CREATIVE CONVERSATIONS 148: BELLA MACKENZIE ON BIGSOUND, AUTOGRAPHING TRUCKS, AND BEING AN AUSTRALIAN FEMALE COUNTRY ARTIST
Futuremag Music had the honour of sitting with rising star Bella Mackenzie at BIGSOUND to chat about her recently released single, Wasted, the first truck she autographed, and being an Australian, female country artist.
FMM: Hey Bella, how has it been like to play at BIGSOUND?
Bella: Very hectic, I would say. It’s my first one, so I didn't really know what to expect but I feel like it's been so much fun, and I'm very, very grateful to be here but yeah, very, very full on.
FMM: What’s been your favourite part about seeing everyone out here in Brisbane?
Bella: I think it's just, literally, you walk anywhere, and you see people you know. I feel like I have been mainly running into people that I know on the street, which is cool. I feel everyone's here, everyone's in the same mindset; ready to play and excited to be here.
FMM: Amazing. I wanted to chat about Wasted as well, your newly released single. It’s amazing, congratulations on that. What was your favourite part about writing Wasted?
Bella: Thank you. I wrote Wasted a while ago with my producer in Sydney, and I had a meeting with my label that day about the upcoming EP. I was like, I really would like to do a collab on it, but I didn't know who with or where to start or anything. And so, they were like, “Okay, go write one.” We went to the studio that day and we wrote Wasted. We didn't know who we wanted on it yet but obviously we ended up getting Lecade.
He's a US country artist. I posted a video on Tiktok, a cover of his song, and he found it. That's kind of how we started messaging. I realised I had that song [Wasted] in the bank, and I was like, this would be really perfect for us to sing together. He loved it, and put his verse down.
FMM: Did you go into the studio knowing what you were going to write about, or was it something that just happened?
Bella: Yeah, I had a little bit of an idea that I wanted to write a song from the guy and the girl’s perspective about going out and seeing an ex. I just feel like it's such a relatable story, and I feel like that song [Wasted] is so unique because we get to hear both sides of the story.
FMM: My favourite verse from Wasted is, “What if you hit the bottom of your glass and you see me and you think of the past.” I love those lines. I was wondering, is there a particular line in the song that’s special to you?
Bella: I think I love “When you take it, you take it too far.” It just sums up the whole story of the song; everything is good in small doses. So, I feel like that's probably my favourite one.
FMM: That’s a perfect thesis statement for Wasted. You filmed the music video in a bar too, right?
Bella: Yeah, we filmed it in Honky Tonks down the road!
FMM: No way!
Bella: Yeah! I was here for some other event. He [Lecade] filmed his part in a bar in Nashville, so they were like, “It’d be so cool if you did it in a bar somewhere.” Where I live in Mackay, there’s not really any cool-looking bar, so I was already here, and I thought Honky Tonks was perfect!
FMM: Oh, wow! Was it weird to go back to Honky Tonks on this trip for BIGSOUND?
Bella: I went back and did another thing the other day there. It was so weird! I don’t know, it’s just such a cool venue and I was like, “This is sweet,” but that was my first time going in when I filmed the video for Wasted, so I was just in awe.
FMM: Incredible. I wanted to talk to you about your musical influences. What were some of the albums or artists that were most formative to you growing up?
Bella: I think my mum. She always listened to Zac Brown Band, which I'd say they’re country, but I guess they're more like a Caribbean kind of country, beachy vibes, so she loves that. Dad was always into his old rock vibes like Bob Dylan, and he was listening to Bruce Springsteen as well, so I feel like I kind of got that from them.
We owned a pub in a small little town, and so I feel like every kind of musician, every genre that you could think of, was playing at the pub every single weekend. From when I was such a little kid, I was just hearing all sorts of different music. I feel like that expanded my inspiration for my own music; getting to not only just hear country, but everything, and also other artists’ interpretations of different genres and things like that.
FMM: Was there a specific point in time where you decided to make music and take it seriously?
Bella: I've always loved music. I always wanted to sing. I was always that kid who was like, “Watch this, Mum,” but I feel like when I was 12, I was like, “I want to learn how to play the guitar.” I started with the ukulele and then I wanted to get into the guitar. I taught myself how to play guitar off YouTube. Then, I started entering the little country music contests they have where I live, little regional ones. I started competing in those. Getting feedback from the judges and meeting other people that were loving the music that I was loving at the time; I think that was the inspiration that I needed to go, “Yeah, I can do this.”
FMM: You also recently signed your first truck, right? Could you explain the significance of that to me as someone who's not well-versed in country music?
Bella: It was actually the most random story. You’ve done your research, I love it!
FMM: Yeah, I went through your Instagram!
Bella: I love it. [laughs] It was so random. We were upstairs, I was just doing a little meet and greet, signing merch and things like that at the venue. This guy was then like, “I’d love if you could sign my truck!” and I was like, “That’s so random, but sure!”
It was so fun. That’s the most country thing ever, literally. I thought it was so funny because we walked out, I had signed his truck, and we were about to go to lunch. Since he was a local, we asked him, “Where do you think is best for lunch?” and everything. He gave the most country answer. He was like, “Oh, this pub’s really, really good. They don’t have oysters or any of the fancy shit.” I thought that was so funny.
FMM: That’s so random! [laughs] I feel like the most random memories can be the most memorable.
Bella: Yeah! It was so memorable. It was literally a very similar truck to what I had in my first music video that I did with a label. It was so cool. He was like, “I have a truck that’s like the one in the video, can you sign it?”
It was also so random because his partner and him loved this random song I put out years and years and years ago as a community project. I personally did not like the song at all but it’s still out there. It was just so random because he said, “This is our favourite song of yours. We dance to it in the kitchen when we have a bad day.”
It was so cute! So, when I signed the truck – the song is called Slice of Happiness – and he was like, “Can you write something about that?”
I just said, “Slice of Happiness is yours.”
FMM: Oh, that is so beautiful.
Bella: [laughs] It was very wholesome!
FMM: Do you still get surprised – and I’m sure you have your fair share of experience with this – when people come up to you and tell you that their favourite song is one of your songs?
Bella: I feel like, not really. Even now, I'll look at…with Wasted, the streaming numbers have been going crazy. It's only been out for a week, pretty much, and I keep looking at it going, “That’s not real.” Even when I look and it tells you, 100 people are listening to it right now. It’s very surreal. I guess that's one thing. You see your following and everything, but then when you meet them in person, they're like, “I saw this, and I saw that” and you go, “Oh!” It’s very cool.
FMM: Speaking of charts, Cowboy went up to number two on the Australian Country Music Charts. That’s incredible! Where were you when you found out?
Bella: I think I was at home, to be honest, which was good. I was with my family and everything, so that was nice. It’s 1 to 50, that chart. It [Cowboy] debuted at 50, but then it kept going up every single week. The chart comes out every Friday, so we were watching it every Friday. We go, “I wonder where it is today?” My producer and I, we kept checking it over and over to see where it was. It went from 50 and jumped up to 30 something, then 20, maybe, then it was like 6, 5, 4, 3, and 2, so it was very, very cool. It was working its way up every week, which was pretty surreal.
FMM: With country music, I think there's traditionally this perception that it’s written mostly by men, for men. We’ve seen an influx of women going into country music in the US, but what has your experience in the Australian country scene been like?
Bella: I think country music, definitely to the general person, it feels very male-dominated. It feels like it’s about being on the farm or being in a truck. It’s not typically sung by women, and that’s kind of how it originated. I feel, especially like you said, in the States, there’s just so many women at the moment who are killing it and paving the way, and they have been for years and years, but I feel like now, there are a bunch of young, gun females just really killing it at the moment.
Me personally, in Australia, I take a lot of inspiration from the US, and seeing how they’re [American women in country music] able to do it is very, very inspirational and needed because there are a lot of males in this genre specifically that it starts to take over. But I feel like we’re coming through.
FMM: I think even just having people see you and what you’re doing in country music is so important. That visibility is representation.
Bella: Exactly. I think about the young girls as well looking up to us, the females in the industry, and going, “I would love to be a country singer,” or thinking that they can do pop too or whatever. I love getting to meet little girls at shows who say “I love singing!” and that's my favourite part because that was me. Now, I get to inspire them as well.
FMM: That’s amazing, Bella. I wanted to ask you about the Ridin’ Hearts Festival. You were in the audience for 2023 and you’re playing it this year, right?
Bella: Yeah, in November!
FMM: What’s that transition like for you?
Bella: So, it was actually their [Ridin’ Hearts Festival] first year last year, and they asked me to come do some content and share my experience, do a little bit of “A day in the life” type thing. I was super excited about the first festival because it's run by the same people as CMC Rocks, which is one of the biggest country festivals in Australia, so it's massive and it's the same team. So I was like, “This will be great.”
They had all the international headliners coming in and everything. I was super excited last year, standing there in the crowd, and I was like, “This would be really cool to play.” They then reached out to me this year to play in November, and I was so excited. It’s going to be such a good event right in the middle of Sydney and Melbourne. It’s so random for a country festival, but they pulled an awesome crowd last year.
FMM: That’s so exciting! My last question is, do you have a dream venue that you'd like to perform at?
Bella: Yeah, I think probably the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. It’s just a very high honour in country music to be able to play there. I feel like it's very well known, even for the biggest artists, they still feel very grateful and lucky when they get to go play there, so I feel like that would be a good run!