THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “British singer-songwriter Rebecca Lucy Taylor — aka Self Esteem —returns with her third studio album A Complicated Woman — a big, bold and poptastic statement.
A Complicated Woman is her first album since the award-nominated Prioritise Pleasure. Ir comprises 12 songs, featuring guest appearances from Sue Tompkins, Moonchild Sanelly and Nadine Shah. The collection focuses on themes of taking back control of your own life and exposing the social inequities imposed upon women.
From the album, she premiered a new song Focus Is Power on BBC Radio 1’s New Music Show with Jack Saunders. The song is inspired by a phrase she wrote on a sticker while working in her parent’s shed during the pandemic. It was written by Johan Hugo, Pale Jay and Rebecca Lucy Taylor, and roduced by Hugo and Lorna Blackwood.
“Wrote it a long time ago,” she says of the single. “I think in the pandemic. I wrote it paper with my mum and dad’s shed and stuck it up. It’s still there, so we should get some security for that shed. But I felt very hopeless, and sort of the world keeps making it feel hard to be me or like my peers or anyone who’s not a certain demographic. And the whole album is like, I’m defeated, but then I’m also defiant, obviously, because I always will be.”
The song features the choir. “There’s a choir that run by Angel Silver, who does lots of session work, and that was her choir. And then we had house gospel choir for a bit as well. So lots of different people, lots of different days of singing in a group.”
