UK musician Self Esteem: 'I think there’s a toxicity to constant positivity'

In 2021, Rebecca Lucy Taylor was catapulted to the kind of fame that musicians are expected to dream about.

Her solo album Prioritise Pleasure (released under the name Self Esteem) was hugely acclaimed, and she appeared across UK TV on The Graham Norton Show, Later… With Jools Holland, Taskmaster, and an array of panel shows.

But Taylor, renowned for her candid lyrics about self-empowerment, says there was a downside.

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“After Prioritise Pleasure everything I wanted to happen had happened. I definitely burned out. I wasn’t well. I had nothing left in my brain. In the UK I was this beacon of body positivity and self-acceptance, but I just wasn’t feeling like that.

“I think there’s a toxicity to constant positivity and constant being ok with yourself. I just don’t think it’s possible, and I was personally trying to accept that about myself.”

This idea is reflected throughout Taylor’s new album, A Complicated Woman. On its first track ‘I Do and I Don’t Care’ she sings “we’re not chasing happiness anymore girls, we’re chasing nothing”.

Taylor acknowledges the nihilism in the lyric, explaining “I like the idea that I’m kind of saying ‘you know what, we’re not trying to be thin, we’re not trying to be fat, we’re not trying to be this, we’re not trying to be that, we’re just trying to be nothing’.

“That helped me,” she says. “I moved my goalposts and thought ‘you’ve just got to be okay’, and that slowly became how I got better, and how I did another album.”

Prior to making music as Self Esteem, Taylor had been one half of UK indie duo Slow Club for about 10 years. When she began releasing solo music as Self Esteem in 2017, her profile started to rise.

The push and pull of doubt and certainty that runs through A Complicated Woman informs its tongue in cheek title. Taylor’s great gift as a songwriter is her ability to channel anxiety into anthemic pop music. The difference this time was that it stemmed from her own success.

“No one cared about any music I’d made before - much - and then suddenly they did. So I had all my normal press that I would do, and a normal amount of gigs, and then there was just a tsunami of all these other people wanting me.

“Obviously you have to do it, so you’re six months behind at all times catching up. There was no let up. But I’d wanted it for so long, I’d wanted someone to hear me for so long, that I was very glad to do it.”

She’s an approachable pop star who sings about relatable things, so with increased profile came more attention from fans. Taylor says some of it is welcome.

“If a girly is telling me that a guy is not texting her back and she doesn’t know where she stands, I’m ready to give advice about that sort of thing.”

But there was a flipside.

“I started to get hassled on the internet, because increased visibility means you get more nice things and you get more nasty things.

“Cancel culture being this huge thing we’re constantly indulging in, I found myself indulging in it, and having an opinion. The more visible I got the more I thought ‘someone could say I said something, and it’s over.’

“So [A Complicated Woman has] a backdrop of that really, I was really frightened I’d put a foot wrong and it’d be taken from me. Which isn’t a human way to live.”

It’s her first album on a major label, having signed with Polydor after the success of Prioritise Pleasure. Taylor, at this point a 20-year veteran of the music industry, says it’s very different to how it used to be.

“There’s a big thirst for me doing TikTok content, so I was on a set with a load of boys under 24 trying to help me do TikToks, and I was like ‘I gotta tell you guys, I’m decades older than you and I don’t understand any of this, and I don’t like it.’”

She prefers Instagram, where albums are teased for years prior with screenshots of in-progress lyrics.

“I’ve always liked to show process as well as result,” she says.

“I think in pop music, especially female pop music, you’re expected to be this perfect finished thing. And you don’t explain how you got there, to make sure no one else knows how to be perfect.”

In 2023 Taylor performed as Sally Bowles in Cabaret during a six month residency on London’s West End, an experience which informed A Complicated Woman. Prior to its release, she performed the album as part of a “quasi-theatrical experience” at the Duke of York theatre.

The interest in theatricality has been there from the start, she says.

“Every Self Esteem album I’m getting closer to what the idea was originally, shedding a sort of shame or embarrassment.

“Those years of being in an indie band… it still haunts me, still makes me think ‘who do you think you are’ if I’m theatrical, or over the top, or showing emotion. It still isn’t easy, because it was ingrained at such an early age to stay cool, and especially as a woman, to stay really palatable.”