Submitted Photo Heather McFarlane is a Tennessee-based musician residing in Phoenix, Ariz. She performs under the stage name Heather Rae.

Minot native Heather McFarlane (Brockell) dove headfirst into professional figure skating and vocal performance after leaving the Magic City. After achieving success on the ice, she’s making her own way writing and releasing music under the name Heather Rae as an independent artist.

Upon graduating from Our Redeemer’s Christian School in Minot, she attended Minot State University for a few years before transferring to and graduating from the University of Minnesota in 2016. After skating in the Magic City Figure Skating Club, McFarlane decided to chase her dream of performing in professional ice shows by sending applications to various production companies. However, she said, she kept receiving the dreaded, all too familiar, “No thank you, we’d like to go with someone with more experience.”

Desiring to become a more marketable performer, McFarlane had the idea to add her vocal talent to her resume.

“Finally, I found an ice show that had live singing in addition to skating and so I reached out to them and I was just like, ‘Listen, if you hire me, I can do two jobs for one salary,’ and so that was kind of how I presented it, and so they took me up on it,” she said.

With some experience under her belt, she had no trouble booking ice shows. After working on a few more productions, McFarlane booked a skating gig with no singing, which gave her a change of heart.

“I realized I was, like, kind of bored, like I didn’t really enjoy it as much. I realized it was the connection with the audience. Being able to talk to people. Singing is what I enjoyed. That was kind of when I started just wanting to go back into just creating my own thing and just getting back to my initial love for music, and so that was when I started pushing more into songwriting,” she said.

McFarlane found herself in the Music City.

“I just loved it, and I really wanted to grow as a songwriter, and I don’t think there’s any place better or that’s a better place for that than in Nashville,” she said.

She said she has always been interested in music and songwriting. She started with writing poems as a child. Both of her parents are musicians. Her mother is a piano teacher and she described her father as always being into music, always composing and songwriting as she grew up.

She describes her music as “Taylor Swift meets Adele meets Billy Eilish. It’s kind of like an eclectic mix, but I think that’s the best way to describe the music on the EP that I have coming up.” McFarlane has released a series of singles, but she is releasing her debut EP, “Liberosis” in November.

McFarlane defined the term liberosis as a desire to care less and to loosen your grip on life, which inspired her writing.

“I felt one thing that I’ve been trying to do over the last year is to just let loose a little bit and accept things as they come rather than trying to control everything,” she said.