4 to Watch: Annie Stela

Hometown: Los Angeles, Calif.
Fun fact: This Bloomfield Hills, Mich., native worked as a recording-studio runner when she finally made it to Hollywood. But her whimsical bow Fool doesn't trumpet Tinseltown—just the virtues of the Midwest. “Once I got to L.A.,” Stela explains, ”I just couldn't stop writing about Michigan.”
Why she’s worth watching: She looks—and sounds—just like a young Carole King.
For fans of: Carole King, Tori Amos, Kate Bush

Parental blame might work for some artists. But not Annie Stela. Sure, she says, her Russian-born father was incredibly strict—as a teenager, she was forbidden from making the 45-minute drive to catch concerts in nearby Detroit. And at home, she was forced to plod through piano lessons. Dad had some of his own ideas about education, too.

“I went to a public school, but for a few hours a day they bussed all us artsy/dorky kids to a creative school,” recalls Stela, who kept her songwriting secret until senior year. “And then I really came out of my shell. … I ended up playing an original song at that art school’s graduation. That was a really good day for me.”

Time to head west to stardom, Stela thought. Not so fast, her pop countered. “I wanted to go. I was ready to go. But my dad said ‘I will not pay for you to go to L.A. right now—you must go to college and get your degree,’” says the 25-year-old, who enrolled “kicking and screaming all the way. But now I’m so glad that I did, because I spent those four years performing as much as humanly possible around the campus, and I don’t think I would’ve been prepared for California otherwise.”

Father did, indeed, know best. Stela subsisted on tuna, cereal and Spaghetti-O’s, and detailed the experience in Fool’s title track. “The first few months I was out there, my car was broken into, I got into an accident, and then I got mono—I was just a mess,” she recalls. “But I was like, ‘If I come home now, I really will jump off a bridge—I’ve gotta stick it out.’ So thank God my dad made me take those piano lessons, ’cause what would I have done for a job if I didn’t have that?”