6 days ago
4
Kaylee Bell had heard people say “a song can change your life”, but it wasn’t until it happened to her that the 35-year-old country artist truly understood what they meant.
A childhood spent in Waimate, a tiny town of just 3000 people on New Zealand’s South Island – “it’s basically two hours everywhere; two hours to Queenstown, two hours to Christchurch” – involved singing lessons with a local teacher and entering talent quests with her siblings on weekends. Bell was gigging at pubs from the time she turned 14, but it was when she won the national Golden Guitar award at 18 – “which is the youngest you can win it,” she mentions offhandedly – that she was first exposed to the reality of a career as a country performer.
“It was really seeing the McClymonts and Morgan Evans – they had their own bands and were touring all year round – that I thought ‘This could be a thing… But I have to move to Australia’.” Both artists would eventually invite Kaylee to join their steady touring schedules, but it was a country artist she hadn’t yet met who’d inspire the song that would change her life.
The idea for Keith, a song that pays tribute to the spirit and songs of Our Nicole’s hubby, sat on Bell’s phone for two years before she got the courage to bring it to life. “So many people told me that was career suicide. And so I held onto it for so long. To know now what it’s done… It was a really good lesson to trust your gut and just back yourself.”
After releasing Keith as a single in 2019, Bell says she always sensed the song was destined “for something bigger than the platform [she] could give it at the time” as an independent artist. Two years later, Bell was stuck in yet another strict lockdown with no touring prospects on the horizon.
“I could actively feel my mental health slipping. And I was like, ‘I need to take some control back, so whatever the next thing that comes into my life, I’m going to say yes to it no matter what it is’. And it just so happened the next week I got an email from The Voice team saying auditions were open.”
The rest is history. Urban was a coach, and within moments of Bell’s blind audition, he slammed the buzzer to spin his chair first. “I feel like after Keith turned, in my body language, it was just like a weight off my shoulders and I could just enjoy it. It couldn’t have been written. I couldn’t have ever planned that moment.”
On her new album Cowboy Up, Bell returns to the moment she first heard another formative artist’s music. Song for Shania traces her own journey as a songwriter as it honours her Canadian queen: “Showed me I could be a mother, I could be a wife / Be a rock star at the same damn time / Face on the cover, country music lover / Yeah, she showed me what that looks like.”
When I ask what Twain represents to her, Bell answers: “Everything. Everything. She was in her thirties when she had success and she had the first record with Any Man of Mine. It went really big, but she was like, I’m not ready. I need another record so that I could play a whole hour and a half of my own songs. She put her band together, they rehearsed for months to the point where they could run around a stadium playing her songs by the time they were ready to go out on the road.”
If it sounds like Bell has memorised Twain’s biography, it’s because she has. “I read her book [2011’s From This Moment On] every year,” she says. “I’ve just taken so many of her ideas and applied them to what we do with the live show. And just, like, the fact that she was actually considered an outsider in Nashville. She was Canadian, and I get that feeling a lot of the time that I’m in America.”
It’s no secret the country establishment doesn’t fling its doors open to outsiders eagerly. When artists like Taylor Swift begin in Nashville then spread their pop wings, they’re viewed as deserters, disloyal to the cause. When Beyoncé’s country performance of Daddy Lessons was dismissed as inauthentic, she took it as a personal challenge to prove she had a right to play in the genre – and won the Grammy for album of the year for her efforts.
“I think Nashville’s one of those towns that is very protective, so when you are from the outside it’s a lot harder to break in,” Bell says. She pushed through and tried not to be disheartened by the absence of immediate kinship. “They call Nashville ‘the 10-year town’ for a reason: you’ve got to go and pay your dues. I’ve been going since 2010 and I’m still building my circles and my crews. At the end of the day, it’s also a town that knows great songs and songs are the overall equaliser in our industry. It all comes back to the song. You can’t deny a good song.”
Bell was producing the title track and first single from Cowboy Up when she learned she was pregnant. She and her partner Nick believed she wouldn’t be able to have children, after “massive health issues” – including endometriosis, chronic fatigue and peritonitis – she’d endured since the age of 16. It was, she says, “a lot of undiagnosed everything. Basically, just years of being in and out of hospital, doctors, no answers, tests. To the point where I just got sick of it.” The question of whether or not she’d ever be a mum felt like one her body had already answered.
Loading
Cowboy Up became the ‘before’, and every other song on this new album was written when Bell was in that emotional and mental space of ‘after’. Heartbeat is the record’s tender conclusion, and was written immediately after seeing those two blue lines appear on a pregnancy test. “The journey of the record was about being in a headspace of like, ‘Oh my Lord, my life is about to change’. When I was writing Song for Shania, it was almost like writing to encourage myself. I knew I wanted to carry on doing music and also be a mum, but what does that look like?”
Baby James is seven months old now and already has plenty of airline miles to his name. There was no question of whether or not he’d be a tour baby, and he’s joined his mum on the road as she performs at the biggest dates on the Australian country music calendar: CMC Rocks, Gympie Muster, Deni Ute Muster and Strummingbird.
Despite being the highest-billed woman artist at every festival she plays and signing with a major US management team on the eve of her fourth album, Bell’s noticed a change in tone when people discuss her career since she became a parent. “I made no excuses for myself this year. Pumped out singles every six weeks, all the things, and I feel like I still get that whole, ‘It’s okay, you’ve had a baby this year’,” she says, mimicking a gentle, condescending tone meant to soothe her invisible concerns about productivity. “I haven’t slowed down. I’ve been as busy as I would’ve been anyway. It’s so crazy.”
It’s put a new cause directly in her crosshairs: advocating for mothers in music and making the stage a place that working parents belong. It’s the kind of endeavour that might see a future country star follow her lead and write their own tribute to Kaylee Bell in years to come.
Cowboy Up is out now. Kaylee Bell performs at the Deni Ute Muster in Deniliquin on October 3, and at Strummingbird in Newcastle on November 1.
