Page 56 - ION Indie Magazine MarchApril 2021

Marty Haviik: Stella, thank you for giving ION Indie Magazine a little bit of your
time and talking with us about your music. Please share with our readers a
little about yourself.

Stella Katherine Cole: I’m so happy to be talking to you! A little bit about
myself…sure. I’m currently a senior at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois,
(about 15 mins north of Chicago). I’m double majoring in Theater and International
Relations and minoring in German. I’m also studying musical theatre and film acting
there. My music career started during the pandemic, actually. I started posting
videos of myself singing on TikTok and a few of them blew up. Now I have around
65 thousand followers, which is just insane. I never really expected to have a career
as a recording artist. I always loved singing jazz standards and these 40s/50s tunes
more than anything else, but I never realized how big of an audience there is for
this. I’m so grateful for the following I’ve gained in the last few months. I mean, this
is what I LOVE doing. The fact that people want to listen to me do what I love, still
feels surreal. I’ve had a lot of moments in the last few months where I just start
crying of happiness.

MH: Let’s go straight to your new Christmas EP. How did you decide to record
‘Classic Christmas with Stella Katherine Cole?’ Fantastic production, by the
way.

SKC: Thanks so much! It was recorded and mixed at the home studio of a local
Michigan musician. We had a blast in the studio. The studio experience is a bit
different in a pandemic. We were, of course, really careful about social distancing
and bringing in minimal musicians. The saxophonist actually had to be in the
bedroom of this home studio, while our pianist was in the living room, and I was in
the actual recording booth. Recording ‘Classic Christmas’ was my first time in a
studio setting, and I was a little nervous going in. Once I was there though, I was
just so thrilled to be singing along with live musicians that I let myself get totally lost
in the music. In terms of our process, I decided to record a Christmas album because
hundreds of people on TikTok were asking for one. My most common comment was,
‘You should record a Christmas album!’ or ‘Your voice would be great on Christmas
music,’ so I called up some local musicians, got into a studio, and put down some
Christmas tracks. Most artists record a Christmas album in the summer, but I
recorded it in early December and had it out in about a week. It was a crazy
turnaround, but I wanted to get something out there since so many people were
asking for it! It ended up getting over 10K streams in less than a month, which is
pretty crazy for a new musician putting out her first album without any real marketing
plan. It was great that my whole family was listening to my Christmas music all
season. It only took a few hours in the studio to get those tracks down... except
‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,’ which is actually a fun story. It was the first
song we recorded, and we did about three takes and moved on. After everything
was finished up, I knew I wasn’t happy with the way the vocals sounded, so I tried it
once more. The next day, I came into the studio to give Patrick (the engineer/mixer)
some feedback on levels, instrumentals, etc. We were listening to ‘Have Yourself’
and realized the last note was a little flat. It was in the morning, so my voice wasn’t
warmed up and I was wearing sweatpants. I don’t even think I had eaten breakfast
yet. But I went into the recording booth just to rerecord that last note. When I got in
there, Patrick was like, ‘Why don’t you just record the whole song?’ I was like, ‘Sure,
let me warm up a bit.’ And I immediately did a take that was just a hundred times
better than any of the stuff we had the night before. My dad was actually in the studio
with me that day, and after I finished the song, he was crying. He never cries, so
that’s really saying something. That’s been my favorite Christmas song since I was
so young. We watch ‘Meet Me in St. Louis’ every year during the holidays, so that
song means so much to my family. Thank God I redid it!