Celeste Krenz

She earned a communications degree from the University of North Dakota in 1990. Her second album, Slow Burning Flame, reached No. 11 on Gavin’s Americana chart in 1994. In Denver she and her husband, the producer and musician Bob Tyler, ran their own record label, which issued four of her albums, and they often worked with Colorado musicians such as Tim and Mollie O’Brien, Sally Van Meter and the Yonder Mountain String Band. Krenz and Tyler both sang on Tim O’Brien’s album of Bob Dylan songs, Red on Blonde (Sugar Hill, 1996), alongside Mollie O’Brien and Kathy Mattea.

A small album of folk songs, Wishin’, drew the attention of Blix Street Records, a Los Angeles independent, which released her next record, Celeste, nationally in June 2000. Recorded at Capital t Studios in Denver, it brought airplay across the United States and Canada, and in early 2001 she was booked as an opening act for Jo Dee Messina on the West Coast. By 2002 she and Tyler had moved to Nashville, where she toured with Gary Morris that fall and began work on a new album. In 2011 she was one of the buyers of a small juice bar in a Nashville-area YMCA that grew into The Urban Juicer, a juice company with six locations by 2022.