Stella Cole Wants You to Escape With Her While Listening to Her New Album
Everyone has moments of nostalgia, but Stella Cole wanted to capture that feeling so it can be replayed forever.
The 26-year-old singer, whose voice first captured audiences on TikTok, did just that with her newly released third album, It’s Magic, from Decca Records. But her love for music, specifically classic American standards, began much earlier.
Cole tells The Hollywood Reporter that while everyone else was listening to Justin Bieber and Katy Perry, she grew up listening to James Taylor and Norah Jones and watching classic Hollywood musicals. “I was this 3- or 4-year-old memorizing full scenes of Mary Poppins, it’s very strange,” she recalls. “I would get up on my parents’ desk and our dining-room table and have my little plastic microphone and give a lot of performances.”
Though she couldn’t have predicted at that age what her future career would look like. Now she’s sharing her interpretations of 20th-century American jazz and show tunes with younger generations, introducing some to a timeless genre of music. “I wanted them to feel calm and a little bit of that joy and peace and that escapism because that’s what people have always said they get from my music,” she says of her third album.
Below, Cole gets candid about what went into creating It’s Magic, her favorite parts of performing, the role social media has played in her rise to fame, what she hopes to accomplish in the future and more.
What initially drew you to old Hollywood musicals at such a young age?
Everyone has called me an old soul since I was a newborn. Apparently, when my great-grandma held me for the first time, she was like, “She’s an old soul, you can tell.” I don’t know if I believe in all that, but I think old soul is probably an apt description for me because I think I was just immediately connected to it. I’m not sure there was a reason. I mean, this splendor of it all is amazing and the costumes and the songs — it’s just the whole package gets me and gives me this insane amount of nostalgia, but not like nostalgia for the ‘40s.
It’s funny because it wasn’t the good old days in the ‘30s and ‘40s — that was a crazy time for this country and the world. Like nobody wants to go back there. But something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is that the ‘30s and ‘40s was such a difficult time, and this media and music and movies, it was all created for people to escape that time. So when people are like, oh, this makes me so nostalgic when I sing “As Time Goes By” or “Over the Rainbow” or something, what they’re really having is nostalgia for this other world that never actually existed, it was just sort of created by the movie magic and the Hollywood and this hopeful, joyful place that I think is really appealing to everyone, even though the world will never totally look like that.
How would you say this album, It’s Magic, is different from your debut album that you released last year?
Everyone was really speaking the same language on this one, and because I had a little bit more experience in the studio and a lot more experience touring and leading my own band and managing my team and all of that good stuff, I had more confidence to be like, this is what I want, I don’t want it like this, this feels right and this is the tempo and just all these little things that when they all add up together, I feel like I created something that I’m so proud of and feels so me. This actually is fulfilling and exciting for me because I’m like, yes, this is what I’ve been trying to make for two years and now it sounds how I wanted it to sound.
When crafting your third album, what was your initial goal and vision, and do you feel like you accomplished that goal?
I had such a clear goal at the beginning of this one, rather than just like, OK, let’s make a debut album. I was experimenting with a lot of different songs and a lot of different repertoire, thinking about what kind of band to record it with, should it be a big band or strings? And I wanted to do the strings ‘cause I wanted it to be this sort of old movie magic. … I was feeling really drawn toward love songs and positive songs and calming, dreamy, like that was just the vibe that felt right. I don’t really know why, but I just followed my gut on that and I ended up wanting to create something cohesive and it didn’t need to be a different band on every song or different production on every side. It’s like, no, it’s cohesive. It’s a bunch of soft strings just like Nat King Cole or Frank Sinatra or Judy Garland would have made. And when people listen to it, I wanted them to feel calm and a little bit of that joy and peace and that escapism because that’s what people have always said they get from my music.
Between writing, recording and performing, do you have a favorite part as an artist?
Performing is probably my favorite, maybe just because it’s the one that I do the most. I love all three parts. The writing is something that’s a bit newer to me. I’ve done just a couple of sessions with people and sometimes I write a full song myself on a plane, usually, or on a long car ride or something. And that’s a really fun feeling and I always feel creative in a different way than I do when I’m singing other people’s music. The studio is also an amazing feeling, but again, we do these records so quickly and just like three days max. So that is always such an intense process because it’s like, OK, lock in. But I will say that no feeling really beats the feeling of singing live with a string orchestra. I just sort of get full body chills constantly.
But I do think my favorite is performing live because I started out my career performing to my phone, like alone in my parents’ house actually, and it is so much better to perform to hundreds of people in a room and feel that energy. To me, singing is all about the storytelling. I always say that it’s about like acting the song and getting those emotions out through a song and telling some sort of story from my life, and to see that affecting people in real time is just a priceless feeling.
As TikTok has become an important platform for artists when releasing music and connecting with fans, what’s your personal perspective on social media and how you’ve used it as a tool in your career?
Social media is so important in the music world. It’s a controversial thing with a lot of musicians and singers and just creatives in general because it really has taken over, not just the music industry, but every aspect. Like if you’re an author, they want you to be on TikTok. If you’re starting a business, you gotta get TikTok followers. It’s like every part of advertising, like radio, billboards, everything, like that’s all TikTok now or Instagram. And I think it is difficult, and I do understand people’s frustrations with it because there’s a lot of art that’s not necessarily meant to be consumed in 30-second or 45-second clips.
But my view on it is like, the way it’s changed the music industry at least has been to level the playing field a bit. Just to use my own story, I grew up in Springfield, Illinois — pretty small city in central Illinois. I didn’t know anybody in the music industry. I’d never known anyone who was a professional artist in any way or I just didn’t have any connections. I moved to New York knowing almost nobody except a couple of friends from college, and by posting little videos of myself on the internet, I was able to knock on these doors and email venues and be like, “Hey, look, I’ve built this following. Now can we make a record or now can I do a show,” and I think that just would have been unthinkable before. … I mean, social media has given me so much and such an amazing audience, but it’s hard as an artist not to think about the numbers too much and get too obsessive about it. But I think without TikTok or Instagram, I would not be where I am today at all.
When you look back at your career so far, is there a moment you’re most proud of?
Signing with Decca [Records] was a pretty big deal for me. Before I signed with them, I had been a little bit scared of the whole major label thing. Rightly so, we’ve all heard of the Taylor Swift thing and Raye had such bad experiences with a major label. So that was always a goal for me, but I was always questioning it being a goal like, oh, are they just gonna take all my money and exploit me, etc. And when I found Decca, and when I was connected to them, it was so amazing because since they’re the classics label of Universal, they are this major label with all of these resources and that’s amazing, but they also are not just focused on, oh, who’s gonna make us the hits? They were like, your music is good and we like that and let’s work together. So I think signing with Decca, I felt like, oh, this is legit.
Looking ahead, where would you like to see yourself in five years, career-wise?
I studied theater in college and I still think of myself more as like an actor than a singer, even though that makes no sense because I very much haven’t done a play in years. But that’s the way I think of myself, and at some point, I would love to focus on acting again and be on Broadway. That’s still a big goal of mine, that I hope will happen someday, and be in movies or TV shows or anything, either as a singer or not. And musically, I think I’ll always continue doing the music thing for as long as I can because I love it so much. And I don’t think I’ll ever completely stop singing standards because it’s what I love the most, so why would I stop? But I am continuing to slowly work my way into writing my own music and eventually I’ll write some stuff that’s good enough or that I have enough confidence in to sort of mix in with the standards.
If you had to describe what makes Stella Cole, Stella Cole, what would you say?
Me, as a person, I’m a very family-oriented person. I’m obsessed with my family and my close friends, so I think the people who surround me sort of make me me. I think the sort of Midwestern humility that I have from my parents is a really important thing to stay grounded and in reality, I really had no trouble with that. I actually have no ego. Maybe I could have a little more ego, but I’m so Midwestern, so that’s been good and not a problem. I’m a huge nature girlie. I love just being in the mountains and by a lake and trees. And professionally, I think what makes me is just sticking to what I love and being authentic to the things that really move my heart and move my soul. And that’s never been an easy thing for me in the past, but it’s something that I’ve been doing a good job at these last couple of years, and it’s clearly been working out well, so I hope I will always stay this authentic to what I truly love.
