Queer Joy and Psychpop from Softee

Softee, the stage name of Nina Grollman, is a Brooklyn-based and Juilliard-trained pop artist paving her way in the experimental pop scene. Beginning her performance career on Broadway, Softee’s music style can be described as a danceable, feel-good, genre-bending psychpop that’s meant to make people feel happy and have fun.

Releasing her first album, Keep On, in 2020 and her second album, Natural, this past May, her newest EP is a DIY pop masterpiece that mixes early 2000s R&B, pop, dance, and electronica. Recorded in Berlin alongside producer sweetbbyj, Softee describes it as a personal and joyous record with each song representing chronological snapshots of her life.

For the readers who haven't heard about you before, what do you think is the most important thing they should know about you as an artist?

I would say that my music is feel-good queer pop that I hope makes people happy and want to dance. It's also a little bit angsty and a way for me to just really try to work out a lot of big feelings. I'm sort of ever-changing and fluid, and another part of the fun in my musical journey is that I've gone through a lot of different iterations, but it's always been danceable and the kind of music that gets stuck in your head. Have you always been passionate about singing and songwriting?

Yeah, I've always loved singing ever since I was really little. I'd literally sing karaoke and make my dad grade me. I didn’t start songwriting until middle school, and it was all really, really angsty. It was a lot of stuff about me pretending to like boys and writing songs about those feelings, and it was me trying to be this romantic, rom-com, angsty person when I actually didn’t feel that way. I would produce in GarageBand a lot in high school, and that was really the start of it all. I started Softee in 2019, and it really was a whole other universe to me because that's when I started writing under a persona rather than just myself, and it was really liberating and freeing to be able to do that.

How did your performing career on Broadway evolve into you creating music and entering the experimental pop scene?

I was making music alongside acting, but I wasn't really taking it super seriously. I hit a point in my acting career where I felt sort of creatively unsatisfied, and I was really only doing music as more of a hobby. That's when I decided to take it more seriously for myself because I felt quite powerless as an actor. Songwriting became a huge outlet for me and was very important for my spirit and creative life. I think that's how I segued into the pop scene because I truly was like, I can't just do acting. My life was just too much of a roller coaster, and it's not that pop music isn't chaotic, but I think having both is really nice because if I just did one thing all the time, I think I'd go crazy.

Are there any challenges that you faced as a queer artist in the music industry?

Interestingly, I find that I'm coming up to a moment where queerness can be commodified in a way that sometimes feels strange seeing that queerness is a huge part of my identity. I definitely want to be visible in that way, and I pride myself on that and creating show environments that are super clear and community oriented. However, at the same time, I think that the challenge for me right now is that there's a lot of focus on my queerness to the point where it's like, well, there's other things about me other than my queer identity. As a musician, it sometimes feels like it's almost trendy, and that's the thing that's being talked about more than the actual music itself.

Do you have any advice for other LGBTQ artists who are in the industry or who are looking to get into the industry?

Trust your intuition; trust yourself; trust your taste, and trust your judgment. No one knows you better than you, and no one else can tell you how to do things. There's not one right way to do something, especially in music.

A part of being in the industry is that you're gonna get a lot of different people giving you a lot of opinions about what they think and what you should be doing. You just need to decide that if it's coming from someone else, that that’s not you. So the trick is to stay yourself. I mean, that's so cliche, but, like, the more you can listen to your gut—I mean, it took me so long to build up the confidence in myself that I actually have good taste, and once I actually believed that, it was a game-changer. Suddenly I didn't need anyone's validation to know that I was good, and I could just do the things that I liked to do without so much of a judgmental voice in my head.

Follow Softee on Instagram @softeepopstar and to stay up-to-date with live shows!