How Natalie McCool learnt to do it herself 

Chatting to Best Fit about her album, Good For The Soul, in the middle of another heatwave, she does well to articulately condense the past few years of an already rich and full career. 

“I think a lot of artists now are waiting until they find the sound before releasing things. But I think, just release the thing and then you'll just find it along the way,” she smiles. “I feel like I've really developed the sort of music I want to make over the years and just sort of found it by doing it.”

Growing up, McCool’s dad taught guitar in her primary school, but it was rather his influence than direct teaching which caught her imagination. “He'd be playing blues guitar, slide guitar was his favorite, and then he'd be writing little bits of songs - his own guitar pieces,” she says. “I definitely got into guitar and wasn't really so much into singing. Then Avril Lavigne came out and I was obsessed. Then I bought an electric guitar and then I just went from there, really.”

McCool grew up in Widnes, a small industrial town between Manchester and Liverpool. Between the town’s local music community, which held a live night called Fused, and her older sister’s musical taste, which ranged from D’Angelo to Jeff Buckley, her passion for writing and performing was cemented.

After A Levels, she enrolled at the renowned Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, where she discovered a like-minded community of musicians and peers. “Whoever you meet in that period, I think it's like friends for life,” she says. “LIPA was very good at putting emphasis on that.”

After graduating, she retained that sense of collaboration and threw herself into music, releasing her debut self-titled album in 2013. From there, she has continued to evolve in the midst of the music industry, releasing two more records, 2016’s The Great Unknown and 2021’s Memory Girl. 

Her progression as both artist and producer is evident across her work, as McCool took on more and more of the leading roles within her creative journey. But it was producing a large-scale event when Liverpool hosted the Eurovision Song Contest on behalf of Ukraine that truly tested her resourcefulness. After being approached by Culture Liverpool, she worked with Stealing Sheep to bring together a ninety-minute concert at the iconic Pier Head on the city’s Waterfront. 

“We devised this sort of really avant garde show with a ten-piece female band, and then we had guest artists from Liverpool. We had a choir, dancers, it was a really big scale thing,” she says. “I think it was the scale of the project that was very inspiring because you don't ever really dream of working at that scale. Having the guest artists, thinking about where they could fit into the songs and the show as a wider thing, I really enjoyed it and I think I wanted to continue that for this next album - the confidence and sense of bringing other people into your world and dreaming big.”

McCool took that confidence and collaborative spirit and set about writing and producing Good For The Soul. Her first stop was a session with Dan Haggis from The Wombats. Together they wrote the record’s lead single “Coming of Age”. “I'd worked with Dan before on a couple tracks that I'd released on the last album and I always have a really nice time writing with him and we always get something that I really like,” she says. 

A euphoric pulse of self-discovery, it also features vocals from Trans Voices and London Contemporary Voices. She met Trans Voices founder ILĀ Kamalagharan while on a writing camp in LA. “I met her and we just hit it off and then I came and sang with the choir a couple times,” she says. “I knew that I wanted a choir on ‘Coming of Age’ when we wrote it. I'm in London Contemporary Voices as well, so that was really nice having them come on. It's sort of a mix of the two.”

McCool describes the album process as “higgledy-piggledy,” bringing together different collaborators based on wherever the music took her. Aside from the atmospherically dark standout “Sleeping Beauty”, she produced the entire album. All but two tracks boast a feature, which again was approached with the same spirit she built Welcome to Eurotopia for Eurovision. “A lot of the tracks I was thinking, ‘Maybe I won't have a second verse there,’ or ‘Maybe I'll just make this bridge section that someone could possibly come on and do some vocals on.’ So it was a bit nonlinear,” she says. “It was sort of matching who do I really like and admire and what tracks would they be into? I had a pretty good success rate when I was reaching out to people.”

For “Sleeping Beauty” she worked with producer Danio Forni, while the song features She Drew The Gun’s Louisa Roach. “I've always admired Lou. I think she's amazing,” says McCool. 

Another prominent collaboration is with Manchester artist Renee Stormz. On the pivotal track “So Lonely Lonely” her vocal juxtaposes with McCool’s rich pop swoon, a sharp injection of momentum. “I really struggled to place someone on that because I knew I wanted a female vocalist and maybe like a bit of a harder vocalist - more like spoken, maybe not sung,” she says. “I was really struggling to find someone who I thought was cool and then, just on Instagram, stumbled across Renee. I could just hear her voice on it.”

The track helps transition the record from its brighter and more immediate first side into a darker, introspective second half. “I think I was just in a big experimental phase coming off the back of that show, but then I really liked the breadth of the material,” she explains. “I was like, maybe there's like a distinctive two sides to it, like you would have on a vinyl.”

Across the album, McCool brings together a bright array of diverse voices and sonic textures to create a record that balances her own creative instincts with a passionate collaborative spirit. Bringing everything together with her direct style of writing, she contextualises the songs with the album’s titular joie de vive. “That was actually really straightforward for me because there are commonalities with the things that I do write about. I do write a lot about discovery, self-discovery, almost like making peace with yourself,” she explains. “I think that's a big theme across all the songs, is like the becoming of self and just acknowledging who you are.”