NYC based New Zealand artist, Chelsea Jade, unveils the new single/video, ‘Good Taste,’ from her new album, Soft Spot, out April 29th on Carpark Records. ‘Good Taste‘ is a calibration of Jade’s skills in passing pop through an R’n’B tinged lens, and is presented alongside a video illustrated by Frances Haszard. “It’s like a miracle // Feeling your charisma getting physical,” Jade begins atop svelte production courtesy of herself and Bradley Hale (Now, Now). “And yeah, I’m miserable // But oh it’s such a mood getting sad.” ‘Good Taste‘ features additional vocal engineering and production by Luna Shadows, and sees MUNA’s Naomi McPherson and Josette Maskin lending their guitar prowess .
Of the track, Jade says: “I met someone at a party while I was living in a hotel for a briefly opulent moment in time. The next night they met me in the lobby and eventually we made our way up to my room. It’s an implicitly sexy situation but we parted without touch. As soon as they left I asked if they wanted to come back and when the elevator opened on the ground floor, they got in and ignited the most cinematic make out plus I’ve ever had. This song is about that encounter. I imagine the first half to be an internal fantasy until the real first touch when the production explodes into maximalism.”
‘Good Taste’ is the second single to be released from Soft Spot. January 2022 saw the release of ‘Optimist’ along with her self-directed, edited, choreographed and animated video.
Soft Spot is Jade’s second album, and dwells somewhere between feeling and expression, certainty and doubt. It ventures beyond the exploration of delusions of grandeur that formed the focus of the critically acclaimed Personal Best (2018), and simultaneously promotes and undermines romance, specifically, in a more solemn way.
Created during a once-in-a-century pandemic, Soft Spot is an evocative assembly of found parts: recordings of sentences and asides delivered by friends, the sound of rain in LA, or the distant voice of bureaucracy against a backdrop of hold music. Seeming choruses were produced to give that impression, layered submission by individual vocal submission. With the reinforcement of composition and arrangement by Leroy James Clampitt (Justin Bieber) and production by Brad Hale (Now, Now), Jade conjures up atmospheres conducive to feelings of place and potential. Muna’s Naomi McPherson and Josette Maskin play guitar on Soft Spot, as does Elizabeth Stokes (The Beths). These collaborators and others that recur throughout the credits of Jade’s work are friends foremost, people she knows and enjoys outside of music. “Everybody who I’ve worked with is very high-achieving in their own right, but that’s not why we work together,” Jade says; community is the starting point. “That’s the nucleus of how these things get made.”
Quietly, Chelsea Jade spent 2020 and 2021 skulking around other people’s projects. In tandem with these collaborations, Jade has been funneling her skills into Soft Spot–adding animator, video editor, producer and engineer to her prolific creative résumé.
You can catch her as a dancer in Lorde’s ‘Mood Ring’ music video, or in the credits as Deafheaven’s graphic designer for their 2020 vinyl release 10 Years Gone. She’s choreographed Aotearoa Music Award winning videos for Georgia Lines (‘No One Knows’, ‘I Got You’) as well as Los Angeles based Trace Le. Over the years, she’s written songs for artists like The Chainsmokers, Cxloe and more. While it’s not unusual to collaborate in music, it might be considered rare to work with a diverse roster of artists in so many different ways.
Moreover, Soft Spot ventures beyond the exploration of delusions of grandeur that formed the focus of the critically acclaimed Personal Best (2018), a record that enjoyed two years on the shortlist for the APRA Silver Scroll Award in the company of Lorde, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Aldous Harding, and Marlon Williams, for excellence in songwriting for ‘Laugh it Off’ and ‘Life of the Party’ respectively. A dynamic pre-Personal Best single, ‘Afterglow,’has made several TV appearances, most recently on the hit Netflix series Emily in Paris.
On the strength of this work and more, Jade was presented with an APRA Professional Development Award; signed a publishing deal, and co-founded a fxmale songwriting/producer camp in New Zealand with tutors including Susan Rogers (Prince) and Wendy Wang (Greg Kurstin). Now, Soft Spot aims from rougher terrain. A sonic sketchbook, Chelsea’s production falls on the textural side, a panorama littered with field recordings and conversations with friends as you travel through the record.
