Final Nightfall this Friday features Gina Chavez, Chattanooga's Danimal Planet

Gina Chavez

Leading up to the release of her second album, "Up.Rooted," Austin-based singer/songwriter Gina Chavez was feeling cautiously optimistic.

Emphasis on cautious.

"There was a part of me that knew it was a risk," the 34-year-old says. "In no way did it really make sense to put out a bilingual album, especially when I approached radio promoters. No one really knew what to do with it because it doesn't really fit in any one place.

"Some songs would fit on NPR's world station, and some completely would not; they'd be more AAA or Top 40. It was one of those things where I ended up not doing radio promotion because it cost so much money, and I didn't think anyone could handle the breadth of the album."

As it turned out, however, "Up.Rooted," which featured guest appearances by the horn section of Grammy Award winners Grupo Fantasma, proved wildly successful, in part because of the very diversity that shook her confidence.

Outlets such as The Boston Globe praised Chavez for her "ease as she moves between social and love songs, between North American and Latin genres and even between languages." In 2014, the album's most popular track on Spotify, "Siete-D," also was selected as the Latin grand-prize winner at the John Lennon Songwriting Contest.

Despite a nearly even split between Spanish and English tracks on the album, Chavez, who is half-Mexican on her father's side, wasn't raised speaking Spanish. She describes herself as a "highly sufficient" Spanish speaker and "decent at mimicking," but says she frequently struggles to achieve the degree of quality she expects of herself when writing in Spanish, whether upbeat salsa dance numbers or sultry Latin ballads.

"I love the Spanish language - I think on some level that's the language my soul wants to speak - and sometimes, that's really frustrating, because it's hard to play with a language that isn't your native tongue," she says. "I don't know many idiomatic phrases or the way things tie together. It's like writing poetry, and that's hard, even in your own language."

For all the praise "Up.Rooted" received outside Austin, it was its reception at home that left Chavez reeling. In 2015, she won four awards at the Austin Music Awards, including Musician of the Year, Latin Band of the Year, Album of the Year and Song of the Year (for "Siete-D").

"Honestly, I still can't really wrap my ahead around that one," she laughs, wryly. "There are so many deserving artists in Austin, and obviously that's a huge honor."

Following a year of travel in Latin America as part of a musical ambassadorship through the U.S. State Department, Chavez is back on the road on an East Coast tour that will bring her to Chattanooga on Friday, Aug. 26, as the final headliner of the Nightfall concert series.

And if there's one thing she says she hopes to accomplish when she takes the stage, it's to entertain and inspire simultaneously.

"I like to take the listener on a journey," she says. "I think one thing we do well is that we can take somebody from an introspective, thought-provoking song to a Latin dance beat that just makes you want to get out of your chair. I want to craft a set that brings the audience along that path. I like to move hearts and hips."

Contact Casey Phillips at cphillips@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6205. Follow him on Twitter at @PhillipsCTFP.