The Friday Dispatch
Camila Cabello, Josie Vander West, Isobel Campbell, Sheryl Crow and talker
Camila Cabello and the write stuff
With her fourth album C,XOXO marking a divisive act of reinvention, Best Fit meets Camila Cabello to find out how the Cuban-born superstar is reclaiming creative control of her career for this week’s digital cover.
Though C,XOXO – released today – is her fourth record, in many ways it’s a new new beginning for Cabello; a coming-of-age story from an interrupted adolescence and a warped navigation of adulthood. C,XOXO is a whiplash-inducing departure from the artist you have believed Camila Cabello to be.
Who is she now? Now, she is wielding total creative control. She answers hesitantly: “I guess I just want to be known as somebody who’s just like… I don’t even think I can say, ‘I want to be known’, because you can’t really control that. But how I see myself? I identify as a writer.”
“The life of a writer feels truer to me than that of a singer, or a public figure,” Cabello adds. “This was my first taste of that satisfaction…. This was the album I needed to make the other three in order to get to.”
Read the full article by Sophie L. Walker now over on Best Fit.
Josie Vander West steps into her own
“I genuinely don't mind if I never put this record out,” smiles Josephine Vander West from her home in South London. Starting out by trying to make it as a solo artist in her teens, Josie Vander West’s career was quickly taken over by Oh Wonder, her collaborative project with husband Anthony West. Now, though, Vander West is picking up the thread she let go of ten years ago with her new solo project, That Woman.
Rather than a fresh start, the project is a continuation. “That's exactly it, that’s what it feels like to me,” she says. “I never made a record as a solo artist, and it was something that I always wanted to do and needed to do. Before Oh Wonder started, I was in the process of writing a solo album. I'm glad we pursued Oh Wonder and had a great time. It's only now, this last year, that I’ve finally had the headspace and the time to write [my solo] album.”
Now, Vander West is ready for her moment — her own moment. Find Joy, her solo debut as That Woman, is slated for release on August 9. Tackling themes such as demanding career expectations and the pressures of womanhood, the record as a whole is an exercise in unpacking her own experiences and self-perceptions as a global musical success. “A lot of the open-ended threads that I left in my early twenties and a lot of the things that happened to me were left unprocessed,” she says. “If I’m somebody that uses music to process things that happened to me, make sense of them and overcome them, I never got the chance to do that.”
“I have loved making [this album] and needed to make it and feel like I've now finally become a woman, which is why I guess this name is apt. I’ve finally put my younger self to bed and allowed myself to flourish and move on.”
Isobel Campbell has the world under her microscope
Since quitting Belle & Sebastian in 2002, Glaswegian singer/songwriter Isobel Campbell has built an impressively kaleidoscopic solo career, roving into lounge, jazz, psych-folk, blue-eyed soul, and, with the greatly missed Mark Lanegan, three fantastic records of sweet ‘n’ sour country blues. Out earlier this month, her new album Bow to Love moves the scenery once more, realigning the mirrors to uncover new angles from which to admire her often surprisingly blunt candour and bird-sweet, cashmere-soft singing.
It’s not as flashy as 2020’s There is no Other…, where Campbell ventured more broadly than ever before. Instead, there are more shadows and sharp edges, and an unshakeable gravity that anchors even her most feather-light melodies. “There’s been tonnes of shit going on,” she says of her past few years. Heavy personal shit like divorce (from musician Chris Szczech, who nonetheless returns as co-producer) and Lanegan’s tragic passing in 2022, but also fully existential, human-condition, deep, deep shit to boot.
Narcissism, toxic masculinity, transhuman AI, and the political race to the bottom all go under Campbell’s deceptively sharp knife. Fittingly, the phrase ‘bow to love’ turns out not to be an instruction. In full, she says on the album: “As below, so above / it’s not enough to bow to love,” a reminder that even the greatest power in the cosmos relies a lot on luck.
Campbell has more faith in the old adage that ‘kindness is the cure’, and goes as far as to say so on album standout “Do or Die,” a track she says is among her favourites from her 20+ year career. She admits she made her choices while standing on the sidewalk in Los Angeles, where she now lives, killing time before a hairdresser appointment, but insists she took it seriously. “The advice I was given was to not overthink it,” she says. “I just thought, ‘Well, that’s rich,’ I overthink everything. I can think myself into paralysis. It’s really a great talent.”
Three things to get excited about this week
The performance: Last night, at the London stop on his headline tour supporting album Something to Give Each Other, Troye Sivan was full of surprises. While the crowd anticipated a Charli XCX appearance, Sivan had more in store, bringing out Ross Lynch for a live interpretation of the fan-favourite music video for “One of Your Girls.”
The book: If you weren’t already convinced that the Joni Mitchell renaissance has entered into full bloom, take this new book as your cue. Earlier this month, Ann Powers released Traveling: On the Path with Joni Mitchell, a book that seems half a biography of the folk powerhouse and half the author’s reckoning with the effect of Mitchell’s music on her own life. Where there are names and dates of important Mitchell events, there are also close readings of her lyrics and critical analysis of her artistic output. And while there is certainly a fair amount of mythologizing about the musician, there is also a genuine effort to be unscrupulously honest about her legacy, life, and work.
The album: After rising to fame as the Internet’s favourite guitarist and touring with Reneé Rapp, Towa Bird has finally put out a project of her own. The British and Filipino artist’s debut album, American Hero, is out today, and, in advance of the release, Best Fit sat down with her for a conversation to discuss her creative process, her upbringing, and her inspirations.
Something Old, Something New
Every week, one of our writers or editors share their recommendations of two records they love - one from the past, one from the present. This week, Larry McClain on Sheryl Crow’s Sheryl Crow (1996) and talker’s I’m Telling You the Truth(2024).
American pop icon Sheryl Crow has had a fascinating career. After graduating from college, she wrote the music for a McDonald’s TV spot and toured as a backup singer for Michael Jackson. But in the early ’90s, Crow started hanging out with L.A. songwriters like David Baerwald, and the result was her breakout first album. It was, however, her self-titled second album in 1996, which drew a real critical mass of attention to her and marked her not just as one to watch, but as a master in her own right.
Most people forget that Sheryl Crow (the album, not the artist) was filled with more acoustic songs than bangers, even though she clinched radio hits like the uptempo “Every Day Is A Winding Road.” The album demonstrated that Crow was at the top of her game, both lyrically and melodically. Her wordplay across the record was dazzling (“We went searchin’ through thrift-store jungles, found Geronimo’s rifle, Marilyn’s shampoo”). And even after nearly 30 years, the arrangements of songs like home “Home” remain rueful and unforgettable.
Crow had a string of failed relationships in the ’90s, no doubt providing the emotional fodder necessary to produce such a work. On “Home,” for example, she croons: “My head is full of voices and my house is full of lies.” Like her successor Taylor Swift, Sheryl turned each heartbreak into another chart-topper.
Still, relationship trauma never interfered with Crow’s ability to write ultra-hooky songs. Just mention the title “A Change Will Do You Good” and most people can hum the chorus immediately.
L.A. artist Celeste Tauchar goes by the stage name “talker” because that’s how people have frequently mispronounced her name over the years (it’s pronounced “tosher”, by the way). After floating around the indie scene, she has cemented herself as one of its fixtures with her just-released album, I’m Telling You The Truth, a project that may remind you of Japanese Breakfast, Wolf Alice and (perhaps most of all) Sheryl Crow.
The debut album is aptly titled because it exhibits candour and courage on every track — even more than on her previous three EPs as talker. I’m Telling You The Truth dares to be vulnerable, exploring the artist’s Mormon upbringing, her evolving sexuality and more. In another life, this record seems to make clear, Celeste could have been a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. On one track, for example, she writes: “Stuck and suspended somewhere out in space, where nothing’s in a single file line.” Even Mary Oliver would be impressed.
Nonetheless, the new talker album also contains the elegies for failed relationships that many listeners have come to expect and love of most releases. On her song “knowitall”, she sings: “You won’t tell me what you want, angel babies, carnal lust – sometimes me but sometimes not.”
Tauchar’s melodic gifts are also on full display in the new release. Her song “Wet” is a touching five-minute masterpiece where the “B” section has the grandeur of melodies by Randy Newman or even George Gershwin. “Everything Is Something (I Never Saw Coming)” is arguably the best hook of 2024, propelled by masterful work on bass.
Some great albums are like fireworks — fun for a little while, then forgotten. But both Sheryl Crow and I’m Telling You The Truth become more illuminating the more time you spend with them. Listening once again to Crow’s album is like savoring a bottle of Napa Valley’s finest wine from 1996. And talker’s new album is also meant to be sipped slowly. Just like Sheryl’s memorable album, talker’s I’m Telling You The Truth will touch listeners’ hearts for years to come.
Listen to the week in new music by following our Discovery playlist
Dropping at midnight every Thursday, follow our playlist for a taste of the best new music from the most exciting breaking artists – 20 new tracks, top-loaded from the last five days in music and on repeat in the Best Fit office right now.
Leading the selection this week are new tracks from MJ Lenderman, Shivani Day, Tex, Pretty Sick, King Isis, Liana Flores and coverstar Tamara Mneney.
Good ones! Thx