How Chelsea Cutler and Jeremy Zucker found an escape from reality

She’s joined by her Brent conspirator Jeremy Zucker, who dials in over a faltering connection. Throughout our chat the pair bounce off each other, interrupting, questioning and reviving the close camaraderie that makes their collaboration so special.

On brent iii, the pair continue to expand the world they first introduced with their 2019 EP brent. An autumnal tapestry of New England-inspired aesthetics, hygge sentiment and rich, romantic imagery, the essence of Brent is more a feeling than a real place. Like an antidote to Brat summer, Brent fall is delicate and demure.

Both artists in their own right, Cutler and Zucker began their collaboration after a series of serendipitous events. Neither expected their partnership to grow into the multi-platinum project it’s become, and have both continued with their own solo releases in parallel to the ascension of all things Brent.

Alongside this third release under the Brent banner, their first full-length, they’ve announced Brent Forever: The Tour, their first time touring the project together. Following on from two live releases - 2019’s brent (live in new york) an intimate and beautifully captured studio performance, and 2021’s pandemic-refined brent: live from the internet - it’ll be their first time on the road with dates spanning three weeks across the US.

On brent iii they expand on their previous EPs to create an all-encompassing world of warm harmonies, steely sentiment and audacious choruses. The songs are still as intimate and captivating, but their range of influence and the emotions and themes they touch on push the boundaries of Brent further into the parallels of real life. If what came before felt like an escape, on brent iii Cutler and Zucker give their listener a vacation.

Cutler was raised in Connecticut, her parents’ influence sharply informing her early music tastes. “I think that my parents had a really massive influence because they pretty much had music playing all the time. It was always Bruce, The Beatles, a lot of Indigo Girls, Amos Lee, The Stones, Billy Joel,” she says. “My parents are classic, born in the 60s, Woodstock hippies. So I think they really shaped a lot of my music taste through that.”

Her musical journey started when her mum made her take piano lessons from a young age. She then progressed to guitar lessons before convincing her parents to buy her a drum kit which she’s sure is still “their biggest regret in life,” she laughs. “I would just sit and bang on it for a really long time.”

Describing her upbringing as “the most quintessential New England kind of life,” after high school she played varsity soccer at Amherst College, a small liberal arts school in Massachusetts, although she’s yet to watch Gilmore Girls, “Which is crazy, apparently,” she jokes.

Zucker was born and raised in New Jersey. Growing up, his dad was the Bruce fan while his mum had a fondness for Counting Crows. However, it was his older brothers who really shaped his early taste in music, turning him onto the likes of The Offspring and Blink 182. “Blink 182 was the first band that I became a true fan of, and that was when I was like, ‘I want to be a famous musician,’” he smiles. “Then middle school, it kind of got more hip-hop leaning and then college, more indie.”

After graduating high school he also attended a small liberal arts college, but in Colorado. Around that time, both he and Cutler began to upload their music onto Soundcloud. In the post-blog era of music discovery, the platform began to grow a close and supportive community of songwriters and artists who helped develop and champion each other’s work. “That was a really cool era of music. Soundcloud is still a really incredible place to discover music. I think particularly that kind of 2012 to 2018 era of music on Soundcloud was really innovative and interesting,” says Cutler. “I loved the blog era, though. I used to just sit in class all the time and just read through G-Man and Camelback Music and stuff. So I loved that.”

The pair met on Soundcloud, both fans of the other’s music, however they were based apart in different states. It was complete chance and serendipity that brought them together in person, at a frat party in Connecticut. “It doesn't get more American than that, does it?” jokes Zucker.

It was a day party, an outdoor afternoon event. At the time, Zucker was in a different era of his creativity compared to the heart-on-sleeve acoustic-pop he now makes. “When I started out it was definitely a little more like, you could tell I was in college. It was a little fuck-boyish and so it kind of made sense,” he laughs. “I don't think anyone was doing keg stands, but it was definitely masses of people all drunk and stupid with sunglasses and tank tops and really loud, bad music.”

Also coming from a much smaller college, Cutler was visiting a friend from school and found herself at the party. “The kind of frat experience was pretty foreign to me,” she says. “So if I'm remembering correctly, I think I was pretty inebriated.”

“How much do you remember about my performance?” asks Zucker, as the pair begin to reminisce about their first encounter. “This was the drunkest I've ever been on stage.”

“I remember it, but I was pretty intoxicated for sure…” says Cutler. “Do you remember us meeting?”

“Oh my god, yeah,” smiles Zucker. “I got off stage. You were under a tent to the right. I walked off stage and you were the first person that I ran into.”

“I don't remember,” Cutler admits. “I remember a lot of early parts of our friendship for sure, but that particular day was a little overwhelming.”

“Not offended,” laughs Zucker. “It was a lot of serendipity, for sure.”

After meeting in person, Zucker and Cutler kept in touch and soon after both began to work with the same manager, again by chance. Their paths now firmly interwoven, testing their connection in a writing session became the obvious next step. Zucker was working on new material in a cabin outside the city and extended an invitation to Cutler. “It was a really weird mutual thing,” he shrugs.

The first session wasn’t organised with any intention of it becoming more than the organic sum of their solo work. “We wrote a song for my project called ‘Better Off,’ and it was just the most natural, easiest, most fun song I’d ever made,” smiles Zucker. “Immediately Chelsea and I were like, ‘OK, we got to come back here, there's obviously some magic.’ That next trip we only came up for three days, just me and her, to write music together. We had no plan. We wrote three amazing songs together. And we're like, we should just put this out, and that was it.”

Released in the spring of 2019, brent immediately captured imaginations with its warm sonics and bittersweet sentiment, its sepia-steeped stories hooked around the intimate pairing of Zucker and Cutler’s tender vocals. It also helped propel both their solo careers, with Cutler sharing her debut record How To Be Human less than a year later, closely followed by Zucker’s debut, love is not dying.

But appetite for their pair’s combined ingenuity continued to grow. As the 2020 pandemic put a halt to travel and touring, the draw of escaping the city began to take hold. Finding another cabin upstate where they could create together and fend off the lonely anxiety of Covid made for the perfect conception of brent ii, a sombre but hopeful continuation of its predecessor.

After half a decade of working together, Cutler and Zucker have honed their process while taking influence from each other’s differing strengths. “I’ve definitely learned a lot from Chelsea in the sense of don't overthink shit and just trust your intuition and gut and just do,” says Zucker.

“I think that working with Jeremy over the years has had a really massive and profound impact on how I approach my songwriting in general,” Cutler continues. “I think Jeremy is a really careful and deliberate and technical musician in all of the ways that I'm not those things. I think that I'm maybe a little bit more spontaneous in my creativity and a little bit less guarded at times. I don't know if that's the right word, but I think that he has inspired me so much to be really intentional. He probably doesn't even know that I'm doing this, but I'm sneaky taking videos of him when he's producing, or taking photos of what he's doing a lot. I've brought a lot of that into my own stuff and just learned.”

“You're talking plugins and stuff like that?” Zucker asks with surprise. “I always thought you purposely tried to stay disinterested so you could stay creative, and less technical.”

“Just watching the way that you produce or you mix things. I’m always on my phone but I'm not always on Instagram,” laughs Cutler. “If you're comping vocals or something, things like that, I check out on purpose because I can't sit for six hours straight and be fully locked into something. But typically, when you're actually doing something interesting, I'm always making videos of you.”

The sonics and visuals of brent iii and its predecessors play into the soft-toned world Zucker and Cutler have built around it. From their morning sun-kissed rural press shots to their snapshot artwork and post-cottage-core Americana aesthetic, the world of Brent plays on the safe feelings of cosiness and nostalgia.

As much as they’ve leaned into the world around their music, they found it happened organically rather than as a cynical marketing tactic. “It was very much an accident,” says Zucker. “We were talking about how we were going to promote it. It was like, Chelsea and I went to a cabin in the middle of rural Connecticut, an old converted carriage house studio, and sat in our pyjamas and watched movies and talked about life and wrote music and that was the feeling of Brent. I think the fans really caught on with the world of Brent and the idea was, the music is so cosy it makes you feel like you're home. So how do we represent that with our art and with the visuals?”

Their first EP echoed with heartbreak while its follow up offered glimmers of hope, but on brent iii the themes are fully rounded, and the album feels more developed, rooted in a wide-range of emotions and influence.

For Cutler, it’s testament to the longer period of time they gave themselves to work through their accumulated material. As well as several songwriting sessions, much of the album came together remotely, sending demos and ideas back and forth. “It's interesting because the first Brent EP we made in a really, really concentrated period of time, in just a few days and then brent ii, still mostly did it in a couple weeks,” she says. “The first time we sat down to work on brent iii was the summer of 2023, so we gave ourselves a really extended amount of time to write together and let that project come to life. I think it only makes sense that it feels a bit more comprehensive in terms of subject matter and maybe a little more varied as well because we each lived a full year. Life is just so fast. I think that last year was really transformative for both of us and I think there's a lot for us to write about.”

Most of the sessions for brent iii took place on different coasts. Recent single “A-Frame,” a glorious footstomp of pop-folk, took inspiration from its inception. “We could move upstate, buy an old A-frame. I know you always wanted to live off the land,” starts the opening verse. Penned in a cabin in Southern California, the song is steeped in Brent's outdoor lore. “We did a bit in Big Bear, we did a bit in LA, and then we did a bunch across a few different really cool studios in New York City as well. We made the project across a few different environments, which actually I think was great because I think each room we were in brought a different magic,” says Cutler. “I think Jeremy came out to New York twice, I went out to California twice. I feel like the album was made across these four week-long periods. And then we did a lot of tying loose ends virtually.”

It also marks the first time the pair have let in a third party to help with production, working with Thomas Michel, better known as Hazey Eyes, across several of the songs. “We wrote so many songs and had so many ideas for this project. Tom works with both of us to get projects over the finish line,” says Zucker. “I tried to not dive too deep in the production during the writing process, because Chelsea and I had such limited time together in the same room. We really focused on the lyrics and the melody, and the meaning of the song and the structure. We were really just making demos and then taking them home and honing the sound of them.”

First single “black & white” is lucious rush of acoustic romanticism, although it was something of a late addition to the record. “The day I got home from my US headline tour last April, I actually sat down and wrote a good bit of the song. I sent it to Jeremy and then we didn't really address it or talk about it,” says Cutler. “Then a few weeks before brent iii was due for submission, Jeremy messaged our group chat, ‘Wait, this song is great. Let's do it.’ It's crazy that it went from being this kind of last minute afterthought to being a really special piece of the whole album.”

“We're just in love with the life that it added to the record,” says Zucker. “It was really just one of the last pieces falling into place.”

For Cutler, “black & white” also made for the perfect introduction to their full-length, as a way of surmising her feelings around the process. “I think we loved the idea of putting that song out first because the undertone when I was writing it was, I just felt really grateful getting home from tour,” she says. “I can't believe this is our life. We get to just go play shows and every night thousands of people show up. I think it’s easy to get desensitised to that because at the end of the day, it is our job. If I spent every day thinking about how fortunate we are I'd be a puddle all the time. You have to toughen up and just desensitise, and kind of dissociate and not think about how crazy that is. But I think we wanted to put out a song that expressed a lot of gratitude and captured how we feel getting to do Brent another time.”

Album track “and the government too!” is a direct strike of sombre storytelling that eventually erupts into one of the records most dramatic moments. It might be fuelled by passionate rhetoric, but has nothing to do with the upcoming US elections. “Yeah, it's not political at all,” laughs Zucker. “My wife, who at the time we weren't married and she's from Germany, we were really trying to figure out how to get her to be able to stay here. It was the biggest hurdle of our relationship and just felt so ridiculous that the government had a say in something as deep and personal as love. It was like, get out of our lives! So the song is really about the struggle of distance and the romanticism and the longing of two people that just want to be together and the world is kind of against us. So it's like, ‘I would scream at the stars for keeping us apart, and the government too.’ The irony of throwing the government in there as a thing that's keeping us apart is what makes it almost kind of funny.”

Closing track “good things,” delivers another of the album’s more striking takes, an arrestingly composed rush of imagery-rich lyrics. “Yeah, that's got to be Chelsea’s most stunning vocal performance,” smiles Zucker.

Layered alongside the song’s evocative lines are distant found sounds, adding colour to the close atmosphere. “That was actually Jeremy’s idea. He was like, ‘Do you have any home videos?’ My parents sent an hour compilation and Jeremy just ripped the audio from it,” says Cutler. “So it's my parents talking to my brother and me, it's really cute. I sent them the record and they listened and got down to that, and they were both melting. I've a massive tendency to not send them music too, so I think they're pretty stoked to hear what Jeremy did with those little sound clips.”

The tangible, analogue feeling of brent iii seems at odds with its digital creation. “Yeah, we're mailing cassette tape demos back and forth,” laughs Cutler. “It's just nuts to think about all the times I was in my car listening to demos. That's such a weird thing as an artist that you create something and then it just lives alone on your phone and your computer for a really long time.”

It might have been made across a year, pieced together via Dropbox and email, but the atmosphere and life that’s breathed into brent iii is as much an escape from visceral reality as it is the sound of two friends catching up.