It’s been a exciting few months for Chelsea Cutler, as the 27-year-old singer-songwriter dropped her third studio album, Stellaria, in October and embarked on a tour to support the fan-favorite project. Since then, her track “Your Bones” has blown up on TikTok, and to celebrate all her recent achievements, she sat down with Billboard‘s Tetris Kelly for a wide-ranging interview.
As for whether or not she knew that her song “Your Bones” would be an online representation of love, Cutler said that she did and didn’t at the same time. “I probably expected — just given the nature of my relationship, I’m obviously in a relationship with a woman, so I think a lot of my fanbase is probably part of the LBGTQ community. I definitely expected that, but I think what’s really cool is we were seeing the song be used on social media for everything, like dogs, babies, relationship, self-love, everything. That was more surprising than anything,” she shared, adding that Stranger Things actress Millie Bobby Brown used the song to soundtrack a montage with one of her foster dogs.
For Stellaria, Cutler knew that she wanted a Western aesthetic to go along with the project. “I knew I wanted the content to be kind of Yellowstone inspired, so we ended up going out there and that word ‘stellaria’ kept coming up,” she recalled. “There was a Stellaria Lane and a Stellaria Creek. Me being a Latin nerd, I saw that and I was like, ‘That’s a fascinating word.’ I fell in love with it, it means ‘starlight,’ and it just felt like such a great representation for the world that I wanted to make.”
Cutler is also no stranger to being open about her mental health, and she says that her vulnerability goes hand-in-hand with her creativity. “I feel so selfish, because writing music and being honest in my music is so for me and it’s such an awesome byproduct that the vulnerability translates into a greater narrative around being open with my mental health,” she said. “I think it’s cool that when I sit down to make music, it’s just an outlet for all of these big feelings that I’m having and I feel no shame around sharing that at all. It led to so many amazing conversations surrounding mental health.”
Watch Billboard‘s full interview with Chelsea Cutler above.
