How Elle King rode into Nashville on a ‘triple-platinum hoverboard’

Elle King remembers wanting to cry after one of the first gigs she played in Nashville.

The young singer with roots in pop and rock was opening for Margo Price a few years ago and recalls doing two songs in an empty club — a harsh experience for any artist, but maybe especially for one who’d already signed to a major label and allowed her dreams to start ballooning.

The tears welled up again when King, known to KROQ listeners for her snarling modern-rock hit “Ex’s & Oh’s,” returned in 2016 to perform during the annual CMA Music Festival. But this time she wasn’t bummed — she was overwhelmed.

Having sung with Dierks Bentley for a crowd in the tens of thousands at Nashville’s Nissan Stadium, “I walked offstage and got onto a golf cart, and I made them pull over and I just broke down,” she said recently, the memory clearly vivid in her mind.

What happened between the two shows was “Different for Girls,” King’s duet with Bentley that topped Billboard’s country radio chart and made her a welcome presence in a scene that can seem wary of outsiders. In the months following that stadium appearance, King won a CMA Award and even played the Grand Ole Opry. Now she’s on the bill Friday for this weekend’s Stagecoach country festival in Indio.

“Dierks didn’t roll out a red carpet,” she said with a laugh. “He gave me a triple-platinum hoverboard to just sail on through.”

King, 27, was hardly a stranger to country music before Bentley (who’s scheduled to perform at Stagecoach on the Mane Stage on Friday) asked her to record “Different for Girls,” a midtempo power ballad about how men and women handle heartbreak.

The daughter of the actor and comedian Rob Schneider, King said she grew up listening to Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard. And the singer’s own banjo playing is all over her 2015 debut, “Love Stuff,” which earned comparisons to Wanda Jackson and Brenda Lee.

Yet songs like “Ex’s & Oh’s” and “America’s Sweetheart” also make room for sleek synth licks and thumping electronic beats; she supported the album by touring with rockers including James Bay and Modest Mouse and was marketed as a kind of tattooed hell-raiser.

For King, the hard-to-classify quality of her music has always been part of its value. She insisted she didn’t go looking for a way to bust into country, a claim bolstered by the fact she followed up “Different for Girls” with “Not Easy,” a moody collaboration with the pop producer Alex Da Kid and the rapper Wiz Khalifa.

Now that she’s gotten used to the place, though, King says Nashville is actually more accepting than she previously thought. For proof she pointed to Maren Morris, the breakout star whose 2016 album “Hero” found a huge audience with a deeply modern sound informed by pop and R&B.

“Maren is killing it,” King said, adding that she’s excited to see Morris’s performance Saturday at Stagecoach. (Other acts due to play this weekend include Shania Twain, Jamey Johnson, Thomas Rhett and Kenny Chesney.)

King’s experience has been positive enough that she said she hopes to record a full country album. But not quite yet: For her next one, which she’s at work on now, she wants to take advantage of the success she’s had in multiple fields rather than focus on a single style.

“It’s like looking in my closet,” she said. “I’ve got so much to choose from. So I’m excited to see what’s going to happen.

“You never know, right?”

mikael.wood@latimes.com

Twitter: @mikaelwood

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