Taylor Bickett unpacks the narrative of her debut album, ‘Nothing I Can’t Undo’
On July 17th, the Nashville-based and independent singer-songwriter Taylor Bickett released her debut album, Nothing I Can’t Undo.
Having poured two years worth of heart and soul into the project, the result is an emotionally explorative body of work that touches on subjects such as the tension between freedom and security, offering compassion to your past self, and how to start again when you don’t yet know the steps.
With its eleven-song tracklist full of acoustic instrumentals and lyrics that cut right to the bone of emotion, Nothing I Can’t Undo is a timeless album for 20-something’s navigating love, life and relationships.
In an exclusive interview, we talked to Taylor in-depth about the album, discussing everything from her relationship with social media and building authentic fan engagement to how the visual world surrounding the project came to life.
How would you describe your debut album to someone who hasn’t heard it yet?
“It’s an indie/folk/pop narrative and lyric-focused body of work. More than ever I really honed in on lyricism for this album and saying what I wanted to say in a very specific way. I tried to be as intimate and specific as possible, and tried to convey where I am in my life and the things that I’m experiencing as someone in their mid 20s going through life and relationships and all the things like that. I’d describe it as a slice of my brain at this current moment. I think that the main themes I explore throughout it are the ideas of attachment and permanence; freedom vs safety, chaos vs peace, and just this reckoning with who I want to be and how I want to exist in the world. Even in love and relationships I think that comes out because I have a desire for adventure while also craving stability, so the songs on this album are all an exploration of those themes.”
The arsonist feels like the crux of the record, being about the struggle between commitment and letting go of control. Did you know straight away that it would be the first song?
“I wasn't 100% certain, but it felt very naturally like a beginning because it's literally talking about starting again and starting over. The first verse in particular, I wrote long before I finished the song. I felt at the time like something wasn't working and something had to change, because The Arsonist specifically is about being broken down sometimes by the music industry. I’d had some experiences with some not so great people, so there's a line where I say, “This is my life, can you be gentle?” and “This is my art, this is my vessel, this is non-consequential.” I wrote all of that because I was working with some people who I really felt viewed my art and my life and my music as just another thing they had to deal with, and my art was not given the care that I wanted for it so I parted ways with that team, which was the best decision I could ever have made for my career.
I wrote the first verse right as I was reckoning with ending that relationship, and I ended up finishing it after I had already left. It was cool then to be on either side of it and just know that I had made the right decision in burning it all down and starting again. So, yeah, I felt like it was a very natural start. I messed with it being in different places in the track list, and I kept coming back to it being first because I felt like it said everything I wanted to say and introduced the project in a very specific way. So yeah, a little bit of both!”
The album is grounded in a lot of visceral imagery and clever metaphors, especially with Firefly Collector. We’d love to know how you got into the headspace for songwriting, and if you had a particular routine whilst writing the album?
“It honestly changes a lot, especially for this album. I wrote it across four different cities in multiple countries, so Nashville, New York, LA and London. There's at least one song in the album from all of those places, which is cool because all those places mean a lot to me and I have friends and collaborators there, but that just means that I've written and started songs in a lot of different ways. The main way, especially for this project, has been in my journal. A lot of the songs have come from journal entries where I’ve pulled full lines from them, or just been writing stream of consciousness and then thought, oh, that could be a song. I think Firefly Collector was one of those.
I was thinking about all these different concepts when I walked into my session with Jack MG who produced the entire album. That was actually our first session and the first time we ever met. I was like, “hey, I've been thinking about these ideas and I don't really know what I have, but this is the concept,” and he just started building out the track and the music whilst I just sat there scribbling in my journal. It was very interesting. I hadn't had a song process like that where he was in his own world building the track and I was also in my own world writing lyrics, but then we came together and it worked so well and it was so cool. We really just got each other right away. So yeah, that song was sort of evolved from a journal entry, but it was a lot of just me writing. I have been trying lately to write more with my hands as opposed to typing on my phone or on the computer. I feel like it unlocks like a different layer of creativity, which has been fun!”
Are there any references or allusions that you hope listeners will notice in the album? Anything that you've hidden or like a lyric that you're proud of and you think, I hope someone gets it in the way that I meant them to?
“Oh my gosh, that’s such a good question. The first song that comes to mind is The Arsonist. The second verse is one of my favourite parts of the album. I'm just proud of the lyricism there, but I say, again, talking about the industry and feeling disillusioned, “Can you be broke and a sellout? / I'm cooking dinner for the local bandits,” where I felt like, oh, I feel like I'm selling out, but can I at least sell out for real? It’s just about feeling like you’re not understood and things just aren’t going to plan. And then I say, “I'm a minute late and a mile south / Of the modern woman's Laurel Canyon.” My inspiration for that was the Renaissance of music that was happening in Laurel Canyon in the 60s and 70s and feeling like that’s happening again in the indie music world - and like I'm so close to it, but not quite there.
The next line is, “If I'd ever been of the in crowd / Maybe I wouldn't find it so romantic,” so it’s about the idea of feeling like the odd one out, feeling like the awkward kid at middle school who didn't get a seat at the lunch table, you know, but feeling like that in the music industry and admiring these artists and feeling like they maybe don't pay me any mind. Or I meet someone at a party and they're looking over my shoulder for the next best thing. That happens a lot in LA when I visit, and people talk about that as just kind of like a trope of people there always looking for who's more famous at this party or who can get them to the next place. I was feeling very disillusioned by the industry, which mostly stemmed from having the wrong team. So yeah, I think that it means a lot to me just because it’s a very real vulnerable thing that I was feeling at the time.”
“My song Genesis was also really fun to write because I was being silly with it a little bit, and I’d describe that one as Madonna's Like a Virgin, but the indie singer-songwriter version. I was inspired by a quote from the movie Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which I actually have not seen, but I basically just saw the quote on the internet somewhere, and it was; “Do all lovers feel like they're inventing something?” I was just very inspired by that and how when you're entering into a new relationship, how it can feel like you were the first people to ever do this. It's this newness and also, I feel like with every serious relationship I've had, I've been like, oh, I've never really been in love, but like now this is real love. You know, you do it every time and it's like, well, maybe you were, but it's just different every time. Or it feels like this is the real thing now. Finally, I found it, you know? So it was kind of playing with that idea.
There's a line in the chorus where I say, “only us on the Earth, like it's Genesis,” just referencing how it feels like it's only us on the Earth like in the Bible. I'm not religious at all, but I just thought it was a fun little allusion. Then yeah, it's “making love, like we're sure we invented it,” because if you're being very literal with how Adam and Eve probably felt in the story, it's like they really were inventing it. So it's kind of fun to mess around with those ideas and biblical imageries I've never really explored before - that was a fun one.”
In your Instagram announcement post, you said that “the project is an exploration of attachment and permanence.” Do you find as a writer that things with that sort of like push and pull or like internal contrast to them make the best inspiration?
“Yeah, I think anything one sided or one dimensional is just not interesting and there has to be some sort of conflict, push and pull, internal struggle or nuance. No one wants to hear about a story where you're 100% right all the time and you do all the right things and everyone else is evil and people hurt you. It's way more interesting to hear about complex people who make mistakes and who just have to navigate being alive because none of us are perfect all the time. Sometimes it's hard as a writer because you're like, oh, what I say represents me, so if I'm writing a song, I want to represent myself in a good light, but that's boring. So sometimes you have to kind of say like, oh yeah, I can admit that I did this.
My song Driving In The Dark, for example, is about a toxic relationship and I'm very open in the song about how, it's not like it was toxic because this person made it toxic. It was toxic because we both made it that way. You have to be able to admit when you weren't always perfectly in the right or when there's grey areas like that. To me, the coolest thing about art is exploring that.”
On the topic of push and pull, your actual album cover is you pulling on drapes of fabric - very symbolic, and you honestly look like a ballerina! Talk us through the process of getting from your initial vision to that final image.
“Oh my gosh - that was one of the most stressful and most fun things I've ever done because we did it completely DIY in my friend's garage. We built this entire set and I'd never built a set before in my life - it was my boyfriend and I - we just figured it out. We were looking things up on Pinterest and YouTube, and it was just a lot of trial and error. I remember thinking multiple times when we were setting it up that it was almost like a diorama; we had the drapes hanging and the lights, and then drapes over different things as well as over myself.
There was a point where it was like the middle of the second day working on it, and I just looked at it and thought: We can't do this. It's not going to happen. It's not working. I give up. And then literally 15 minutes later our friend and photographer came in and shined a light behind it. I was like, it's amazing. It's beautiful. It was crazy. I never really fully understood how lighting is everything in photography, but it was just right. So that was a crazy process, doing it all ourselves and not being able to just hire it out and have someone else plan it. It taught me a lot and it made me be creative in ways I never have before. I was like, I write songs. I don't build things and I'm not a creative director or a physical artist, so it definitely challenged and stretched me. But then when we got it right, and I mean, most of the credit goes to the photographer who just had such a vision and is so talented - Cooper Smith is his name. I was just so pleased with how it turned out and looking through the photos it was like, wow we made this completely by ourselves.
I was just cool to do it as a DIY with my friends, and it's special knowing that it's my first ever album and I'll probably have it hanging somewhere in my house forever. It was very special and a labour of love, but it was stressful. I didn’t think it was going to come together. But that's just me in my life. If you listen to my music, you know that I get stressed easily!”
Speaking of the visual world of the album, we loved the crossword you posted for fans to figure out the track list. As an independent artist, what's your relationship like with social media and music promotion, and how do you work on keeping fans engaged in a way that feels authentic to you?
“I mean, it's no easy task and I've definitely had a trial and error process of figuring out what works best for me. There is a pressure and a pull to be on social media every second of every day, posting and interacting constantly because it's like, well, this is how you make fans. This is how you blow up or whatever. But if you don’t set boundaries with it, you will go insane and it will ruin your creativity and it will ruin your art. So that has been difficult for me as someone who's very success oriented and I've just been an overachiever my whole life, so I'm like, I have to grab everything and I have to do it all perfectly.
But honestly, you're doing yourself a disservice if you don't just let yourself breathe away from social media - it's just necessary. But aside from that, I’ve found it's been really cool lately to really lock in on interacting with certain fans who are very passionate about community-building. There’s a fan who started an account called @bickettverse and I’ve been so amazed with the way she’s so dedicated and I'm really grateful to her. It's amazing that someone cares, it seems, as much about my music as I do. That is wild to me. She and a couple other people have helped build a Discord to get people talking, and that's been really cool because community is so important and people love to be able to connect over art that they like. That’s always been something I thought was so cool but haven’t known how to execute, so it's been really great to actually collaborate with fans on that.
And yeah, I love crosswords, so specifically the crossword was something I knew I wanted to do in some capacity and I wasn't sure how until I thought, oh, it would be fun to reveal the track list. This is like a perfect setup where I've got 11 titles and I can mess with them and do whatever I want. It was really fun to write the clues, and then I revealed a different answer on my story every day, so it kind of just like kept people coming back. That was super fun, and I’d love to do something like that again. It was cool that people wanted to play it and got so engaged!”
In a lot of ways, this record is about coming of age. It feels like something you wrote with your younger self in mind, particularly with Gold Star, and it's a great achievement to have written the track solo. Was that something that you always wanted to do?
“Yeah, I think it was just as I was writing it in my room I thought, this doesn't feel right to bring to anyone else. No one knows me that intimately who I work with on music. And yeah, I felt like I really should say what I want to say and the way I want to say it and not be influenced by anyone else because it’s such a personal song and it was very vulnerable and uncomfortable to write. I actually didn't even show it to almost anyone after I wrote it because I think I was afraid that someone would tell me some sort of criticism or tell me, I don't think this should make the cut or maybe this isn't your best song or whatever, because I didn't really care. I didn't want someone to tell me something negative and change my opinion on it, because it's just true and it's real to me.
I didn't really want an outside opinion, which is not common for me. Usually I'm like, rip it apart and tell me what you think, but that song I was very precious about. It was one of the last ones we recorded too. And I was like, okay, here you go. This is my child, you know? So yeah, it just felt very personal and it's fitting that its the only solo written song on the album.”
We saw that Driving In The Dark was not only the first song you wrote for the album, but a co-write with Jensen McRae. How do you guys collaborate with each other and bounce off ideas?
“Yeah, that was so cool. I've just admired her work for the longest time. We've been mutuals and we'd gotten coffee before, but we'd never written together. I was like, hey, I'm writing for myself, maybe trying to make a project and I would love to write with you. I was so nervous for the session because I was like, she's so amazing - I’ve got to bring something good! I was going through my notes and found the first verse of Driving in the Dark in an early iteration of it, and I thought, this feels like something she could just kill. I just felt like she would get what I was trying to say based on the music of hers that I'd heard and also help me figure out where to go next with it, so I brought it to her and she totally agreed that it was right up her alley.
She was the one who was like, actually, I've been thinking of this idea for a while and I haven't known how to write it, but of driving with your headlights out and I've been wanting to write a song about that in some capacity. She agreed it really applied to what I was saying about the blindness of being in a toxic relationship and of just letting go and being resigned to the toxicity instead of realising that you have autonomy and you can turn the lights on - you can get out of it. And so we took my verse and her chorus idea and blended it all together. It was great. It was just me and her in her living room with the guitar, and that was one of my favourite writing sessions I've ever done because it just felt like we collaborated really well together and bounced off each other in a cool way.”
Good Thing Short is the last single that you released before the album came out on July 17th. How do you feel like this song set the tone for the rest of the project to come?
“Before I decided on the full track list, there were three songs that I felt like told almost a complete story. It was Firefly Collector, Nothing I Can't Undo, and Good Thing Short in that order specifically. I felt like Firefly Collector explained why I’d been guarded and closed off. Because I've been burned because people have attempted to take away my freedom or my light, so that was the first part of the story. And then the second part, with Nothing I Can't Undo, I was exploring that searching for a lack of commitment. I wanted to be free. I wanted to explore. I didn’t want to do anything permanent. And then Good Thing Short comes in where I’m like, oh shit, I met someone amazing and I think I'm falling in love with them. That song was me figuring out how to stop myself from cutting it off or running away from it because I'd been burned in the past? That’s the overall arc.
It felt like I was just debating on titles, and I almost called the album Good Thing Short because I just felt like there was like this idea of not wanting to end a good thing for the sake of protecting yourself, and that attachment and permanence idea felt like it came through. I ultimately felt like Nothing I Can't Undo was stronger to convey that point, but Good Thing Short was a close second and it's also just one of my favourites. I'm very attached to it. I just think it's a sweet song. Even though it's kind of a sad love song, it just felt to me like the right way to set up the album.
I also have been sort of trying to transition my music, not that it will ever not be pop music, but just be a lot more organic and folky and raw, with real instruments played live, like in Good Thing Short. We recorded all the instruments live and nothing's programmed, so it just felt like the right last little sneak peek before the rest of the album was ready. And you know, some people don't make it all the way to the end, so I wanted to make sure they heard it.”
With track one The Arsonist, the main question was essentially can I start again? And in the final track Venice, you have the lyric, “funny how I thought I'd see the ending, but it just begun.” How did you go about making the album feel cathartic and cyclical with this throughline?
“It kind of just happened without me realising it. I think I wrote Venice and was like, oh, this would be a perfect last song to me. It just felt like a good wrap up and then as I was listening through the album I was like, oh wow, there are all these parallels to The Arsonist and it's cool to kind of come back around to that. I've never made a full project before so it was cool to explore how I ordered the ordering of the tracks impacted the listening experience and narrative. It felt like certain ones just fell into place in the order - they just felt right.
It's not like I'm telling a very specific story, but there's an arc to the album and with Venice, what I was trying to say was that you don't have to hold onto everything so tightly. The line, “Funny how I thought I’d seen the ending / But I’d just begun” was a direct reference to these thoughts I had that my career was over. I was like wow, I've just, I've messed it up. I've chosen the wrong team and the wrong people, and how do I come back from this? But back then I didn't know that I hadn't even started making my favourite music and making this whole album and everything. A lot of this album is me talking to myself and being like, hey, it's going to be okay. Its a lot of self soothing.”
Are there any fictional characters you think might relate to certain songs from the album?
“Well, with Gold Star specifically, I’ve been like, this song is so Rachel Berry from Glee. Love her and hate her, but it's true. Also Hermione Granger from Harry Potter and Rory Gilmore from Gilmore Girls. Those three, especially and Joe March from Little Women - honestly, all of them. I feel like need to hear Gold Star.”
What’s a trait of your star sign that you feel makes you a better songwriter?
“So I'm a Taurus, and I don't know a tonne about astrology, but I believe that Tauruses really value stability, which is sort of ironic considering the whole album is me fighting against stability and that push and pull of chaos versus security. So I think that internal conflict - and maybe it's because of my star sign, maybe not - makes me have something interesting to say, I guess. But I have to say that I am a Cancer Moon, and from what everyone says is that they’re not surprised because I'm very emotional, so I have to imagine that that helps my songwriting too.”
From releasing your first single in 2021 to now releasing your debut album, how do you feel like you've honed your craft over the last five years?
“I feel like where I've grown the most is in lyric writing and storytelling. That's been really cool to just explore, you know, like literary devices and rhetorical devices and how there's something to be said for just your instinct and writing what comes out. I think that's a beautiful thing, and it often happens when you just start writing where you're not burdened by any rules which is really cool. But then there's also something to be said for learning more about writing and being able to analyse other people's writing and take pieces of that with what you've learned.
As I was writing the album, I was listening to a lot of Samia, and what inspires me about her music is that it’s not direct and is so vague and metaphorical that it challenged me to not just say things outright and to try to come up with interesting or unique or clever ways to say them, which has been cool.”
What are some music related goals that you'd like to achieve in the near future?
“I do want to learn the bass. And I've been telling myself I'm going to buy a bass for a long time and I still haven't bought one, but that is a goal of mine. I also would love to learn more about production. I know a little bit and have produced some demos, but they’re very very basic skills. I think that that would really inspire me and help my creativity if I knew more about how to actually produce music. I just think it's cool, so yeah, those two things for sure.”
Finally, what’s the overriding thing that you hope fans take away from listening to your debut album?
"I hope that they feel a sense of calm and self-forgiveness, especially with the last song on the album saying; hey, slow down. It's all going to be okay. It's all going to work out. You, your life is going to be so many more things than just this one thing. I hope that they feel heard and seen in their anxieties and their complicated parts, but that they feel an overall sense of peace within themselves and their decisions, and just an ability to give themselves grace.”
In just a few days, Taylor Bickett will head out on her first headline tour, with shows across the US from Nashville to Dallas. You can find tickets here, as well as more information via her Instagram:
In the meantime, make sure to stream the rest of Taylor’s discography on Spotify:
