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nzherald.co.nz | The New Zealand Herald | Monday, May 2, 2022
COVER STORY
Who: Musician Chelsea Jade What: The release of her second art-pop album Soft Spot When: Out now.
Electro-art-pop artist Chelsea Jade speaks to Karl Puschmann about her new album and reaching her point of vulnerability PERCHED ON the edge of her perfectly made bed, in the fastidiously tidy bedroom of her apartment in a trendy part of Brooklyn, New York, the immaculately presented Chelsea Jade says, “I have this impression of myself that I come across quite harshly sometimes.” It’s a surprising admission. How she comes across is something Jade puts a lot of thought, time and effort into. She may have dropped out of art school to pursue music but her presentation remains steeped in those ideals with a healthy dollop of provocation and challenge dropped on top for good measure. Whether it’s from her idiosyncratically off-kilter dance routines, the way she uses her beauty as a prop to be admired, confused or rattled by, or the beguiling art, photography and music videos that accompany her meticulously crafted electro-pop, Jade’s dedication to aesthetic is unrivalled. But, of course, that’s the view from the outside looking in. Flip that around and things can look a lot different. “The record is talking about the context — and subtext — of my own inner feelings about those experiences,” she continues. “Man, I’ve discovered so much.” That record is Soft Spot, her longawaited follow-up to 2018‘s Top 10 charting album Personal Best. By now you should have heard its lead-in singles; the deliriously glossy alt-slow-jam Optimist, the sexual bounce of Good Taste and the carefree pop of Best Behaviour, which is worth looking up on YouTube to enjoy its joyfully goofy Rose Matafeo-starring music vid. The rest of the album lives up to the promise of those singles as Jade dives in and explores the parts of her psyche that aren’t so pleasant. “The act of making anything should be time well spent on examining your own perspective,” she says. “Hopefully, this has helped me do that. But it’s not really diving in for me. I’m always writing and making work so it feels quite positive to now be here thinking about it. I’m understanding that I’m at a place where I enjoy adding context to esoteric
Photo / James K Lowe
HIGHWAY TO THE
danger zone
thought.” Then putting on a cartoonish voice she jokes, “I don’t walk into the room being like, ‘I’m gonna deal with this today!’ “I really wish it was that way,” she sighs. “I wish I could think like that.” Instead, she approached this concept with the same artistic intent as her visuals, inviting you to share the journey through her headspace in a sonically literal way. “On the record, there’s that line that’s crossed from the outer world into the inner world,” she explains. “You can hear sound design of a storm and me walking into the room, singing the song before it cuts to my inner monologue voice, which is obviously more glossy and in the pop-mentality world. That occurs a lot in the album, where it’s undulating between what’s really happening and what’s happening in the mind.” That juxtaposition between lousy reality and the perfection of escapism is universal. Whether that’s singing in the shower or cutting shapes on the d-floor, we’re all superstars in our minds. But is the imagined reality where Jade herself lives or was this more of an artistic flourish for the album? An enigmatic look crosses her face as she replies, “Who can really tell?” She laughs, then quietly adds,
“Especially in the last couple of years. God, I spent so much time alone . . . As an artist, I spend a lot of time alone.” Even though Jade still feels very local, appearing in Lorde’s music video, playing shows, turning up at events and collaborating with New
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It’s the place I’m most vulnerable, but also where my cruelty comes from.
Zealanders both in front of and behind the cameras, she actually relocated to Los Angeles six years ago to pursue music and collaboration full time. More recently, she packed up and moved to New York. “I wanted to be a pinball in a machine made of different kinds of people, where I keep grazing different incidental crossover moments with unexpected
people,” she says of her motivation to move across America to the Big Apple at the start of this year. “LA,” she says, “is very intentional.” You’d think the lead-up to an album release would be a less than ideal time to make such a major move — “It’s as brutal a transition as you might expect,” she says — but she’s had time. Soft Spot was finished a year ago. So when asked how she’s feeling now that it’s out, she replies, “It’s surprising that it’s happening. Time is a foreign topic for me. I don’t have a good relationship with time, I must say. It’s been a long lead-up for me.” Having had all this time with the album she says she understands it a lot more than she did while she was making it, especially the repeating patterns and motifs that emerged throughout its creation and how they relate to the side of herself she was exploring. In her past works, any sight of a forming pattern made her feel “affronted”, and she’d purposefully reject them. She’s since realised she was projecting. “At times I could be worried that I was being too obtuse or that people weren’t gonna put the time into understanding,” she says. “Now I believe that the audience, if they choose to spend time with it, maybe the dual meanings of things can take shape for them as they
have for me. It’s a richer text.” This brings us to the point of the album and its themes, sometimes daringly obvious (Good Taste), sometimes less so (Real Pearl), other times brutally reflective (Superfan) or worryingly escapist (Optimist) but always boundlessly inventive and teasingly intriguing. “The concept of the Soft Spot to me is a point of vulnerability,” she says. “Doesn’t it imply a groove in a regular demeanour? To me, it’s the place that I’m gonna love or the place where I’m most vulnerable, but it’s also where my cruelty comes from. It’s like the quicksand of yourself.” In that light, the album could almost be considered a warning. Addressing and highlighting the different sorts of fallout from her personal and emotional failings, her acerbic tendencies, losing experience under the watchful eye of social media and the way she sort of just floats softly away from friends. “The implication is that you reserve the soft spot for only some. When you do isolate yourself to that point, then as well as being a place of affection and love it feels like that soft spot is also a danger zone.” This is something she’s identified within herself, I ask. Without hesitation, Chelsea Jade answers. “Definitely.”
