Princess Chelsea "The loneliest Girl" 2018

...There are less-expected subjects too, for instance ‘Respect the Labourers’ – a lovely song in appreciation of manual labour, and a collaboration with Jonathan Bree. But for the most part The Loneliest Girl continues Chelsea’s examination of storybook love, ever so sweetly defacing each page. As I noted at the time in a RNZ Sampler review, “in a new era of uncompromising women songwriters, many of them tackling sexism and gender issues head-on, an album of titles like ‘I Love My Boyfriend’ and ‘I Miss My Man’ might seem out of step, but Chelsea Nikkel has plenty of dark thoughts about modern love; she just has her own ironic, pop-sweetened way of expressing them.”...
...The album also saw Chelsea’s current band take shape around the rhythm section of bass player Joshua Worthington-Church, drummer David Harris, and Chrystal Choi on keyboards. When it came to planning what would become the follow-up, 2022’s Everything Is Going To Be Alright, her intention was to record live with her band, but lockdowns intervened. So while the album includes one fully live studio performance – ‘The Forest’, captured in all its grungy late-night glory in Auckland’s The Lab – it also involved much of Chelsea’s typical layering. Still there are noticeably more guitars than on any previous album, with touches of early Flying Nun in ‘Love Is More’ and hints of The Cars in ‘Forever Is A Charm’, while the juxtaposition of sweet sentiments and unsettling tones reaches new dimensions. Suffice to say, the album’s title is not as reassuring as it might seem.
At the time of writing, Chelsea and her band are set to tour Europe in October 2022, culminating in a live-in-the-studio recording at the hallowed Abbey Road. The Beatles connection is significant to Chelsea; not only is she a diehard fan, but among her various side-projects she has played in The Disciples of Macca, an aggregation of mostly Lil’ Chief artists dedicated to the music of Paul McCartney and Wings. This occasional band originally featured Scott Mannion on keyboards: “he was Linda,” Chelsea says. It was a role she took over when Scott moved to Spain.
Though Chelsea effectively stopped work during the lockdowns, her music seemed to keep working for her. For one thing, it was discovered by French pop artist Mattyeux. “He wrote to me and said, ‘I’m doing an album and I’m really a big fan of yours and I was wondering if you’d collab with me.’ And I was like, who is this person? And then I looked at his project, and the music videos for the project were really, really good, and the songs, I was like, oh, this is pretty cool. So he sent me the beat that he had, which is pretty much the instrumental bed of that song, I wrote the lyrics and basically turned that beat into a song and sent it back to him. I think I spent three or four days doing it, and he really liked it and added his own verse and his vocals. So it was a really good collab.”
The song result was ‘Sometimes’, released in mid-2022 with an imaginative video filmed by Mattyeux’s sister.
Her audiences, too, began to grow and change during the enforced layoff, something she has noticed now she has been touring again. From the stage she sees “the sort of people that might shop at Marbecks” alongside old punks, heavy metallers (“maybe they like the classical kind of stuff?”), a queer contingent, and a lot of much younger people, “the TikTok generation”. In the first six months of 2022 her streaming numbers suddenly “tenfolded”, she says, “and it’s got to be TikTok, it’s the only thing I can think of.” From her Spotify insights she sees she has listeners scattered everywhere. “Turkey is a big one. Germany, France, recently the US. And heaps in Mexico. I don’t know how. I’ve never been to Mexico, but I’d like to go.
“It’s just weird to me. Like the last two years or three years I didn't do a thing, I just took a break. And during that period, heaps of people started to listen to it without me lifting a finger. So my modus operandi since then has been like, I’m not going to plan or try to do anything. I’m just going to make the music, and play a really good live show, and not worry about anything else.”. - Nick Bollinger and AudioCulture
trax:
01 The Deer with the Golden Lights 02 Good Enough 03 The Pretty Ones 04 I Love My Boyfriend 05 Wasting Time 06 The Loneliest Girl 07 I Miss My Man 08 It's Nothing 09 Respect the Labourers 10 Cigarette 11 Growing Older 12 All I Need to Do 13 Cigarette Duet (Bonus)
…served by Gaius…