There’s a reason we’re so easily captivated by stories starting with serendipitous meetings: Just like the people involved, we never know where they might lead. In Chelsea Pribble’s case, a C-group ticket for a 30-minute Southwest flight turned into an opportunity to record her first solo EP, the autobiographical concept album Second Movement. On its seven beautifully rendered tracks, the singer, songwriter and pianist peers into the darker depths of her life and relationships, while facing the realization that her lifelong dream — dancing with a top ballet company — has crumbled away. According to the ballet world’s particularly harsh biological calculus, her window of time has already slammed shut. And yet, when one window closes … Pribble, fortunately, had started studying both piano and ballet at age five, and later received classical vocal training. When she took that middle seat, she was returning to Austin after a holiday visit to her parents, hustling to get back in time for a gig with her jazz/R&B band, Little Red & the Riffs. She wound up next to Andrew Allen-Aguilar, owner of Sea Change Records. Before industry frustrations sent him into dormancy, he’d released Alpha Rev’s debut, plus albums by the Soldier Thread, Johnny Goudie and the Little Champions.

“He talked my ear off about music and then apologized for it,” Pribble recalls. “I admitted it didn’t bother me, because I’m a songwriter.”

Before long, Pribble found herself performing her songs in a recording studio for the first time. Allen-Aguilar says the plan was to record three, with spare instrumental backing. But with Lars Goransson producing and engineering, they wound up cutting seven, several with a full band featuring Billy Harvey on guitar, bass, piano and synthesizer, Daniel Jones on drums, and Pribble and Derek Morris on piano. The Tosca String Quartet, arranged by Christopher Cox, appears on all but one track.

It’s no accident that the rich orchestral structure of these tunes evokes images of a tutu-clad dancer executing perfect arabesques in a majestic theater. Pribble attributes its classical influences to the ballet and vocal training she received in Switzerland, where she spent a couple of formative years; her father, a financial executive in health care, moved the family there from Bastrop, outside of Austin, when she was nine. She also lived in the Austin suburb of Round Rock and in Warsaw, Indiana, before attending an arts-focused high school in Massillon, Ohio, near Canton. She returned to Austin to attend the University of Texas, where she earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in dance. The music also sounds as if it’s designed for dance because, Pribble says, “It’s nearly impossible for me to separate my dance brain from my music brain, so I often find myself writing songs I can imagine choreographing dance pieces to.” The album even takes its title from a term common to both symphonies and ballets. “First movements are usually more lively, with unresolved conflict or excitement,” Pribble notes. “Second movements are slower, more lyrical and usually on the other side of an issue, or in a dream-like state. It’s a metaphor for the shift in my life,” she adds. “As I’ve come to terms with letting go of my dance career as I envisioned it, I’ve been able to embrace a new future with music — with a clarity and focus I didn’t have with dance because I wasn’t aware of all the external forces that were affecting my relationship with it.”

That vision, of achieving 32 fouettés, then doing fish dives with her pas de deux partner — ideally in a major New York or Chicago dance company — kept her going during the upheaval of so many moves and difficult family dynamics she experienced growing up. So did journaling, which she also began at an early age. In college, she got a guitar and started turning some of her poetry into songs. They twice earned her finalist slots — and showcase spots at Austin’s legendary Cactus Café — in the Kerrville Folk Festival University Songwriter’s Competition; she was named a runner-up both times. Then she combined her choreography and songs for a class project, and was told to apply for a slot at UT’s Cohen New Works Festival. She earned a grant, and credit for a semester spent developing a 45-minute, 10-song stage production performed by student dancers and musicians to several full houses during the festival.“Since then,” Pribble says, “songwriting has been a more permanent fixture in my life.” She did get to dip her slippered toes in the dance world’s major league once, however, spending several weeks studying in Manhattan after winning one of a few coveted spots in the American Ballet Theatre’s Collegiate Summer Intensive program. But family pressures also kept her from auditioning in New York or Chicago after graduation.

Now teaching ballet privately, Pribble envisions Second Movement as a multi-media project incorporating dance videos choreographed for each song. She’s already got some experience in front of the camera; in 2017, Little Red & the Riffs scored a top-six “Desks in the Wild” superlative ranking for their entry in that year’s Tiny Desk Contest, conducted by NPR’s All Songs Considered as part of its Tiny Desk Concert series. They performed “Howl,” a song she composed, in a burned-out pine forest in her hometown of Bastrop, where the worst wildfire in Texas history occurred in 2011. But Pribble’s current work sounds nothing like the songs she wrote for the band, which she describes as more jazz-influenced. Noting Etta James and other jazz singers are among her biggest reference points, she explains, “I wasn’t confident enough to leave the safety of my influences yet. I was also writing on a cheap keyboard that didn’t have a full set of keys.” When she got her hands on a better one, she says, “Something just happened; I started writing songs like ‘Overgrown’ and ‘Pas de Deux,’ and for the first time I really felt like the music I was writing was coming from a place that was genuine and uniquely me.”

With its sweeping, mournful cellos, “Overgrown” certainly evokes the sadness of those fading dance dreams, and alludes to those forces that kept her from pursuing them. “Pas de Deux,” the final track, is delicate, and sparely arranged, the better to exhibit her ethereal vocals — also influenced by Norah Jones, Over the Rhine’s Karin Bergquist and, less overtly, Dolly Parton. Pribble says her current style is probably best described as “contemporary singer/songwriter.”

“Most of my songs don’t have a pop structure. I am more concerned with the feeling I get from a song, and what happens to that feeling as the song goes on, than I am about the structure being familiar. So I allow myself to build songs based on how they sound and feel to me, as opposed to fitting them into a standard structure.”

But she attributes their cohesion to Allen-Aguilar. “He was able to understand, even more so than I could, how the concept should tie together.” It worked so well, she’s already recording a full-length follow-up, along with those dance videos. And so, it seems, Pribble has finally landed right where she belongs — a place where she can create both music and dance. All it took was sitting next to one chatty, charming music fan — who turned out to be willing to take a leap and ready to help her shape a new dream.

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