UNC freshman has record deal

Priscilla Townsend, a freshman pursuing dental hygiene, stopped by the Waxhaw, N.C., fair this summer to see some rescue puppies.

Townsend left the fair with a three-year record contract.

“I always thought how it’d be really cool to have a recording contract,” Townsend said. “Now it’s just so surreal. It still hasn’t hit me.”

Townsend sang her self-authored song “How Did I Know” in a karaoke contest at the fair.

The song — now her first single on iTunes — brought her victory and the attention of Charlotte-based The Bench Studios producer Rick Lapinsky, who then asked Townsend to sign with the company.

“It was really her writing style that caught our attention,” Lapinsky said. Townsend is the label’s first signed artist. “The maturity of her writing is pretty exceptional for her age.”

The song comes off of her still untitled upcoming extended album, which will boast five other songs that Townsend wrote herself.

“I’ve always loved to write. It can be anything from relationship stuff to memories or stories from friends,” Townsend said. “It all goes into this melting pot that becomes one of my songs.”

Growing up in Waxhaw, a small town outside of Charlotte, Townsend learned to play guitar in kindergarten and at nine years old began playing piano and writing songs for her church youth group.

“When most of her peers would just be playing guitar and piano, she composed entire songs at 10 years old,” said Priscilla’s mother, Soli Townsend. “Now I can see what she composes is really an expression of who she is. I’m really proud of that.”

Since then, Priscilla Townsend has added the ukulele, tambourine and rain stick to the myriad instruments she plays.

She credits her Spanish and musical fluency to her mother’s Peruvian roots.

“I really wanted to teach them the culture that I grew up with in Peru,” Soli Townsend said. “They gradually began to appreciate their heritage through music and dance.”

Priscilla Townsend hopes her Latin heritage will be more prominent in her future work, she said. For now, she channels her Latin roots by dancing with UNC’s Latin dance team, Dámelo.

Priscilla Townsend plans to follow her mother’s footsteps into the dental hygiene world.

“Around my junior year of high school I got interested in dental care. My mom worked for a dentist so I got to shadow a dentist,” Townsend said. “Plus I’ve always been really picky about my teeth — like O.C.D. weird about them.”

Townsend plans to pursue a career as a dental hygienist to aid third world countries with health problems stemming from insufficient dental care, she said. This decision came after a service trip to Nicaragua last summer with Samaritans International.

“We worked with underprivileged kids that don’t have knowledge about dental hygiene,” Townsend said. “That really inspired me to stick with it as a major.”

Townsend works as an usher for the Student Union and as a greenhouse assistant for the Coker Hall labs. Every other weekend, she returns to Charlotte to put the finishing touches on her album.

“Right now it’s a juggling act, but ideally I’d love to pursue a career in music,” Townsend said. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll just be a dental hygienist slash singer.

“That’s normal, right?”

Contact the Arts Editor at artsdesk@unc.edu.