Self Esteem: ‘I Achieved Everything I Set Out To Do, And I Was Sadder Than Ever’

Rebecca Lucy Taylor, better known as Self Esteem, just released her third album A Complicated WomanIn 2021, the British musician and singer Rebecca Lucy Taylor found herself at something of a crossroads. Four years had passed since her band Slow Club had parted ways, after which she’d embarked on a solo career, rechristening herself under a new name, Self Esteem.Her first album as Self Esteem, Compliments Please, had performed modestly upon its release in 2019, and earned her a small, though loyal, following. Work on its follow-up had been slowed down by the Covid pandemic, and after moving back home to Sheffield to live with her parents during lockdown, she was contemplating a career change, and retraining to be a Zumba instructor.When work was completed on her next album, Prioritise Pleasure, she decided to push ahead with the release, just to see what happened. “You know what, I’ll put the music out, but never mind about this sort of career thing,” she reasoned.So, she did. “And then,” as Rebecca puts it, “it was just chaos”.Prioritise Pleasure went on to achieve the kind of success that a burgeoning artist dreams of. First came a string of five-star reviews, and a chart placement just outside the top 10. Then there were invitations to perform on The Graham Norton Show, Later With Jools Holland and even Stephen Colbert’s US talk show, before the likes of Taskmaster, RuPaul’s Drag Race and Celebrity Gogglebox all came calling for Rebecca to appear as herself. The Guardian and The Times both named Prioritise Pleasure the best album of 2021, then it was nominated for the Mercury Prize. She opened for Adele during her homecoming shows at London’s Hyde Park, then Blur at Wembley Stadium, and delivered a scene-stealing set at Glastonbury before embarking on her own sold-out UK show, culminating in three sold-out shows at London’s Hammersmith Apollo.And that’s without even getting into her work on the score of the Jodie Comer play Prima Facie, or her starring role in the West End production of Cabaret, where she played Sally Bowles to Jake Shears’ Emcee.Self Esteem performing at the Mercury Prize ceremony in 2022, where her second solo album Prioritise Pleasure was nominated“It was life-changing, really,” she says of this whirlwind time in her life. “Every day, the phone would go, and I’d be like, ’whaaaat?! Woah! My god!’. Every day it was so exciting – for about three years.”She recalls: “I’d been making music for so long, and I’d watched so many artists go past me, and the metric of that was always getting a poster on the tube, and billboards and stuff. And when I finally had a fucking tube poster – not even a billboard! – I was like, ‘OK, I’m one of the girlies now’.”“But also… I burnt out as well,” Rebecca admits. “It’s not natural,” she says, looking back at it all now, to achieve so much in such a short space of time. “It’s not normal.”As you can imagine, after a few years that would make anyone’s head spin, the pressure was on when it came to following up with the next Self Esteem album.“It was so tough,” she begins. “It was really stressful.” With a nervous laugh, she says she’s “not really been alright”.“Because I consume so much pop culture, I know how much people love you when they think they’ve discovered you, and then they can’t wait to sort of be like, ‘oh, it’s not that good, actually’,” she explains. “Especially with women.“There were no stakes before, because no one gave a fuck who I was. But now I need it to carry on. So, basically, I went mad. And I’m still a bit mad.”The fruit of that labour, the third Self Esteem album, A Complicated Woman, was finally released in April.Self Esteem has made no secret of the fact her third album A Complicated Woman was a labour of love“I think you can hear on the record I’m a bit bamboozled really,” she says of her new album. “‘What now?’ is the overwhelming feeling of the album, because I’d got everything that I set out to do, and I was sort of lower and sadder than ever.”Rebecca quips: “If I was smart, if I was financially savvy, I should have made 12 tracks of, like, ‘here come the giiiirls’, ‘my body is beautiful, baby’. There was this whole sort of thing looming over me – ‘do a crossover record now’. ‘Go and be a Loose Woman.’ And I couldn’t do it.“When I finally accepted that’s not what I was going to do, and let the album be complicated, and let it be weird, and this sort of snapshot into being a 37-year-old woman, I was like, ‘OK, this is what it is’. But I was scared!”“The interesting thing is, some people have received it as, ‘oh, she’s sold out, she’s done a Here Come The Girls’. “And then some people have been like, ‘it’s too weird, I don’t like it’,” she claims.“So, that’s been interesting. It’s the first time I’ve had any negative reviews, ever.”“I’m talking like the album has flopped, and it hasn’t!” Rebecca notes (a quick Google search pulls up a string of four and five-star reviews from leading music publications), but she’s not wrong that the general critical reception to A Complicated Woman has been less unanimously glowing than its predecessor.Interestingly, she observes that “there is a sort of relief” to this, because on some level, her “worst-case scenario” has now happened. “It felt like I had the Midas touch for a while. Everyone was being so kind to me, and I was like, ‘this is not sustainable’,” she recalls. “So, rationally I was prepared for it.”Still, she reiterates, she’s “not been alright” all of the time. “I just had to go to a yoga retreat for 10 days,” she shares, adding a jovial “namaste!” for good measure. Rebecca adds that some of her fellow artist friends have found themselves in similar positions.“We’re all just a bit like… burnt. Because when it first happens to you, when finally your career goes how you want it to, you do feel a bit invincible,” she explains.“It’s just this weird thing. It’s an unnatural thing to do this for a living. And I’m so honest [in my music], it’s my everything. I put it first my whole life, and to have someone say, ‘I’m not sure about her whole life actually’, it was hard, I’m not going to lie!”Self Esteem's third album A Complicated Women sees the singer commenting on the state of the worldAs the title suggests, A Complicated Woman is anything but straightforward, not just musically, but thematically. Over its 12 tracks, Rebecca bounces from genre to genre as she grapples with everything from gender roles, alcohol abuse, female sexuality and, of course, the everyday complications of relationships to the importance of retaining hope in a world that makes that near impossible.The album opens with the sardonic I Do And I Don’t Care, on which she ponders “if I’m so empowered, why’m I such a coward?” with growing intensity.But alongside these darker explorations, Rebecca’s sense of humour still shines through on other tracks. Mother sees her admonishing a disappointing partner with lyrics like, “are you interested in growing? There is other literature outside of The Catcher In The Rye” and “I am not your therapist, you don’t pay me enough for this”.Then, there’s 69, on which she lists the sex acts she’s the biggest fan of (and, more crucially, which she’s not). While this may have started out as a song she and her collaborators worked on for a laugh more than anything (“it was very much like, ‘this is stupid, and this won’t make the album’,” she recalls), it eventually found its way onto A Complicated Woman when Rebecca realised its less superficial message.“As it went on and on, I was like, ‘this actually feels really important to be on the album’,” she says. “It’s still quite political to be a woman saying what you want.“I also think, ‘god music is really pivoting back to being, like, male gaze-centric’... which is fine, you do you, hun. But like… what the fuck? We’re going back to that being the most successful music and visuals and vibe for a female artist. And I love to be sexual, and I love being sexy, and I love talking about that. I even love the male gaze, I love catering to it – but I always want to skew it that little bit, so people can’t quite enjoy it in the way that they want to, without having to fucking think a bit, you know?”“So,” she concludes. “It’s a silly song, but it’s also quite a serious song, in some ways.”Self Esteem shows off her signature sense of humour on A Complicated Woman cuts like Mother and 69Just as simultaneously “silly” and “serious” is Cheers To Me, a more saccharine-sounding offering than Self Esteem fans might be used to – until you clock those lyrics in the chorus: “When you’re a sucker for a skinny mother fucker, I love ’em hard while they’re texting another. And I’m fine, but babe, it’s still true, the worst idea I had was you.”Of Cheers To Me, she says: “It was like the sugary nature of a Taylor Swift sort of pop song – that I fucking inhale – but then, the lyrics take you out of it. It’s the same thing that I’m doing all the time with everything, really. It’s just skewing it that bit, to Trojan horse my message and agenda, but using the tropes that I sort of hate and love. And it’s the same as the fucking TikTok thing.”Indeed, to play up to Cheers To Me’s more commercial-sounding production even more, its release was accompanied by a semi-ironic TikTok dance, both parodying the music industry’s shift towards making TikTok-friendly music, but with a more cynical Self Esteem slant.“I’m forever fatigued by the industry and it’s now a good few years of [people saying] ‘TikTok is the answer’, but it just doesn’t do it for me, really,” she admits.“And I really wish it did. Not a week goes by without someone saying, ‘the way for my career to go bigger and last longer is to do a dance on TikTok’. And I can just never get my head around it. “I’m quite obsessed with it, I’m really, really wound up about it all the time. So, what I like to do is lean into the things that wind me up and try and own them.”“I don’t think that’s worked, you know?” she observes with a laugh, referring to the TikTok dance. “It’s quite embarrassing. There’s still time… but it’s up to me, and I can’t be bothered. I think it would be genius if it was a hit on TikTok. At the minute, though, I’m just petulantly taking the piss out of it, and it’s not going well on TikTok, so it’s really not great. It’s not Warholian just yet, but we’ll get there.”@selfesteemselfesteem69plsss do this dance x♬ Cheers To Me - Self EsteemA Complicated Woman not only draws on experiences from Rebecca’s life, but also passes comment on the modern world more generally. The album ends on a somewhat hopeful note with The Deep Blue Okay, which could be seen as a book-end when compared with the more cynical opener, I Do And I Don’t Are.Rebecca says the contrast between these two songs wasn’t necessarily “deliberate”, although it was important to her to thread optimism through the album (a stand-out moment on The Deep Blue Okay, for instance, sees Rebecca and a choir singing the line “you’ll always work it out” in unison), especially in the current political and social climate.“I did need it to be hopeful,” she says. “I think it’s really important to say that it’s never over. You’re never at the top of the mountain, you are always climbing. There’s no idea of ‘happy ever after’. And that’s not as bleak as it sounds – because we will always figure it out.”As for the current state of the world, Rebecca says she’s feeling as “a bit frozen”. “I’m in that part where my head is buried in the sand,” she claims.To those feeling similarly overwhelmed, she says it’s important “to not give up that change might be possible”.“I do think it is possible, it’s just going to take ages, and it’s [about] willpower, I guess,” she continues. “Willpower is my message… have the willpower to stay strong. But I also think it’s important to give yourself grace if you can’t fucking do much.“Every day I kind of try to do something towards the purpose. And it doesn’t have to be enormous, or putting yourself on the line. Just existing, as proudly as you can.”In that spirit, she recently partnered with Trainline for their I Came By Train campaign, encouraging people to travel to Glastonbury by rail in a bid to boost sustainability.“The problem we’re in at the minute is because we’re so disillusioned, it feels like there’s no point – I know that sounds like we’re in the kitchen at three a.m,” she jokes. “But getting the train to Glastonbury is worth it, if you can do it.”Self Esteem – pictured here performing at Radio 1's Big Weekend – is bringing A Complicated Woman to life at Glastonbury later this month“I did an in-stores tour when the album came out. There’s so much shite, still, in music – carbon footprint-wise, it’s already bad, you’re selling CDs, it’s plastic – that you’re trying to cut it down where you can. So we did it on the train, which was really pleasant, and also feels good in the planet sense.”Throughout her time in the spotlight, Rebecca has never shied away from the issues she’s encountered within her industry, and the arts in general. This includes the growing hurdles faced by working-class artists when trying to make it in music, something she feels is only getting worse as time goes on.She laments: “The more governments don’t respect art as an important part of education, it’s the first thing to go. And that means, unless you’re paying for it, you can’t get it.“I had drum lessons at school, and I had an amazing music teacher who stayed after school and did choirs. Everything I know is because of the free shit that I got to do at school. It’s just terrifying really. Because where does that leave the people who don’t have access to that?” “For years,” she continues. “I was like, ‘why does it not feel fair?’, and I really didn’t realise that sort of generational wealth is so prevalent in the arts. I had no idea. I lost, like, a decade of my life not understanding why I wasn’t getting anywhere, and… I don’t know. It just feels unfair. It feels really unfair. More stories from working class people and people of different backgrounds, it’s vital to everyone’s… society’s fucking sense of self.“But obviously, I was also very privileged in loads of other ways. I’m not saying it was impossible. But I think it’s good to be aware of.”"I lost, like, a decade of my life not understanding why I wasn’t getting anywhere," Self Esteem says of music industry classismAfter a string of Self Esteem festival shows this summer, culminating in what promises to be another show-stopper at Glastonbury, Rebecca is heading out on her own headlining UK tour in the autumn in support of A Complicated Woman.While it hasn’t been an easy or straightforward road, she’s able to step back and feel “really proud” of the work she’s put out this year.“I think it’s mad,” Rebecca enthuses. “And I think it’s dense and I think it’s interesting how it spans genres. It’s complex.”“And then,” she adds. “I’m also like, ‘and here’s a fucking song that will get on Radio 2, my friend, because that’ll make my life easier’.”Trainline’s I Came By Train campaign is working with artists including Self Esteem, to spotlight how switching to rail can reduce carbon emissions by up to 67% compared to driving. With direct routes to Glastonbury, it’s all about cutting traffic, lowering impact, and starting the festival on the right note. You can explore more here.READ MORE:Jake Shears: 'It Really Feels Like The World Might Need Scissor Sisters Again'Eddie Izzard: 'If You've Got A Problem With Honesty, That's On You'Katherine Ryan: ‘I’m At That Age Where I’m A Bit Of An Old Straight White Man Myself’Layton Williams: ‘Everyone Thinks They're A Critic Nowadays, But Girl Where Are Your Credentials?'

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