Jeremy Zucker and Chelsea Culter are an unlikely duo. While artists come together for a collaboration all the time, it’s hard to maintain individual identities and finding a collaborate music identity together. For Jeremy and Chelsea, everything just seems to flow together. Sonically speaking, brent iii is tuned to perfection. Chelsea’s sultry voice and Jeremy’s warm vocal melt in your ears. Their acoustic set feels like coming home. There’s so much comfort, love and support in their music as they sing about love and all the entangled feelings. The creative duo is one of the rare things that are hard to come across.
The duo reveal that it’s their genuine friendship that ties their music together creatively. In real life, they turn to each other to vent and be vulnerable, which is what they do in their music. The creative process of each song comes together is also very unconventional because they are essentially drawing from their individual experiences and talking about different things that somehow fit into the frame of one song.
”Making art is a creatively vulnerable thing to do,” said Chelsea. “At the end of the days, we’re friends first. The duo met at a fraternity party in 2016, and over the years have grown tighter musically as they became each other’s best friend. “We really vent to each other about things we’re going through in our lives,” said Jeremy. Before, they were working on a single-to-single basis. With brent iii, they both decided to commit to a full length, 11-track album.
Looking back at the journey they walked so far with the making of brent iii, Chelsea recalled that it was the last track, “good things,” that kickstarted the entire creative space in the album, and for that, if she had to choose one favorite song from the entire album, and it’d be that song. “It’s perfect. It’s so untraditional and beautiful,” Jeremey added. He joked that he didn’t think they’d make another song that match up to “good things” ever again.
Press Q&A with Jeremy Zucker and Chelsea Cutler
Q: You’ve been making music together for quite a while now. Do you think maintaining a healthy friendship is important? How do you inspire each other?
Chelsea: Healthy friendship is really important to being able to collaborate while together. We both have to be comfortable enough to be vulnerable with each other in our conversations and our songwriting. Making art is a creative vulnerable thing to do. It requires comfort and vulnerability to disagree and work through [differences]. At the end of the day, we’re friends first.
Jeremy: I’d say it’s especially important when we push each other, and Chelsea and I know each other so well, we’re pretty comfortable being pretty frank and honest. It’s a lot harder to be honest than to be nice [with people you don’t know so well].
Q: Did you base the lyrics on your love relationship, friendship or personal love experiences?
Jeremy: Definitely our individual experiences outside of our friendship, usually is romantic love. We really vent to each other about things that are going on in our lives. As for the songwriting process is kind of therapizing. We each have our own perspective on songs we’re writing about and we’re able to work them together in a way we’re writing about different things but it’s about the same thing.
Q: How did you decide on the album’s lead singles? What do these songs represent in the context of the entire album
Chelsea: “Black and White” is actually one of the last songs to get tagged into the project. I don’t really remember the process of choosing it to be the lead single. We never really talked about it. A week before Brent was due, Jeremy circled back to it. It just came together so quickly.
Jeremy: It was one of the last ones we were working on. It felt like the last piece of the puzzle. It felt like a really good introduction of this extension of the world we built. “A-frame” is an obvious banger.
Q: Is there anything specific about this album that would offer fans like a sense of comfort or a new perspective
Jeremy: More specific story here. It would really relate to someone who’s dealing with hyper specific issues that we talk about our songs. Like “ashes & rust” about transgenerational trauma and ”the government too” is about continental relationship. There anre also a couple of really general, across-the-board songs. A lot of perspective that you can pull from it.
Chelsea: I do think the fact that we’re able to make music so earnestly as friends definitely helps us making music that other people can find solace and comfort in. We always say that we want the record to feel like a cozy, safe place for people. It’s born out of a place of us being friends.
Q: You mentioned that you don’t believe in genre boundaries, so how does this philosophy influence the creative process when working with Chelsea, who has a strong EDM background.
Jeremy: It was such a hard thing to say that I don’t believe in genre boundaries. I believe in them. I think they exist. I just don’t believe we should be tripped by it. I feel like genres are types of cuisines. Songs are made of flavors. The influences are the ingredients. It’s great to borrow an ingredient from other genres. We definitely borrowed a lot from folk and Americana. I have a more indie pop alternative background, while Chelsea is indie pop electronic. It really means singer-songwriter. That’s what’s really exciting, being able to dip into different spaces and feelings, genres and experimenting with instruments that we haven’t experimented with before.
Q: Do you both have a favorite song from your collaboration? What makes it special to you?
Chelsea: “good things” It’s the first song we made for a grand project, and it totally started this trajectory of what this has become.
Jeremy: I agree with Chelsea. It’s just really special and the fact that it’s the beginning makes it special, and it’s perfect. It’s so untraditional and so beautiful. We’ll never make a song as good as that ever again. I’m just kidding. Who knows.
CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT BRENT III
FOLLOW JEREMY ZUCKER AND CHELSEA CULTER
