“For years my therapist has been trying to say that there is me and then there’s Self Esteem, but I used to be like, ‘No, it’s all me! It’s all me!’” Rebecca Lucy Taylor laughs. But when you have as many different irons in the fire as the creative force behind the seismic new album A Complicated Woman, the concept of “all” takes on a different meaning.
The English vocalist’s early steps into the music world came as a member of the folk duo Slow Club, but her boundless imagination has led to an incredible array of expression since — most prominently as the explosive pop star Self Esteem. From her 2019 solo debut Compliments Please to the critically and commercially adored 2021 album Prioritise Pleasure, Taylor boldly swirls R&B, electronic, pop and more into an immersive, expressive blast. The latter record was an absolute revelation, dominating year-end lists both in her native UK and around the world, and led to nominations at the BRIT Awards and the Mercury Prize — solidifying her place as a vibrant touchstone for pop’s grand future.
As if that weren’t enough, Taylor branched out from that project, including working on the soundtrack for a Laurence Olivier Award-winning stage production and taking her own star turn in the West End as Sally Bowles in Cabaret. And across it all, Taylor is unafraid to unravel the suffocating strictures of identity we all relate to in front of our eyes, to bring a downright religious zeal to her endless expression of self. Listening to A Complicated Woman delivers a sudden clang of hope in an era defined by cataclysmic dissolution. Whatever expectations are put on her, especially those based on her gender, Taylor not only defies them, she obliterates them. “I am not your mother, I am not your mother, I am not your mom,” she grits on “Mother” an undeniable, house-indebted highlight from A Complicated Woman. “Everything is all me, but I’m allowed more truth as Self Esteem,” she insists.
PAPER spoke with the rising pop star about embracing control of her art, the pressures of time on women and balancing the two wolves inside of her: “pretentious wanker” and “deeply mainstream.”
Thank you for talking to me right in the middle of rehearsals for your upcoming shows! I don’t know how you compartmentalize your brain with all the different things you have to tackle. Or are you the type of person that has to stay in one lane for a while?
It would be lovely if I could. [Laughs] I think I’d definitely benefit from it, but I’m okay! It’s just that every album you ever put out is just always this mad scramble. And no matter what prep you do to try and get ahead of it, you just can’t. So I’m accepting the nature of the job. And making it was really hard. A lot of stress around it. And then performing it, it seems to start to heal me. It’s hard work, but it’s really useful and good for me.
I’m curious if you’ve had any artistic epiphanies recently? Are there any songs that start to feel different than they did?
Great question. I think I wrote the album with live so much in mind, so a lot of it feels like I thought it would, and that’s a really enjoyable feeling. I’m sort of smugly being like, “I knew I was right.” But we’ll see. Things take on such a different life when you share them with other people. This album is complicated, and the way I’m finding out that so many other people feel [the way that I do], it’s sort of sad, but also amazing.
I had some success with Prioritise Pleasure, and you stand on the edge of the next bit of your career. And I was like, “If I simplify this, and I make just female empowerment pop music, I’ll get on all the playlists, and all the radio, and I’ll get on all the mainstream TV shows, and I could become this thing.” I so badly want to make money and get some security in my life for the first time ever, and that was a tempting road. But artistically, I just couldn’t. [Laughs] It became a sort of weirdly meta thing, and you don’t know where you stand genre-wise or even how you feel. And it’s been really cleansing for me to admit that about myself.
From Prioritise Pleasure until now, if you didn’t embrace all the change that was happening, I’d imagine you would lose more than you would gain in that sense.
Exactly. I’d be a different artist. I’m such a mixture … I’m a pretentious wanker. [Laughs] And I’m also a deeply mainstream consumer of pop culture. Once I stop overthinking it and I just make what I think, it ends up being somewhere in the middle, which I think is really cool. And especially today’s music industry, to want it to grow, to want to try and hit more people, to get the things that the industry wants, which is, like, followers and views and viral moments and stuff, I just can’t do it.
The antithesis of art. It’s everything but how you’re meant to feel as this artist operating in the world, you know?
All these artists that I’m inspired by or want to be, they all made enough cash off their first breakthrough records because it was the fucking ‘70s or the ‘90s. I had this success with [Prioritise Pleasure] and I barely made a penny. It’s really hard to not sell out — or try to. I know the answer, but my anxiety and my stress and my head hitting the pillow is still, “Should I have just made that simpler thing?” And, well, you know, obviously not!
Obviously not! That feeling of struggle, of learning how to operate in a world that feels natural, and the complex emotions that come with it makes everything feel so relatable. It’s encouraging to know that being complicated isn’t a problem, necessarily. The album offers that support to the listener, but what sort of support did you need to make the album?
I’m not sure I quite got what I needed. [Laughs] It’s a weird shift when you’ve worked with the same people for a long time and they started working with you when it was a favour because I had nothing. But again, that’s the dynamic and you take a risk on an artist and hopefully it pays off. This is the first time I made a record where it was, “Everyone’s getting paid properly and well,” and all that. I hoped that would make it easier, but, you know, it was tough for loads of different reasons. I have really good management who love and care about me. They support my decision to not try and just make a quick buck, which is really helpful. It’s hard being a solo artist because I’m often just looking for someone to go, “Yeah, this.” That person isn’t there.
At the end of the day, it’s you.
The struggle with it is I’ve always known what I want to do, and what the vision is. But because I was so exhausted from Prioritise Pleasure, I had a proper breakdown. I felt nothing and my brain had just disappeared, and I made this album from that place. Prioritise Pleasure was a full realization of the exact vision I had there, sonically, lyrically, melodically, visually. So it’s a bit complicated. [Laughs]
For the live show, I’m working with Tom Scott, who I’m a really big fan of. It’s the first time I’ve worked with an artistic director and designer, and that’s been extremely helpful because every time I’ve played live and put a show together, I’m the leading lady in that show and the director and the designer. I can’t do that anymore. And because I’d done a stint in the theatre and saw how theatre worked, I was like, “Those boundaries and that infrastructure is what I need to be able to tour indefinitely like I did last time.” It’s extremely expensive. I’m putting a lot of my own money into this. But again, it’s the two-path thing. I could just do a gig with a small band, or I could try and make this really sort of experimental meeting of theatre and music.
That makes me think of that roar on your cover art. The behind the scenes of that shoot is a video of you sitting there trying on different screams. What comes out of your body when you’re creating like that?
I realized over the last couple of years, and it’s quite cheesy, but there’s a massive difference between the performer and the musician in me and how I actually am in life. If I’m in a coffee shop, I’m really shy. I’m socially anxious. And I mostly don’t say what I mean — still. I can go back all into my childhood, and my parents are conflict-averse people, and that passed to me very strongly. Over the last 20 years, I’ve noticed that actually isn’t a good thing. And I think all my songwriting, even back when I was in another band, it’s because it’s a place to say what I mean. I can keep it ambiguous enough about who it’s to or who it’s about. When I am performing my songs, I don’t think I realized it, but I need it. Rebecca Lucy Taylor, in her pajamas at home, she doesn’t get to do that. My aim is to get better. From Compliments Please to A Complicated Woman, you can hear I’m the same person, but fuck me am I realizing shit! They may be small, but they are positive steps towards the two meeting.
You really cleverly make that progress on this album, it’s palpable. You’re refusing to be defined but then also acknowledging that those roles and expectations still have power and exist when we refuse them. It plays in ambiguity but there’s nothing ambiguous about it. I know you said it’s about complication, but it felt very clear to me.
Good! I think I’m pre-empting… Because Prioritise Pleasure got these “five out of five” reviews, ten out of ten. And obviously it was incredible, but it had never happened to me, and as much as I’m constantly the person with all my other creative friends saying we need to de-centre reviews, I knew making A Complicated Woman, you can’t repeat that and you shouldn’t fucking try to. But as I sit on the edge of reviews starting to come in, there’s a shitty bit for me that can’t stay away. And there’ll be some man, some male journalist who gives it a shitty review because it doesn’t….
Because he doesn’t understand it, of course. Someone who doesn’t want us to be strong and to be sad and to fight all at the same time.
Exactly. It’s really simplistic. I just think everyone from my childhood to now, if I’d have just shut up and if I’d have not felt much, I’d have glided through this. [Laughs] And because I didn’t understand that … I suppose that’s what all this is about. I’m just trying to get back the years I spent trying to shut up and be good.
You do have these incredible collaborators and guests on the album to help flesh out your world. As a South African, I have to ask about how you connected with Moonchild Sanelly.
So the guy I produced the records with had made her album, and he was like, “You guys sort of remind me of each other and you should meet.” I think she’s fucking brilliant. We spent one day in the studio together and we made the song “Big Man”. I thought that would be it but I had the idea for “In Plain Sight” at the tip of my tongue, and I talked to her about what it was about…She just sat and wrote that poem in like 10 minutes. I sang up to where it gets to, and then she stood up and said it, and sat back down and I was mind blown by how fucking incredible it was. And then she was like, “Hang on, I’ve got another thing, and then stood up and shouted “What the fuck you want from me,” which is literally my favorite bit on the whole record. And then we finished it and we cried and then we got drunk. [Laughs] As the record progressed, that became my favorite song and anchor of the record.
You have wielded this brilliant orbit of artists around you — including with the live show you’re working with 11 women.
It’s a sisterhood. Songs like “The Curse”, I’m singing about my journey with alcohol, for everyone in the room, it’s, “Whatever thing that you do to make things easier for yourself that isn’t necessarily quite good for you, channel that.” Everyone is singing with this passion that connects in the same way. It adds to the fact that we’re all fucking different, and we’re all on a different journey, but we’re also humans together.
Does that emotionality spread into the other, more business-y elements of your work, like having to come do interviews?
It sounds ridiculous, but I’m like, “Who do I think I am? Why am I special enough to have someone like you want to talk to me? Why am I special enough to have a room full of people [listening to what I say]?” And it’s just a constant loop of, “Yes, I fucking deserve it. I deserve to be here.” I’ll write that as a lyric. But then I’ll also be like, “No, you don’t, no, you don’t, no, you don’t.” I just really love working hard. I really love results. I love committing myself to something and seeing it through. After Cabaret, I took about eight months off, but I’ve still made a load of work. I made the album during that. There was a lot of downtime, and while I loved it, I got into a relationship and I was going on holidays and I was at dinner parties. I was a normal sort of someone’s fucking girlfriend, but I was like, “It’s nice, but it’s not enough,” you know? I’d hope I can find the middle ground. I haven’t yet.
I think we have that reckoning at so many different points. Before I became a mom, it was endless worry and conversation about how to have time and space to work and travel, the things that make me me. When you hit these points in life, part of you just assumes, “Okay, I need to settle down.” And sometimes your body needs to settle a bit, but your brain doesn’t.
It’s very binary and I’m pushing through and it was fucking pleasant, but then I also froze my eggs because I was like, “Maybe I would want a baby. Maybe I wouldn’t want to be monogamous. Maybe I want all these things that society has told me I’ve got to have.” And now I have identified that I don’t have to have it and it doesn’t make me a lesser person.
Exactly!
There’s a lyric on A Complicated Woman, in “The Deep Blue Okay”, I say, “I know too much to fall in love.” But it’s my first admission that the idea of being with someone and building a life with each other might not be an insane idea. [Laughs] Which is as romantic as I’ve ever got in a lyric so far. But like you said, I hit 38, and a wonderful thing happened where I was like, “I don’t really want to be fucked up with people.” Every year I get closer to what I actually want. But I guess we juggle forever, right? You can be a mum and also be a creative.
There’s never enough time. And nothing is for everybody — motherhood, specifically.
You can hear it in the record as well. I got somewhere finally in my career at the time where if I wanted to have a baby, I absolutely should have started thinking about having one. I watched that Blur documentary, and thought, “I want that. I want to be making music well into my late 40s and 50s and still seem relevant, still seem cool.” They’re all just drinking beers all day. If that was women of the same age, people would be horrified. People would think it’s disgusting.
I went on a podcast the other day, a live recording of Off Menu. A lot of their fans are heterosexual men. And I had a glass of Prosecco with me throughout it, and I was sipping away and being quite silly. There were so many comments about me being unprofessional and drunk and difficult to watch. I wasn’t drunk by the way, I was just having a nice time. But still, you wouldn’t have said that about a man. Those things go hand in hand, the idea that I can be drunk or I can be free or I can go to the studio for months, the things Damon Albarn gets to do, that Matty fucking Healy gets to do, I don’t. It’s alive and well. There’s a lot of clock metaphors and time passing in my lyrics, and I don’t really notice when I’m writing them. I was like, “God, I’m obsessed with running out of time!” There’s the very real thing of my biological clock, and then just as valid is the fact that society still doesn’t want to see a woman over 40 doing anything, really. They want you to disappear.
But also … Prosecco in their eyeballs. Piss right off to those people.
I know! Babe, I don’t go looking for comments anymore. But I accidentally ended up on a Reddit thread because I saw this t-shirt on sale. In a way it’s good. It reminds me of why I’m doing this.
There’s a real depth of field on this record too — hypnotic and immersive. What was the process like of determining how layered or complex, how massive or how singular each emotion or theme needed to be?
It’s a woo-woo answer, but it comes out in my head. I never struggle with that, actually. It’s an instinct, a feeling. There are versions of these songs that I went down the road of other people’s opinions and they got scrapped. If I can have a bunch of people singing with me, nothing feels better in the world. Songwriting feels like playing as a kid like, “And now I’m a wizard!” It’s just my imagination in real time. You can hear where I’ve gone, “Here’s your songs for radio. There you go.”
This album was very hard, but to be honest, I got to the end of it, and when all the features were on there I thought fucking hell, this is a lot. Even I felt like there’s a lot going on in this record. I need it to come out. It’s been a really tough time of worrying about everybody creatively involved, their feelings, the industry, record labels, all the people involved in making it. It’s been tough. It’s been tough. And I want it back. I want it mine. It’s mine to do with it what I want. And honestly, soon, I’m going to be there and I can’t wait.
Photography: Oliver Richardson, Aaron Parsons