To say it’s been a whirlwind might be an understatement. When Lauren Daigle brought her delta blues smokehouse voice from the Louisiana bayou to Nashville, TN and signed a deal with Centricity Music in early 2014, everyone concerned already knew she had a great voice. They had seen Lauren’s American Idol auditions from the two seasons she made it to Hollywood. They knew Lauren Daigle had pipes of the sort that could handle a subtle rasp as well as a high-octane arena rock anthem. What they didn’t yet know when they signed her—what no one was prepared for in fact—was the maturity of Lauren’s presence as an artist from day one, and the immediacy of the connection that would form between Lauren’s songs and her audience, and the fact that once in a great while in this unpredictable industry, there actually is such a thing as overnight success.

Lauren Daigle’s 2014 debut single, How Can It Be, shot up the radio charts to #5, spurring more than 370,000 iTunes downloads. Her follow-up singles (First, & Trust In You) each reached #1. At the 2015 K-Love Fan awards Daigle took “Song of the Year” honors and then twelve months later added the “Artist of the Year” & “Female Artist of the Year” accolades. As an artist still so new to the industry she had never even attended a Dove Awards Ceremony, Lauren was stunned when her breakout debut garnered four nominations and earned three Doves including “Song of the Year” & “New Artist of the Year.” Her freshman release also secured a Grammy nod for “Christian Pop Album of the Year.” To cap those accolades, How Can It Be was officially certified gold a year-and-a-half after its release. In that short span of time Lauren Daigle also landed slots on six major tours (Big Daddy Weave, Outcry, Casting Crowns, Chris Tomlin, Empires, WinterJam) and is slated to headline her own shows beginning Fall of 2016. All in all, not too shabby for a bayou girl who moved to the big city only two short years ago to pursue her dreams.

“You jump into something new like this and you think it’s all going to be baby steps to slowly build a career,” Lauren Daigle muses. “But then you realize you’ve landed on a treadmill that somebody’s already turned up to nine, and you just have to run as fast as you can to keep up!”