ON THE RISE
Kelsey Dodd, for most of her 17 years, has wanted to begin a music career, and her debut, for Christmas 2024, is Christmas music, her EP Forever Evergreen.
Its five songs, one original and four classics that she has made her own, feature her beautiful voice—rich, strong and expressive—which carries the lyrics up and down the scales and into the Christmas heart.
The title track, “Forever Evergreen” is a song of her Christmas memories and feelings told through the story of a family Christmas gathering, written by Kelsey and Cassandra Kubinski.
“A big portion of this project was finding ways to make such classic songs sound new again and put a unique twist on it,” she said. “And we’ve done that through multiple instruments. We’ve done that through some stylistic choices. We’ve made some songs jazzy. We’ve kept some songs traditional. We’ve done that through having everything done live.”
The four classics are “The Christmas Song” from 1945, first and most famously recorded by Nat King Cole in 1946; “Let It Snow,” also from 1945, which became a Christmas hit for Vaughan Monroe that year and again in 1950 for Frank Sinatra; “Home for Christmas,” a top-10 song for Bing Crosby in 1943, recorded as a tribute to American soldiers overseas; and “Oh Holy Night,” a popular Christmas carol since it was written in France in the 1840s.
“I’ve always wanted to put out some of my own music, some of my originals, since I’m a songwriter, and doing that through Forever Evergreen has been a beautiful process,” she said.
“And it’s always been a big goal of mine to put out some Christmas music, just because Christmas has also always held a really special place in my heart.”
Kelsey has not only given them her voice, she and her team of producers, have given them touches of jazz, “The Nutcracker” and “Jingle Bells,” among others.
All have been performed by many artists, old and new, famous and not. Many of them are inspirations for Kelsey, who cites especially Ella Fitzgerald, Barbra Streisand, Adele and Kelly Clarkson.
“My identification as an artist has been shaped by all of those,” she said. “I’m truly inspired and I take my own stylistic liberties from seeing the greats that have also found success in Christmas music.”
Kelsey, finishing high school, has been developing her voice since she was 7, “training in all styles, from classical to musical theater, to pop, to jazz.”
“I’ve been knee deep in every style of music, and it’s shaped me into the artist I am. So, having the ability to bring such a variety of styles into one project has made it feel complete. It’s made it feel like my own.”
She has been singing publicly for almost as long, especially at the Saratoga Springs Senior Center, where, she said, she got her strong connection to Christmas and music. She has also been involved in musical theater.
“And I started collaborating with people around my own community around Christmas time. Being able to put out Christmas music and using this Christmas project to put my original work into the public eye for the first time, has been a dream come true.”
“Forever Evergreen,” the title track, is very much a Christmas song as well as a coming-of-age song.
“I felt like it needed to reflect all of the values that I’ve been holding close to my heart throughout this whole time in my life—having this retrospective aspect where I’m looking back on the memories of my childhood. Then, in verse two, when I say, ‘the memories that I carry with me as I build my own world,’ it resonates with every aspect of my life currently, because I truly am just getting started and having this coming of age, having this …”
She stops here, searching for the right word, and a few seconds later finds it.
“Hopeful, that’s the word,” she said, “this hopeful quality about the track. It resonates with where I am in my position as an artist so far.”
Where she goes next is open. For now, that is college. In the spring, she will begin college majoring in musical theater, which she loves, but she also wants to continue writing and putting out music.
“Being young, emotions swing all over the place. It seems like one year I’m in one phase of my life, and the next I am in a completely new one, learning everything I possibly can.”
“I’m open to everything,” she said, “being, in my own opinion, such a versatile artist.”
Listening to her sing, the versatility is evident in the power of her vocals, high and low. Her voice goes a lot of different places over the five tracks of Forever Evergreen. It is obviously a voice that will go wherever she decides to take it, and she has the talent to take it wherever she wants.
Or, as she says, wherever her artistry “wants to lead me.”
“I’m going to continue performing, continue growing as an artist, continue writing, continue working with the team that I’ve been working with. There will be more music in the future just because of how deeply it is rooted in my identity.”
As she builds her own musical world, connect to Kelsey Dodd on all platforms for new music, videos, and social posts.
ON THE RISE
M.O.T.H.E.R. – the new collaborative band helmed by Robbie Furze of The Big Pink and currently featuring Jamie T and Jamie Hince of The Kills – have given their first proper interview, talking to NME about the emotional origins of the project, their aim to be “the guitar version of N.E.R.D.”, and their hit-list of future collaborators.
Revealing the new project at the end of May alongside the blistering anthemics of debut single ‘My Love’, Furze shared that the seeds of M.O.T.H.E.R. had come from losing his own parent after a prolonged illness. “My mum got sick about five years ago and was ill for about four years before she died,” he told NME.
“In that period I had a daughter, which was this real juxtaposition of death and birth. My mates – Jamie T and Jamie Hince – came together for me, and then sadly Jamie [Hince] lost his dad too,” Furze went on, sitting in a West London pub alongside Hince.
Hince continued: “I lost my dad four days after Robbie [lost his mum], and it felt like, if ever there was a calling, it was that. But it didn’t all come out of that doom and gloom. I hate mentioning COVID but everyone had so much time on their hands and there was this open creativity back then. I was working on music with Jamie T, sending each other stuff, and the idea for the three of us to do something together came out of that. It felt nice, like we were buying into this camaraderie, and this gang.”
The three musicians have previous credits together, with the two Jamies also writing on The Big Pink’s most recent album, 2022’s ‘The Love That’s Ours’. Fully collaborating on M.O.T.H.E.R., Furze joked, was like “the clash of three egos”. “Everyone wants to work with each other because you like what each other does, and so it’s not quite imposter syndrome but you have to live up to [that idea] and jump in and be a character,” Hince continued. “You can’t be too humble about it.”
Recording between Hince’s studio in LA and Furze’s studio in London’s Bethnal Green, the current trio have also dropped their self-titled debut EP featuring three further tracks: ‘Real Human’, ‘Traitor’, and ‘Surrender’. The ethos of the band, meanwhile, is for the line-up to shift with each release, bringing in familiar faces from other groups and working with whoever might be available at the time.
“We did a little bit [of recording] with Jenny [Lee Lindberg, bassist] from Warpaint who I love; I really want to get something solid down with her,” revealed Hince, while Furze suggested that names including Zach Hill of industrial hip-hop trio Death Grips, and electronic producer Skream have all been in the mix for future iterations of the band.
“We ran into Zach and he seemed into it but then he started ghosting me,” he noted. “Whether or not he decides to text me back, it would be wonderful to have that kind of thing. Jamie Hince, Skream, Rhys Webb from The Horrors [who played on their recent radio session], and Zach – if I saw that, I’d wanna hear what that nonsense sounds like!”
Check out the rest of the interview with Furze and Hince below, as they discuss their endearing bromance, their admiration for Jamie T, and why the band are unlikely to ever make an album.
NME: Hello Robbie and Jamie! You must have been kicking about at a lot of ‘00s parties, how far does your friendship go back?
Robbie Furze: “Me and Jamie T started becoming friends on the circuit of festivals when the first Big Pink record came out in 2009. Then me and Jamie Hince met at Corona Capital in Mexico in 2012.”
Jamie Hince: “He had a reputation – I think we all had reputations… I remember his wife giving me these dried insect snacks and I didn’t eat them because I thought he might have laced them with something…”
Furze: “Every band playing Corona Capital was staying in this massive hotel, so it was just chaos.”
Hince: “It was at the height of ego. Everyone had bodyguards. Bands were trying to outdo other bands. Like, The Black Keys – you’re two guys from Ohio, you don’t need armed bodyguards…”
Where does Jamie T fit into all this?
Hince: “Our orbits crossed quite a bit. I remember seeing him at some tiny little pub when he was probably about 19, and I love how it’s come full circle. My heart sinks a little bit when I see Jamie T working because I know I’m nowhere near [as good as] that. I have to chip away at things and stand back and then dive in again to get the feeling, whereas he’s just got the feeling from the start.”
Furze: “He’s pretty incredible. The song ‘Traitor’ on the EP was supposed to be for my vocal, and he was almost getting pissed off that we couldn’t get the verses right. He was just like, ‘I’ll sort it out’, goes up to the mic, does one take and it’s done. See you later. He’s that kind of guy.”
Do you have to leave your ego at the door in those situations?
Hince: “I did this amazing beat for ‘Traitor’ that I loved, and I sent it to Jamie T and got back a text saying: ‘One pound fish’. Fuck! I mean talk about leaving your ego at the door… I know what he was saying, he thought it was a bit ‘cor blimey’ waltz. But some of the shit he ends up doing, it’s totally ‘cor blimey one pound fish’!”
Furze: “But whatever works for the track works, and everyone has to be happy with it. You push each other without really knowing it.”
How did you envision the project?
Hince: “These things just come together. It sounds cheesy, but I wanted it to be the guitar version of N.E.R.D. – a production team of people that love each other.”
Furze: “We’ve got songs in the pipeline with other artists already, and it makes it like an N.E.R.D. or Unkle or Massive Attack thing. Being collaborative makes me more excited.”
Hince: “It feels like that time has gone where albums really last. Records seem to come and go quite quickly now. So I’ve shifted my enthusiasm because I think the attention span has gone. You spend so much time making records and so little time getting any reward.”
Furze: “I’d like to do standalone singles, or another EP of four or five tracks as a batch. I wouldn’t wanna go further than that.”
None of your individual bands and projects sound that alike – where do you think your tastes align?
Hince: “There’s something unspoken that we all seem to agree on which is this epic-ness. There’s a line in one of the songs that talks about ‘the last of the hooligans‘ and that seemed to be the feeling behind it all. If there’s a similarity with what everyone wanted, it was maybe just being a bit romantic and epic.”
Why do you think you were drawn to that?
Hince: “I don’t know, maybe we’re just lonely men?”
Furze: “Beaten down but being pulled up by hope…”
Hince: “We’ve all been bashing around, making all this noise and spending so much time doing it; I think it gives you that feeling. There’s something tiny and irrelevant about what you do but something life and death about what you do too, and I think the cocktail of that makes it… well, the last of the hooligans.”
Tell us a bit about ‘My Love’ – the first proper single.
Furze: “It’s one of the most basic songs. It’s a love song about hope, but it just has such an incredible energy to it with its simplicity. I’m not a massive Beatles fan but it has this relatable energy [like their early music]. ‘I wanna hold your hand’ – you don’t get more basic than that, in a great way. I think simplicity is power. Sometimes less is more, and if you mean it you can get away with it.”
Are there going to be live shows?
Furze: “Definitely. We’re playing a bit of catch up because we didn’t think ‘My Love’ would get the reaction it has, but we’re desperate to get out and do gigs.”
Hince: “In the spirit of the collaborative project, I’m really liking the idea of having different people in different countries playing with us; having a different vibe each time.”
Furze: “It would be really exciting to see different characters that you know from different bands. For the radio session [with Steve Lamacq on BBC 6 Music] we had Rhys Webb from The Horrors on bass, and I love that idea.”
You’re obviously very close – what are your favourite memories of this charming bromance?
Furze: “Jamie’s probably my best friend in the world and we’ve been through a lot together. In 2015 we both uprooted and went out to LA together, I went out there for about five years and he stayed, so we were pretty inseparable. It got to a point where it was breakfast, lunch and dinner together.”
Hince: “We just became one person. People would confuse us even though we don’t look the same. He had an ex-girlfriend who he went to say hello to and she said, ‘Hello Jamie’. We just started having the same vibe. The same embarrassing energy. We’ve chilled out a bit recently but when I was in LA and Robbie was in London we’d speak to each other for four hours a day. I was getting complaints from his wife.”
The ‘M.O.T.H.E.R. EP’ is out now.
The Big Pink returned with their third studio album, ‘The Love That’s Ours’, in 2022. It marked their first full-length effort in over 10 years. T and Hince worked on that LP, too, co-writing the single ‘Love Spins On Its Axis’.
The Kills released their sixth and latest record, ‘God Games’, in 2023.
Jamie T, meanwhile, made a comeback with ‘The Theory Of Whatever’ the previous year. He recently joined forces with Fred Again.. on the track ‘Lights Burn Dimmer’, and performed with The Maccabees at their big London reunion gig last summer.
