Shelita Lets the Water In on Open To You

Shelita, born Shelita Burke and writing now as Shelita Murrell, came up the long way. Raised in Seattle, she left for Europe as a teenager, busked, toured, and later built an independent pop life across Los Angeles and a wider map that now includes Denver on her Bandcamp page. Before the records, she worked as a software engineer and data scientist. That background still sits in the public story. Forbes wrote about her use of data and blockchain around the 2017 Special EP, which streamed in the millions and reached No. 10 on Billboard’s Heatseekers Pacific chart. Penetrate climbed Billboard’s Next Big Sound list. NPR and Music Connection took notice. The 2019 self-titled album, produced with Marcus “Bellringer” Bell and mastered by Chris Athens, locked in a glossy pop language after earlier folk-jazz and acoustic chapters.

Then the timeline broke. A skydiving accident in Seychelles put her through years of recovery, surgeries, and a stretch when walking itself was the project. Freediving became part of the way back. So did writing. The 2025 and 2026 run, from You Will Want My Love and Fade through Bloom, I’m So In Love With You, Sailors, and the Into the Depths EP, carries that afterlife. Open To You, released 4 September 2026 on Bbminor, arrives as a standalone single with the same collaborators close at hand. Shelita and Bellringer produced it. The music is credited to Shelita and Marcus Bell. The writing is hers.

Freedivers talk about equalization the way other people talk about faith. To go deeper you have to open the inner ear on purpose and let pressure enter a space the body wants to keep sealed. Clench and you stall. Force it and you injure yourself. The skill is a small, repeated act of permission. That is the thought that kept returning while Open To You played, and it has almost nothing to do with romance until it has everything to do with this song.

She has said the first draft started in a hospital bed in Seychelles, before major surgery, when she could not walk and could still picture ordinary tenderness. Flowers in bed. Candlelit baths. The finished record keeps those domestic details and refuses to dress them as metaphor only. They are the point. Desire here is not a montage. It is a room someone is finally allowed to enter.

The arrangement understands that. It opens close, with a clean piano and harp figure that feels almost private, a little like the hush Cashmere Cat used to put around a vocal before the low end arrived. Then the track finds its walk. A deep bass line steps in. Modern claps sit on the offbeats. The groove is unhurried, made for a night drive or a kitchen at two in the morning, and it never lunges for a drop. Shelita sings as if the microphone is already inside the conversation. Breath stays in the take. The verses stay spare. The chorus stacks doubles and soft harmonies until the phrase “I’m open to you” starts to behave like a held note underwater, repeated until the body accepts it.

Lyrically she lets the animal out first. “There’s something ’bout the way / the animal in you brings the animal in me out to play.” Then she turns sailor, a vessel on a wild sea of hope, heading for a love with no mapped edge. The second verse is sharper. She will have her cake and eat it. She is chasing him. He is chasing freedom. That friction keeps the single from floating off into mood-board sensuality. Openness, in her telling, includes the risk that the other person may still be mid-escape. The later turn toward “You can have it all / I’m chasing waterfalls / so come with me” is the invitation after the admission. It is also the line where the hospital-bed draft meets the present tense she describes on Bandcamp, the life in which that ordinary care actually arrived.

In the press note she puts it plainly. “For me, being open to love means giving up the illusion that you can control it. You have to be willing to be seen, to be vulnerable, and to experience whatever comes with that.” Coming from an artist who once treated release cycles like lab work, the sentence has extra weight. Control was part of the method. Open To You is what happens when the method is no longer the subject.

The cover image does the same work without a caption. William D. Murrell Jr. shot her in Dominica’s hot mineral baths, then the frame was collaged with hibiscus and jungle cut from Seychelles. She sits in a blue patterned suit, half in water, looking out through torn botanical layers. Heat opens the skin. The flower opens whether anyone is watching. The collage keeps the edges visible, which feels right. Recovery is not a clean dissolve. The single does not pretend otherwise. It just refuses to stay clenched.

At 3:41 the record knows when to leave. The outro thins toward “and only you” without a big last speech. What remains is temperature, a laid-back R&B pulse, and a vocal that treats surrender as a practiced skill rather than a collapse. That is why the track holds. Shelita has already gone as deep as accident and surgery will take a person. Open To You is the quieter test. Equalize, or stay at the surface.