Elles Bailey Pushes Out of Her Comfort Zone on Beneath the Neon Glow

Elles Bailey had a major shift in perspective as she was working on material for her fourth studio album, the forthcoming Beneath the Neon Glow. While she had for years thought of lyrics as the most important part of a song, that changed sometime in 2023.

“It just suddenly clicked with me that, actually, melody is more important than lyrics—that is kind of what makes it a song, in the end,” Bailey said during a recent interview with Blues Rock Review. Though she still spent a lot of time and energy on her lyrics, Bailey went into the writing process for her new album determined to find the “sweet spot” between each song’s sound and message.

Instead of relying on the “same kinds of sounds” that she used before, Bailey sought to push her voice “out of its comfort zone.” After nearly three years of touring the material from her 2022 album Shining in the Half Light, she was ready for a new challenge.

“I love Shining,” Bailey said. “It’s a really special album to me. But it’s very easy for me to sing and tour; it’s very much in my wheelhouse. And that’s what I wanted to get out of: I wanted to get out of my wheelhouse and be like, ‘Come on, what else can you do?’”

There has been another big development for the British singer since she released Shining in the Half Light, which earned the Album of the Year Award at the 2023 UK Blues Awards. After releasing her first three studio albums independently, Bailey decided to begin working with an independent record label for her next project. Bailey’s own Outlaw Music is partnering with Cooking Vinyl for the August 9 release of Beneath the Neon Glow.

“Although I am working with a label, I still feel very independent—and also they are an independent label, which is great,” Bailey said. “We come from the same ideas and ideals.”

Having a little extra help has relieved some of the pressure Bailey dealt with on past projects. “What is amazing is that I’m not doing the heavy lifting anymore,” she explained. “It got to a point where I was just basically running a label for myself—which is great. But I wasn’t doing the artist thing anymore, and everything was suffering.”

There are parts of that process she still enjoys, as evidenced by a shipment she was waiting on at the time of our interview. Following a recent return to the studio to record acoustic versions of five new tracks, Bailey decided to release a special bootleg CD, the copies of which she is making by hand. High demand among fans led to a rush for supplies to make more, something Bailey hadn’t anticipated spending time on with just over two weeks remaining until release day.

“I’m very much enjoying it, but I’m just really hoping the stock arrives in time so I can get them all turned around before I go to Norway,” she said with a laugh, referring to her scheduled performances at the Notodden Blues Festival in early August.

Bailey described those bootleg CDs as being “handmade with love,” a fitting project in support of a 10-track album that’s all about different kinds of love. That theme started with a narrower focus on self-love, and expanded over time to include examinations of the love one has for friends, romantic partners and even specific points in time. These themes lend to the album’s sense of joy, which is sometimes at odds with individual songs about heartbreak and uncertainty. It is on those tracks that Bailey’s new focus on melody really makes a difference.

“There’s a lot of heartbreak, and there are a lot of sad lyrics in this record. But when I was writing, I was really consciously trying to write uplifting melodies,” said Bailey, who listed Hozier, Fleetwood Mac and Brent Cobb among her sources of inspiration for the new album. “It’s really nice that the sense that has come across from listening is that feeling of being uplifted, despite when sometimes the lyrical content is pure heartbreak.”

There is perhaps no better example of this than “Ballad of a Broken Dream,” a song Bailey wrote in 2019 with her friend, fellow singer—and the inspiration for another of the album’s tracks, “Silhouette in a Sunset”—Tamara Stewart.

“Lyrically, it felt like one of the best songs I’d ever been a part of writing,” Bailey said. “Melodically, it didn’t feel like an Elles Bailey song. And personally, it didn’t feel like a song that I felt like I could release.”

Bailey never intended to record “Ballad of a Broken Dream” due to how personal the song was, and kept it under wraps for a long time. But as she was gathering material for Beneath the Neon Glow, she added it to the mix. After spending years trying to rewrite it, Bailey started to believe the way she and Stewart initially crafted it was right on target, though Bailey still needed some convincing that she could record it for herself. The song quickly became a favorite for producer Dan Weller, and Bailey said it is also already a “fan favorite” among others who have heard it.

So what exactly is an “Elles Bailey song”? Bailey laughed at first before admitting, “I don’t even know.” It can be a complicated question for artists who are game to test themselves creatively and push the boundaries of what they once thought they could accomplish.

After all the time she spent making music after her last album, Bailey said she found herself at “this point where, actually, an Elles Bailey song is a song that I sing. I know that sounds stupid, but I don’t want to confine myself to genres, and I don’t want to be confined to a genre. Although I’m very grateful to the so many genres that have championed me. I think, for me, as long as I’m writing a good song that’s honest and authentic, that feels something to me, then that feels like I could sing it.”

As an artist and human, Bailey has learned that “we are never just one thing.”

“We are constantly changing. We’re evolving,” she said. “I’ve gotten to a point in my career where I want to be bold as well. If that means recording a song like ‘Let It Burn,’ which is totally not really comfortably in my wheelhouse, but feels amazing to do, then I’m going to do it.”

“Let It Burn” is a full-bodied barnburner of a song that Bailey described as having “full Hozier production.” Katey Joy Brookes, who Bailey has been a “huge” fan of for years, approached Bailey with a half-written “gift of a song” that they completed together. Brookes later contributed vocals to “Let It Burn,” and also sang on “If This Is Love” and “Love Yourself.”

Another track that finds Bailey stretching in new ways is “1972,” a nostalgic ode to what she described as “one of the coolest eras ever” and a simultaneous modern-day “craving to live more in the moment.” The song is her first to use a wah-wah pedal, which Bailey adamantly said she is “not a fan of.” That changed—for this song, at least—following a moment of truth in the studio when she realized the sound fit the song’s theme and style.

“I didn’t know whether that would make it sound more ’70s or not. It just felt right for the song at the time,” she said, adding that it might be the “only” song of hers that ever gets that treatment.

Looking back on the recording process, Bailey recalled that her album opener, the autobiographical “Enjoy the Ride,” was the last track she worked on and the one that made the most sense to be her new album’s first single.

“I’ve lived and breathed by the idea that there is no destination. And this musical journey that we’re on, like, it is a journey—enjoy that journey,” she said. “That just felt like such an opening statement for me for this album.”

Bailey is most hopeful that her fans will “feel uplifted” by the new songs. With Beneath the Neon Glow’s release now just days away, she will before long have an opportunity to find out for herself what audiences think as they hear the album for the first time and watch her take the material out on the road. Her headlining fall U.K. tour is set to kick off in September.