Rising pop singer Tori Kelly embraces ‘Change’

Voice full, heart empty, she pours her emotions into the song as if it were a vessel to be filled.

“I’m confessing,” Tori Kelly sings, her words freighted with the ache of an exposed nerve.

The song is “Change Your Mind,” a tale of desire and disapproval, of love found and familial consent lost.

You don’t have to feel what Kelly is saying to feel what Kelly is saying, the sentiment absorbed almost unconsciously.

“Change Your Mind” is not a gospel number, but it’s delivered like one, a sermon of longing in the guise of finger-snapping R&B.

There’s a reason for this.

“That’s how I learned to sing, listening to gospel growing up,” the 26-year-old Kelly explains. “There’s so much soul and so much heart in that genre.”

‘I’m really opening up’

Soul and heart are the goalposts of Kelly’s songbook, and “Change” is the latest addition to that catalog: the first single from her forthcoming album, her third overall.

Speaking of “Change,” its title bears more than a little symbolic meaning. Kelly says that her next release marks a creative evolution from her previous album, the full-on gospel record “Hiding Place,” which earned her Grammys last month for best gospel album and best gospel performance/song.

“The new stuff that’s coming out is way more vulnerable, I’d say, than anything that people have heard yet from me,” Kelly says. “I’ve just gone through a lot in the last couple of years, even before the gospel album, and it’s all kind of compiled into this next body of work. I think ‘Change Your Mind’ is definitely a step in that direction, where people are going to hear this music and hopefully it’ll be able to take them to this deeper place, because I’m really opening up about a lot of stuff.”

She cites a particularly personal song about the death of a loved one as an example.

“There’s a song I wrote about my grandpa passing away, and I would never have thought I’d write a song about that,” she says. “But I just was in a place to write it. The person I wrote ‘Change Your Mind’ with, Jimmy Napes, he was a huge part of really helping me open up and talk about all these new things on the album.”

A singer from birth … almost

In conversation, Kelly speaks of her creative proclivities with the ease of a music lifer who’s been doing this since she was in grade school.

The California native — whom you may remember as the guitar-strumming blonde in the once-ubiquitous Nationwide Insurance commercials she starred in a few years back — was entering singing competitions at age 6, appearing on “Star Search” and “America’s Most Talented Kids” not long thereafter and landing her first record deal at 12.

Despite starting at such a young age, Kelly didn’t find success overnight. She parted ways with her first label over creative differences. But her career gained serious momentum after she signed with Justin Bieber/Ariana Grande/Kanye West manager Scooter Braun, who helped guide her 2015 debut, “Unbreakable Smile,” to a No. 2 opening on the Billboard Top 200 album chart.

‘I do feel this freedom’

Though she’s a Christian, Kelly doesn’t consider herself a Christian artist, even after “Hiding Place.”

While her next record is still taking shape, the connective tissue of the material she has completed is candidness, which Kelly acknowledges required time to get comfortable with.

“I was writing for probably a year and a half, and toward the end of that, I finally got to this place of like, ‘OK, I can sing about these things,’ ” she says. “But at the same time, once I started writing, it was almost like the song was a safe place for me. It was almost easier to sing about it than talk about it.

“Music has always provided that for me where I felt like, ‘Oh, this is a safe stage where I can really just pour my heart out,’ where sometimes I don’t always have the words to say in a regular setting. It was hard to get to that place, but once I got there, it was very freeing.”

What else does she consider herself free from these days?

Genre constraints.

“I don’t really know where things are going to go after this album, but I think even on the gospel album, because it was so different from my first album, I already felt like I’m going in a completely different direction,” Kelly says. “It’s really fun for me, because I do feel this freedom now, even when it comes to genre. I’ve done a country song. I’ve gotten to work with all these people and dance around all these different genres, and that’s really fun for me. I don’t like to be boxed in.”

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter.