Before she wrote The Frost, Kelsey Taylor knew she wanted to write a concept album.
“All of my favorite albums are concept albums,” says Taylor, 22. “At the time, I was listening to a lot of this band, Oh Hellos, and their kind of niche is folk rock.”
She was attracted to the band’s Dear Wormwood album. “It’s really cohesive top to bottom and has musical themes and lyrical themes through the whole thing. The first time I heard it I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh. This is the kind of thing I want to make.’ I’ve always been very into stories. Any kind of story. I read a lot. I love film and television. I would write a lot of short stories and things of that nature before I got into songwriting.”
Taylor, who began writing songs three years ago, says, “I think I’m drawn to really large form content as opposed to a single song. I love the idea that a theme can be carried through this giant overarching work and the songs are more like chapters than stand-alone things.”
With the idea of one day writing a concept album, Taylor kept a journal during her senior year at University of Memphis. “I would scribble an idea every time I had one.”
The entries were diverse. “It ranged anywhere from a phase of life I would write about, to talking about a book that I loved.”
Taylor, who majored in music business, says she was required to do a senior project at the end of the year. Her voice teacher suggested she combine a recital with an album for her project. Her teacher also told her she might write about how she’dbeen dealing with isolation during the pandemic lockdown/quarantine.
Taylor went to a coffee shop with her journal and began “recounting everything” top to bottom like free-verse poetry. She wrote down the journal entries with the idea of inserting little instrumentals here and there. “I tried to keep it pretty open ended from my own personal experience about that desolate period, but I kept it broad — as being about going through a difficult time in your life.”
She composed songs based on what she wrote down. “I would get really inspired and go from song to song and lock in whatever flowed off my brain.
“I was breaking it down song by song. I would spend maybe a week, four or five days, on each song until I had it where I wanted it to go. I was very picky with word choices and the way it cadenced.”
And, she says, “As I was writing, it kind of turned into something else. The whole album shifted.”
She had been reading T. S. Elliot’s “The Waste Land.” “I got into references from that, and the album — instead of being about a difficult or depressive period — turned into an album about grief and loss and how we cope with it.
“I had a little outline I was going off of and I sat down and sort of rewrote the entire thing top to bottom. The first draft of it.
“I just thought that would be an interesting way to write. Instead of going song by song and trying get really detailed about it right off the bat.”
Taylor wrote the entire album, which contains nine songs and two instrumentals, between November 2020 and January 2021.
She chose The Frost because she loves metaphors. “I wanted to find one giant metaphor to use for the whole thing.”
Taylor broke the album into seasons. “The dark period you’re going through, the grief, that would be the idea of winter. And spring coming out the other side.”
The fist song, “Aspen,” was named after the tree, not the city. Aspen leaves turn “a pretty bright yellow” in Autumn. So, that song is a “pretty, bright song.”
Also, fall is “a warm or nice period of your life before this darker period.”
The album eventually gets to “The Longest Night of the Coldest Year.” “I was using that as the ‘longest night’ being the solstice. Least sunlight maybe the least hopeful. Maybe you feel like you’re not going to come out of it. It’s quite heavy, but very folk rock. Huge gang vocals and string quintets. It’s just massive. The bass on that song is a bowed upright instead of an electric bass.”
“Bloom,” which is spring, has many references to Elliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The poem’s first line — “Let us go then you and I,” — is one of many vocal lines that are performed simultaneously in the song.
Taylor specifically didn’t use “summer” on the album. “I just wanted to bookend winter. I think that was part of it. I wanted that to be the focus.”
But, she says, “I just don’t like summer. It doesn’t have to be there. I don’t know. I honestly think I’m just not built for heat.”
Plus, she’d rather be in school than on summer break. “I really liked school and I was very good at school.”
Taylor made a video of The Frost for her senior project. “We’d been having virtual recitals at the university since Covid happened. I wanted to be more artful about it than just setting up a camera in the concert hall. If I was going to do this, I wanted to go all the way. I ended up renting a day at Annesdale Mansion on Lamar and making this super high production live video of the whole thing.”
She formed a six-person band with herself on vocals and piano and a drummer, guitarist, cellist, violinist, and an auxiliary percussionist. “Everyone else except the drummer sang. We did it in one of the front rooms with all the dark wood and gold mirrors.”
Taylor recorded the album “all over the place,” including people’s homes and at Young Avenue Sound.
She released the video in May, 2021, and the full album on December 3rd.
Since then, Taylor has been writing more material. Her alternate acoustic versions of three of the songs from the album will be released March 1st.
She did take a brief rest, but she’s already setting up two live shows for spring. “It’s hard for me to take a break.”
The Frost gets heavy in some places, but that doesn’t necessarily describe Taylor. “I think my resting face is just a little angry looking, but I’m not actually angry.
“In superficial relationships, I think outwardly I represent cheerful and friendly and welcoming. But I think inwardly I tend to lean to the darker side.”
But, she adds, “Not in an evil way.”
To listen to the album, click here: https://open.spotify.com/album/3QkhMKDb8kIVrh3E32DESO?si=C_GUc5sRRhqaoLvsDN4W0w
