Chelsea Wilson is the executive producer of Feel Good – an album created by the Women of Soul Collective – and has made it a priority to amplify female voices (both literally and metaphorically) in the Australian music biz. We caught up with Chelsea to find out more about the making of this album, and why it is so important that women are given more opportunities.

How did you get started in the music biz? I started off my career as a full-time singer and I spent quite a few years on the road touring. I worked in Japan, Dubai, Bangkok and all kinds of places – I was even on a cruise ship for a while! When I moved to Melbourne, I was really determined to concentrate on the business side of music, so I started working in behind-the-scenes roles. Since then, I've worked in festivals and events. Now I'm running my own label and music consultancy and we are focused on supporting women and non-binary creatives.

What does an average day look like for you? Oh my goodness – every day is so different when you work in new creative spaces. It sounds like a cliche, but it really is. An average day might be writing songs, working on charts and a lot of rehearsals.

Because I have a seven-month-old and a three-year-old, it can be a bit of a crazy juggle to take care of everybody's breakfast, get everyone dressed and ready for the day before I head into work, so I drink a lot of coffee! Being a mum of two boys and trying to squeeze in being a singer and business owner is overwhelming, but wonderful at the same time.

What is your favourite and least favourite aspect of working in your industry? It is really challenging for Australian artists in the current music landscape, and there’s such little support for them. If you look at the last month, there's only been one Australian artist in the Top 40 ARIA Chart. Despite this, my passion for music has never wavered. I think about music all day, every day. I love communicating with audiences and I love that, to create songs, you literally start with nothing. It's just really amazing how you can write a song and create this mood and moment that can be somebody's favourite memory, or a soundtrack to the current time of their life. I love being with my fellow musicians – we are eccentric in our own ways and that sense of community is a beautiful thing.

How did Women of Soul Collective come to be? It started with a live show. We did some residencies and always had such high energy in the band and the audience; we really loved doing it.

A few years ago, I saw some of the statistics around women in the music industry as a whole, and only ten to 15 per cent of song-writing royalties are going to female artists. That is across everything including radio, TV and festivals. It's so low, I mean, there's probably more women in aerospace! When things got really dark during the pandemic I thought, “What would be great is to use this time as constructively as possible and really support women.” Working alongside talented women was such a fun experience, even in such a scary time, and so I feel like we've made lemonade out of lemons.

What makes an all-female team so important? I think for all of us, it was our first time actually doing this. It's extraordinarily rare that we got this opportunity – only two per cent of record producers worldwide identify as female. All of us are all doing different projects and are different types of people, but what we recognise is that often women don't get the opportunities that men do. We do work with men, of course. We have been running for over 10 years and there've been times where we can't find women because there might not be that many women working in the particular role we need. But with this album, we wanted to offer every job we needed to women first, and we actually did find female creatives to do every single aspect of making this album. That's why it's so important to us: it's about creating opportunities for people.

Tell us about Feel Good. We went with the title of ‘Feel Good’ because we think that's what everyone wants right now. I mean, we're still in a pandemic, there’s a cost-of-living crisis and housing is just out of control. The album features 14 original new songs, and we recorded the band live together because we've been doing live shows for so long, it just made sense. Every rehearsal, there was such great energy in the room. I wanted it to sound like an album you put on and listen to from start to finish, and I think we achieved that. It's a bit more mellow than our last record, but I think that just reflects where we are in all our lives.

What advice would you give to other women working in the music biz? Finding your people is so important, and finding other female artists is great since we all understand just how hard it can be, so it can be a really great support system. Solidarity is vital, and we need to all stick together and support one another since that makes us all shine.

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