Jeremy Zucker and Chelsea Cutler delve into their musical partnership in ‘brent iii’
Since its initial release nearly 5 years ago, the collaborative world of brent by Jeremy Zucker and Chelsea Cutler has resonated deeply within the hearts of fans. brent was cherished immediately upon release due to its intimate and vulnerable lyricism, cozy atmosphere, and the close-to-home thematic exploration of growing older and changing into someone entirely new. This first EP was simply the beginning of the world of brent, as the duo curated a fresh collection of tracks called brent ii back in 2021. This past November, Zucker and Chelsea reached new heights as musical companions as they released their biggest project to date, brent iii. With an incredibly moving and sentimental 11 new tracks, brent iii glistens with a magical, nostalgic euphoria through its investigations of friendship, maturity, love, loss, and the government, too. At a recent press conference, Jeremy Zucker and Chelsea Cutler shared more about how their friendship imbues itself within their work, how the process of creating music together looked like for brent iii, and how the meaning of brent has grown alongside them over the last five years.
You have been making music together for quite some time now, do you think maintaining a healthy friendship is an important part of your music making process? How do you inspire each other?
Chelsea: I think that healthy friendship is really, really important in being able to collaborate well together. We both have to be comfortable enough to be vulnerable enough with one another through our conversation and our songwriting, because I think making art is inherently a pretty vulnerable thing to do. I think also it requires comfort and vulnerability to disagree… Obviously, when you’re working with other people there are a lot of opinions and a lot of ideas that are brought to the table, so having a healthy friendship is really important to sort through that and work through that. Comprise in some areas, and just try to support each other in others. It’s definitely really important that at the end of the day, we’re friends first.
Jeremy: It’s especially important when we push each other. Chelsea and I know each other so well, we’re pretty comfortable being really frank and honest, where if we were working with someone we didn’t know very well, it’s a lot harder to be honest and be nice. We have each other’s boundaries pretty locked in, we know when to give each other space, we know when to double down with each other, and we’re good at not getting upset with each other.
The union of simplistic, yet powerful vocals, instrumentals, and lyrics are a large reason behind both of your warm successes. How do you approach the production process? When do you know that a song is fully complete?
Jeremy: It’s hard to know when a song is complete, but it’s kind of just a gut feeling thing. Yeah, when you’re working on a song, it kinda becomes a race against the magic disappearing. When you write something good, there’s inherently a lot of magic in there. You have to keep kinda refining and adding or simplifying to get to the place where the magic has stuck. Producing and building out a song is trying to bottle up that magic, and so some things that we do or add or some ideas that we have can seem like a really good idea, but when we do it, we lose the initial thing that made us really excited about the song. We have to backtrack and be like, “Okay. We thought that would that, that wouldn’t work. Maybe we need to go simpler, or maybe we need to go bigger, or maybe we need to go faster, and slower…” It’s this process of like exploring what works, and as much as we want it to be easy and effortless and natural, the reality is that it’s not always that way. And sometimes it is. Sometimes you write a song and you just explode, unleash all these things that work together perfectly, and you’re like, “That was amazing.” Other times, it has to be a really deliberate, intentional process.
Given that many fans see brent as a safe space for dealing with emotional topics, is there anything about this new album that you hope will offer them comfort or a new perspective? (not my question
Jeremy: There’s definitely more specific stories on [brent iii], so I guess it would really relate to someone that is dealing with the hyper-specific issues that we talk about on a couple songs like “ashes & rust” about transgenerational trauma and “and the government too!” is like a long distance, intercontinental relationship. But there’s also a couple of general, relatable, and across the board songs. “black & white” was written about loving being on tour and the fans, but I think it really comes across also as a genuine appreciation and love song. I think in a lot of music, there’s a lot of perspective you can pull from it, and I think this is definitely no exception in terms of how well people can connect to it.
Chelsea: I think the fact that we’re able to make music so earnestly together as friends definitely helps us make music that other people can find a lot of solace and comfort in. We always sit in the studio and say we want the record to feel like a cozy, safe place for people. I really do think this is born out of us being friends and building this world that feels like friendship for a lot of other people.
A theme of brent iii is wanting to hold on to fleeting moments and feelings. If you each had to pick one moment to bottle or hold on to from creating brent iii, what would it be?
Chelsea: Ooh… hold on, there’s so many… It’s funny, because every song we write has a moment that feels like this, where we look at each other and we know, like “Okay, this is becoming something special.” I remember Jerm was at the piano, playing a chord progression, and I just started singing and improvising a lot of the lyrics that ended up becoming the hook of “terrible things.” I just remember so distinctly, we were making eye contact, smiling, and Jeremy you were doing that arpeggio, like the chord progression, and I remember just being giddy, and I was like, “Wait, this is really good, dude! Like this is so good!” That, that feeling… I think we’ve captured that feeling with pretty much every song we’ve made together, but that one moment is such a distinct representation of when that “a-ha” moment happens, so that was really special. It’s that, or when we stood on the side of the road and got crepes from a tin hut in Big Bear, and it was 10 degrees.
Jeremy Zucker: I like that we get to talk about it a lot, because every time we talk about it, we remember more things that we forgot before. There are so many amazing moments that get attached with these songs that grow and live with us for so long… I really enjoyed writing “i miss you.” We were watching either Midsommar or Society of the Snow, we were watching the movie with the sound off…
Chelsea: Oh, we watched both of them!
Jeremy: Chels was sitting on the couch facing this projector, and I was sitting on the ground right in front of the couch, so she was right behind me. I was playing my guitar here, and we were recording the voice memo… Chelsea wrote a lot of the lyrics, and I was doing the guitar part. We were just writing the whole song while watching. We were so zoned out but locked in. It was really cool.
On your Instagram post celebrating the release of brent iii, you remark on how brent “has taken on a meaning of its own.” When reflecting on the first brent project compared to where you are now, has this meaning remained consistent throughout the exploration of brent? Or is the magic everchanging, presenting itself in a new form in brent iii?
Jeremy: Everchanging, for sure. There’s been something special with mine and Chelsea’s collaborations since the beginning. In the beginning it was kind of a discovery and an exploration… I think it’s always been an exploration. We’ve always tried to dig around and see what we could create together in a really open-minded way. But, I think this last time around we really got to pick apart everything that we had worked on together in the past and figure out how it applies to us today. Chelsea, I’m curious to hear what you have to say about it.
Chelsea: It was so funny when you said “everchanging,” cause we’re so different… The feeling or like the world of it all has kind of changed so much since we’ve gotten older, and we’ve changed, and our music has changed. But, I feel like what brent is has stayed so true at the center of everything. So, I feel like it's both.
Looking ahead, how do you see your individual careers evolving after brent iii? Will this collaboration influence future solo projects, or are you planning to continue exploring collaborations together?
Jeremy: We’re definitely not like, closing the door really. We’ll never say never. I guess neither of us wanna minimize this project like, “Yeah, we’re gonna do brent iv!” I don’t even know if I would want to do something called that. But, Chelsea and I are always gonna be collaborating and working together. It’s just a matter of what form that takes on, whether it's a song for her album, for my album, another artist, or for something that lives in the world of brent.
Chelsea: I think it would be hard to envision us going the rest of our careers without working together in some capacity. I think we’ll always want to be a part of each others’ careers… Life is long, and who knows what will happen? As for our solo careers, I have no clue what’s next. I know we both are sitting on a lot of stuff that we’ll probably be able to give a little more attention to when we’re done touring this great brent iii album.
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Jeremy Zucker and Chelsea Cutler have shared some of their most poignant and thoughtful songwriting to date in brent iii. With this latest and perhaps final installment of the brent saga, the feelings of growing up with the music of brent have sprung up again in full swing for many listeners who felt the same magic back in 2019. While Cutler sings “But I know / Good things never stay / People always change” in the closing track of the album, the magic of brent is undeniably forever. The songwriting duo have written powerful and riveting time capsules of the past through each of their three brent records. There’s no denying that even as listeners grow older, each project will continue to invoke the feelings of falling in love over and over again for years to come.