INTERVIEW: Baby Cool on her debut album: "It represents my whole journey through the last five years and just coming to terms with the reality of being alive."

Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Guy Niemack

Australian singer-songwriter Grace Cuell has headed up the acclaimed psych group Nice Biscuit for several years and last year she launched her new project Baby Cool.

Today she releases Baby Cool’s debut album, Earthling on the Road to Self Love, a nine track collection written as way to help Cuell make sense of the world around her after a period of dwindling mental health. Sonically, it is a gorgeous, ethereal, otherworldly melding of psychedelia, folk, country and pop held together by Cuell’s dreamy, angelic vocals.

“The songs are deeply sentimental. I have a lot I need to sing about to help me make sense of this earthly pod I have been gifted. If in singing these words out loud, I can help others find solace in knowing that we’re all out here flailing about in the cosmos, then it feels good to me,” Cuell says.

The album opens with second single ‘The Sea’ which references the way she coped with poor mental health by writing herself a love letter on pink paper and reading it to herself every day. It sways along with almost tropical flourishes and tinkling chimes with a dreamlike sound which is captured perfectly in the sci-fi leaning music video.

‘Poison’ brings a rockier sound to the album and is reminiscent of the raw, live, unpolished sound of rock’s earliest years. Written to in the aftermath of a breakup, Cuell wrote the song with a playful edge to help move through the sense of rejection that comes when someone choses to leave you.

The album closes with the latest single ‘Daydream’. It begins as a classic country song, and a slow and soothing soundscape before half way through the guitars turn it up several notches introducing a distorted, unsettling mood as Cuell repeats ‘life is but a daydream’ before the song comes to a quieter close.

Earthling on the Road to Self Love is a glorious album that is both consoling, challenging and hypnotic, full of emotion and feeling. It is an album that makes you think and, as was Cuell’s intention, find solace in the music to help you through your own difficult periods. An album to cherish, Cuell is thriving creativity in this new chapter in her career and we recently caught up with her to find out more.

Hi Grace, what a delight to be chatting to you today. You've got a delicious new album Earthling on the Road to Self Love out now and is quite the collection of sound and heart. I had this real sense of an old Hollywood movie, like campfire country scene with mushrooms.
Yeah, that’s one way to describe it! Absolutely. I spoke recently to a friend who said it was interesting that I use the word ‘earthling’ when the whole concept is pretty otherworldly. I feel like that is me in a nutshell, really. I grew up in the country, I had a rural upbringing, but I have a really vivid imagination and always have since I was a small girl. So mushrooms by the campfire sounds pretty good.

It's an exposing album as well lyrically as well. You're speaking a lot about mental health, put to these beautiful instrumentals. Can you talk me through the creation of the album?
The album instrumentally was brought to life by myself and this amazing music community that I have around me up in Brisbane and the Northern Rivers. I had all of these demos, which were essentially all love letters to myself after a pretty rough period of low mental health. I took them to my friends and I was like ‘help me make an album!’ And they did, and the whole process was very, very beautiful. Up until now, even releasing it, everything's been very surreal. A lot of work has gone into it, but there's been a real effortless part to it as well, which has been nice.

You're coming from a part of five piece band Nice Biscuit, and now you're gone solo with an album that is love letters to yourself. So as much as that could possibly be quite daunting at the same time, it must be like ‘well, if anyone knows what's inside these letters, it’s me!’
Yeah, absolutely. Nice Biscuit is such a collaborative project and there's a real beauty in that process. But it's also been nice to be the one making decisions. It was a record that I was making for myself, and from the beginning, I was like, ‘if people listen to it, that's going to be a bonus but this is just something I feel like I need to do’, which sounds really cliché, but it made all of it just not stressful in any way which is how it should be. Throughout the whole thing, I felt like I was eight years old, making a diorama for school or something!

That's good because that just answers my next question, I was going to ask you if you were a cool baby, but if you were making a diorama when you were eight then you definitely were!
It's funny, in speaking to my teachers now that were teaching me when I was that age, I was very much a daydreamer. I had the classic love hearts and butterflies in the corner of my page and paying attention was hard for me, I was always in my own world. But I’m happy that that's how I spent my time to be honest.

It's wonderful and it's clearly done wonders for your musical career, because I'm seeing that imagination. Not just in your approach to creating music, but also the visuals that are paired with them, you're quite a visualiser as well. Do you always see your music?
Yeah, absolutely. The album, while I was writing it was a film to me as well. I kind of pieced it together start to finish with the idea of I wanted to make a full length feature film to go with it, but the budget didn't quite allow for that. I have a visual arts background, I studied fine arts at uni and so those two things are just completely entwined for me.

Beautiful. One of my favourite tracks on the album ‘Poison’ has been released with the gorgeous visualiser, part of a three parter, and I just absolutely love that track, But I wanted to ask about album closer ‘Daydream’. The melody, the inspiration, your kind of layered vocals in it. I mean, it is the perfect goodbye, don't forget to pick up your popcorn box on the way out. Was that always the closer?
I always envisaged the album and the final film clip coming to this sort of big chaotic release. I guess that sort of represents my whole journey through the last five years and also just coming to terms with the reality of being alive. Which is something I struggle with, I think everyone struggles with every day. So I wanted to write a song that represented that which was ‘Daydream’.

It’s the perfect closer. The whole concept of this album, I absolutely love. There's a plethora, and there will be forever a plethora, of songs that are love letters to someone else, but you've chosen to make a love letter to yourself. Do you feel like that was missing in the music you were listening to growing up?
Yeah, absolutely. There's so many songs about love and I feel like the two things I really missed in listening to lyrics, and what I was always listening for, is that feeling of appreciating and loving yourself. Also songs about friendship which are few and far between, which is maybe what my next album is about! There's just so many beautiful melodies that speak about this emotion of love and I wanted to add to that in a different sort of way.

Beautiful. We have this gorgeous album, we have some self love, we have some incredible visuals. Tell me what else is on the horizon for you Grace?
I'm doing a tour, just a small Australian tour to support the record, and I have a few in stores around the time of the release, which will be fun. I'm also heading to Europe in May which will be a bit of a silly time. It's a joint tour with Nice Biscuit and Baby Cool. We're like a big family, so I think that's gonna be really fun. I'm also halfway through the next album! It's so funny the release timelines, because these are all stories and songs from two or three years ago, and it's interesting people just meeting them now. I feel like I'm listening to them differently, having been through that journey. So who knows? I'll keep working on the next album and see what will come from that.

One more question before I leave you. Where did your stage name Baby Cool come from?
Ah, it's a nice one. My last name is Cuell, and my friends have always called me cool, that's just sort of my nickname. And I'm the youngest of my generation in the family, so that's where Baby Cool came from. But it's also the song title from this really amazing underground Brisbane band called The Morts, they have a song called ‘Baby Cool’, which was written about me going to visit my little niece being born. She is now in the film clip, which is amazing! So it's a multi-layered name.

Earthling on the Road to Self Love is out now via via Virgin Music Australia, Bad Vibrations (UK/EU), and Greenway Records/Levitation (US). You can buy and stream here.

To keep up with all things Baby Cool you can follow her on Instgram and Facebook.

Baby Cool Earthling on the Road to Self Love album tour 2023
10 February - Sound Merch in-store, Collingwood, VIC - Free entry - 
16 February - Jet Black Cat Music in-store, Brisbane, QLD - Free entry - 
18 March - The Malthouse Outdoor Stage, Southbank, VIC Tickets 
25 March - The Lansdowne, Sydney, NSW Tickets 
26 March - La La La’s, Wollongong, NSW. Tickets
15 April - Eltham Hotel, Eltham, NSW. Tickets