By Scarlett Kersey
Photographer - Harrison Woodward // Editor/Creative Director - Scarlett Kersey // Photo Assistant - Heather Woods // Stylist - Elena Lark // HMUA - Arianna Chalene Blean // Shoes - Jeffrey Campbell
Bold, Bright, and Brilliant- no one’s got energy like Ella Collier. It’s rare I come across refreshing energy like Ella’s: passionate and instinctive with a childlike excitement to make sense of the world around her. Sometimes you meet an artist and you just know they don’t take anything in their career for granted. Beneath the excitement there was a depth to her. It was genuine and real, but carried the grit of someone that had fought to arrive where they are now.
When we retired to the makeup chairs under the glow of the glam lights, the energy shifted. When our conversation began I simply asked, “Where is this coming from, what is your motivation and why now?” To which she replied:
“Everything is from personal experience. I would say I don't think I can’t not write about personal experience, just because I feel things so deeply. Which is like a blessing and a curse.”
Her cadence confirmed to me that this was all coming from the heart.
“I've been writing music my whole life. I'm 25 but this feels the most true to me, and I've been working, actually, on the DANGEROUS album for little over two years.”
“I started taking guitar lessons when I was 11 years old, and voice lessons, and I started writing music at 11. I started performing all around Atlanta and Nashville at 11… It was just me, my guitar, Taylor Swift style, and I was doing Nashville and Austin and New York and LA.”
Even as a child, Ella’s drive was unstoppable. She cut her teeth performing at dive bars from a young age- seizing any opportunity she could to play her music. Her new record carries that same hunger to show the world who she is. As she steps into a new chapter, Ella dives deeper.
“I think going through getting sober and dealing with rebuilding my life, emotionally and physically and also spiritually, it was just kind of inevitable that this project kind of came to light.”
DANGEROUS guides listeners through the deepest depths of Ella’s psyche, each track personifying extreme emotions such as anxiety, control, codependency, power balances, etc. It’s inviting, thought-provoking and brings you back to yourself in a vulnerable way.
“I am a sober alcoholic,” she explains. “The way that I function emotionally is kind of too extreme… I have tendencies to live in a lot of fear, but I also live in a space of enlightenment, happiness and joy, and I'm all over the place with that.”
“A lot of this album explores the extremes of desire, codependency, anxiety, fear, coldness, resentment, reaction to trauma that's happened to you.”
A big part of Ella’s process was revisiting her past, creating characters from personal experiences and emotional states. Each track is being used as a way to show up for herself in complete self-acceptance.
“I think accepting all the parts of you is the only way I've learned how to survive.”
While it’s a heavy record, it’s packaged as this electric, euphoric pop. Unless you dig deep into the lyrics, you completely miss the juxtaposition in each track. The record is another masterful devotion to duality. Ella described the contrast as a freedom.
“There's like a freedom in this juxtaposition, because I'm not afraid to explore… There's also a way of me… Reclaiming it and almost making it an anthem or empowering… unapologetically just showing up in that emotion.”
The deeper our conversation went, the more it was clear to me how each themed track lived under the umbrella of ego. It’s portrayed as both a protection and a liability. However, it’s equally an asset. Ella explains that for an artist a healthy relationship with ego can motivate you to pursue something in the greatest possible way. Yet it can be your biggest enemy- self awareness is the key.
As I mentioned earlier, there was an unspoken energy shift when I sat down with Ella. Even though she possessed a cool composure, I could feel a slight hesitation to guide me through her new track, 17, to be released on January 30th.
“17 is one of my personal favorite songs… It ended up being this song that is kind of like the older version of me, or like the higher-self version of me coming back into my trauma from high school, and like, what I was going through when I was 17, and almost like reclaiming her.”
“I was… pursuing a career in music in high school, and people weren't nice, you know. And I had a lot of… hard times with friends and people I felt were my friends.”
17 explores darker themes that can be emotionally intense, but Ella reclaims them as a part of herself and the foundation of the way she behaves in this world. She treats resentment like a character in this track, emphasizing, “I’m not here to… get mad at anybody for who they were when they were 17.”
Naked and Animal, are the last two tracks on the album. Described by Ella as the most vulnerable moments of the project, she claims that “Naked and Animal need time to be digested.”
“Animal is a reclamation, and I think it's a perfect way to close out the album, because I'm basically speaking on we're all animals at the end of the day, like, we all have instincts, and we all are too loud, too much, too big. That's okay… I'm meant to be.”
While they have many differences, the tracks belong together intentionally. Animal opens the door to accepting our animalistic instincts, while Naked serves as a bridge between this record and what’s to come.
“Naked is almost foreshadowing for my next project”
She explains, “This song is very specifically about a relationship that I was going through, and it kind of shows the doorway to the next album.”
Everything in this record was intentionally thought out, down to the sequencing. Describing the last two tracks as “the landing points of the album,” it shows how crucial each detail is. When the artist exposes themselves this way, the attention to detail seems exponentially higher. I asked Ella whether that precision came from hesitation from needing to protect a raw part of herself before she shared it with the world.
“I had hesitations.”
“This is my life, you know, like, this is me. It's not a fake. I didn't make up anything. I don't write songs, just to, like, write them.”
“When I'm out here, you know, presenting my artist project, and presenting myself as Ella Collier, like this is actually just an extension of the truest version of me.”
Her music acts as a mirror, it’s not meant to be understood her way- it’s for you to understand it your way. That was a recurring conclusion we always were led back to throughout our conversation.
With the promise of revisiting and getting coffee in 10 years, I could see that this was only the beginning for Ella. There is so much more of her story to tell. As she wraps up her writing trip in Nashville, she’s diving headfirst into her craft- preparing for a future project even more vulnerable than this one.