Holly Lovell photo by Kate Petrik Burnette
Holly Lovell Releases Grief and Welcomes Healing With Hello Chelsea
On February 7th, 2025 Denver-based indie and folk artist Holly Lovell released Hello Chelsea, an album that draws on her experiences of familial grief in the wake of losing a loved one to addiction in a New York setting, but it is also an album about engaging with emotion, processing, and healing. Lovell worked with producer Brian Joseph (Bon Iver) in the woods of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, bringing her young family with her on location in a renovated school bus.
For Lovell, the experience of writing and recording the album was her own delayed engagement with her experiences at the center of helping keep her family moving forward, and completing the recording process helped to give her something positive in exchange for her hardships. Something that makes the album particularly engaging are Lovell’s direct lyrics and powerful vocals tied to a production approach that’s both considered and textured, drawing the audience in to an intimate experience of Lovell and the studio band, who included Courtney Hartman (guitars, vocals), Shane Leonard (drums, percussion), Steve Garrington (bass, synth), Ben Lester (pedal steel, synth) and Sean Carey on (piano, vocals). I spoke with Holly Lovell about the internal and shared family experiences behind the songs and how she approached and handled such emotional subject matter to give life to these songs.
Americana Highways: Given how personal and direct the emotions and ideas on the album often are, I was wondering if this was something you had to really draw out of yourself, or if it’s your natural mode of creating.
Holy Lovell: I think because the songs are mine, I’m allowed to say things in the way that I want to. I can also point things out to myself in the way that I need to hear them. I like directness. I don’t dancing around something. I want to see it how it. Good songwriting, in my opinion, is really honest, and direct, and shares the core of it. I think, so often we are avoiding the core. That’s why music can unlock something for us. It can be that mirror back at us where we say, “Gosh, that’s it.” I think I was able to do it because that’s the way I am. I like the truth.
AH: I’m glad to hear that. You having that quality is helpful for other people because maybe if they are less direct, then they hear something in your song that catches their attention, it might encourage them to be a little more direct.
HL: Yes. I think some of it, too, is that a lot of this record is written through the lens of my family members, too, and for my family, and to my family. My grandparents are from Georgia, and my mom was born in Georgia, and that’s the side of my family that this story originates in. I don’t know if it’s a Southern thing, but there’s a general sugar-coating of things, and an unwillingness to look things in the face. Then, my dad is Australian, and I think Australians, in general, are direct, but my dad is that guy. So I think another reason to be direct is to pull the curtain back a little bit and say, “It’s okay to talk about things.”
AH: My Southern family have a very hard time with the same things. I can see how an antidote would be needed!
HL: It becomes something that makes it a challenge to talk about this record with people, to stay in my real feelings about it, and not be jokey about it.
AH: After you’ve managed to say these things by creating these songs, has it been tempting to walk it back a little, edit the songs back, or are you pretty good at sticking to it?
HL: I think there’s only one or two moments where I felt that way as far as the songs. I definitely feel that way when I’m on stage talking about a song, or with people like you. It’s more the talking that I feel less in control of. But I think that’s probably why I’m drawn to songwriting. I’m just committed to what it is. I have this song at the end of the record called “Family” that’s about the process of losing my uncle and feeling like I was the one taking care of everyone at a certain point, and the second verse is that “nobody understands our grief and it’s embarrassing to me what we’re all so sad.” I double checked that line with one of the people in the studio, wondering if I should not say that. But when it came down to it, it was true, so it stayed.
AH: I know the line that you’re talking about. To me, that line felt incredibly modern and real in a good way. That’s where the conversational feeling is. Not that every line has to be like that. But that sounds like you, talking. That song I found very interesting anyway, with the image of wings and gathering people around you. It reminded me of people in my life who have taken that role, and it’s a very hard role. That’s a lot for them to bear.
HL: I think it took me a while to see the other side of it, or to even feel the other side of it, because in crisis mode, you just do what you do. Then, later, you think, “I feel a little stretched thin, here.”
AH: “Crisis mode” is a great phrase to use for that.
HL: I think, in a way, the whole album was that moment for me. I was in crisis mode, taking care of everyone, doing all the big business things that needed doing. There were all the logistical things that were serious and crazy. I think maybe my subconscious gave myself this record as a chance to work through my grief, even though it had to be so delayed. I found that certain stages of putting this album out have been certain stages of grief for me. The last song on the record, called “100 Different Ways,” was the last song that we recorded on the very last night.
I had only met the people worked with on the record only two weeks prior, so that would normally not be a space that I would feel open enough to cry in, or be emotional, but the last minute or two of the song are just instrumental. The music was going, and I, unexpectedly, started crying. It felt like someone was giving something back to me for what felt like the first time. Like the music was giving itself to me and I didn’t have to give anything else to it. It was such a special moment for me.
AH: If anyone deserves to benefit from this album, it’s you! Have you played these songs in public yet?
HL: Only twice, and not with a full band. I played an acoustic show and a trio thing at Americana Fest. I have a release show the second week of February and I’m starting to gather the band together. I’m excited to feel them live, but I’m also anxious that they are going to bring things up, because that’s the way it was at Americana Fest. What was harder to receive was actually the way that people were coming up to me at the end and saying, “I’m sorry for your loss,” or sharing things.
Every time I’ve shared these songs with someone, someone comes up and shares with me about someone in their life who they’ve lost to addiction or who is in addiction. It’s incredibly special that they feel connected enough to me to share it with me, but it’s also extremely hard to receive that. That will be the new challenge.
AH: How did you actually draft these songs and start the process to move towards recording?
HL: Originally, I sent Brian [Joseph] all voice memos from my iPhone that I took in my living room, and it was either me playing the piano and singing, or it was me strumming the guitar and singing, and we didn’t have anything else. We didn’t have any rough draft sketches of anything until we got out there. I think that he probably had a feeling based on the demos, but we were working with what we had. Sometimes he’d say, “Okay, we’d need a full band.” So we’d wait for full-band days for that one. But there’d be some days where we wouldn’t have all the band, but Brian’s brother was there for the weekend, who plays drums, so we’d pull him in on that one. That would lead to a song being more stripped-down. For one of the songs, “Selling Your Shoes,” it almost sounds like the voice memo that I sent him. It just had a few flaws in the original memo, and we agreed, “It needs to feel like it did when I wrote it in my living room with my piano.” So I took my iPhone up to his house, and sat at the piano, and did a voice memo there in exactly the same way. I think it just kind of happened organically, but now, in retrospect, I think it tells the story in a way that I really like.
AH: I love that song and I thought it was so cool how it sounded. That’s wonderful that you felt free enough to do it that way, and didn’t feel like it had to be super-controlled.
HL: I think all the little humanity bits in this are what ended up being my favorite. Some of it was born of necessity, since we recorded it in two-and-a-half weeks, some of us had to record at the same time. And because we recorded at the same time, some of the bits couldn’t be edited out. I can feel the human in it because of that, and I like that.
AH: I think that’s the feeling of the whole album, that there is a texture to it. You can make things pretty slick today, but this has a high production quality alongside textures that feel like real life. It kind of seamlessly drifts in and out of that.
HL: That’s so good to hear. Not many people have heard this, so it’s great to get some perspective.
HMS: I song that’s obviously very carefully presented and recorded is “When Did I Lose You,” which is one of your singles. It has such big energy and it builds up. But it still fits in with all these textures that we’re talking about.
HL: That one was one where I was sweating through my clothes! Some of them were very easy to record, and comfortable, but for that one, the musicians were of such a high caliber, and I am primarily a guitar player, but I had composed that song on piano. We had a bare minimum crew, so I needed to play the piano, and singing at the same time. I didn’t track vocals later on these songs. That one was really hard! The piano was right next to the control booth.
Everyone was just rocking in the live room, and I was in the control room trying to keep up. Then, at the end, where it kind of breaks down, you can kind of hear a strange sound. Brian was leaning over my shoulder strumming his hand across the open-face strings on the piano since it didn’t have the cover on it. He was making that chaotic sound happen, and I was trying to keep up, and it was very intense! I think that you can feel that energy.
Thanks so much for sharing with us, Holly Love. You can find more details and info here on her website: https://www.hollylovell.com/
Song Premiere: Holly Lovell “Lion’s Den”
