Princess Chelsea

After the viral sensation of her video for The Cigarette Duet, Princess Chelsea has discarded the pink wigs for her new album, TheGreatCyberneticDepression, writes Mike Alexander.

Did you feel any weight of expectation following the viral success of The Cigarette Duet or are you unfazed by such things? I could lie and say no but my new thing is to be completely honest in interviews. Apologies if I sound crazy, it’s because I am. I think the success of The Cigarette Duet has done a lot for me – it’s opened up a dedicated fan base in Europe (I guess they like smoking over there) and it’s introduced a lot of people to my music who probably never would have heard it before. I can’t complain, but allow me to a tiny bit. The flipside is that perhaps it’s pigeon-holed me in the minds of cynics as an annoying hipster who wears pink wigs and writes exclusively gimmicky 60s-ish songs. It’s been so long since the first album I think I’ve changed a lot and the sound of the new album is quite different, so I’m always sort of terrified people who loved the first album will hate it but you know what, Lou Reed always said make music for yourself, and I like it. Great title for an album. Is there a context to The Great Cybernetic Depression? Yes. It’s a fictional world event 10 or so years in the future (of course). It is a metaphor for the anxiety and depression I was experiencing during the writing of said album. I like channelling personal stuff through a narrative. It’s easier to sing about the end of the world than how sad you are. However, sometimes on the album I just straight-up get emo on it – We Are Very Happy. I’d like to try to be able to do that more in the future. I think it takes guts to be cheesy and emotionally direct. You seem to love to ‘‘play’’ with music, taking different sounds and putting them in unexpected contexts, or is your writing approach actually quite orthodox? My approach to writing has always been pretty nuts in general. A lot of the time I’ll sit in a room for three months and do nothing but record 100 layers of arpeggios and listen to 300 synth banks before making up my mind what I want – a particular countermelody noone else will notice to sound like. That’s certainly ‘playing with music’, I guess. It’s a very manic, intuitive and vague process and somewhere out of it comes a song. I like this process because the music just sounds undeniably like you. Who else could it sound like? I’m curious, given your classical training, about the use of electronic instruments on the new album. Were you zapped by aliens? LOL, was I ever. I was zapped by Ultravox’s Vienna at age 7 and never quite recovered. The first album has a chamber-pop feel to many of the arrangements so the classical influence is more obvious. The new album has an almost exclusive palette of Yamaha DX7 and Roland D-50 synthesisers (most important synths), and is peppered with a celeste or piano here and there with the odd duelling guitars, so I can see why one would ask this question. I’d answer by saying the arrangements and writing style aren’t much different at all (apart from getting a bit weird) and the synth or guitar lines I’ve come up with are still influenced by the Bach, Schubert, Debussy I grew up playing on piano.