existed for years in their living room before the couple finally decided to record them professionally. Chris describes those compositions as their children, making their subsequent international reach, chart appearances and awards seem almost improbable.
And there are more children on the way.
Eleyet McConnell are already preparing material for a third album, this time expanding the collaborative process with longtime bandmates Kenny Barnett on drums and Brandon Ullery on guitar. Both musicians have appeared on the duo’s previous albums, but the new project will give them greater opportunities to co-write and influence the songs themselves.
“What we end up with isn’t always how we started,” Chris says. “That’s the best part of working with talented musicians.”
His description of songwriting could just as easily describe Eleyet McConnell’s career.
“You never know how it will end. It’s like raising a child. It can be rebellious. It can be kind. It can be troublesome, but in the end, it will be what it was meant to be.”
After seven Josie nominations, The Journey, “Your Eyes,” and more than half a century of musical perseverance, Eleyet McConnell seems increasingly comfortable allowing the music and the journey to tell them where to go next.
