Charlotte Wessels’ has finally dropped her first traditional full-length, full-band solo album, The Obsession, which was released on September 20, 2024 via Napalm Records.
Featuring a collection of twelve tracks, Wessels is taking The Obsession to the next level with a band of her fellow ex-DELAIN cohorts Timo Somers (guitars, additional arrangements), Otto Schimmelpenninck van der Oije (bass) and Joey Marin de Boer (drums) as well as Sophia Vernikov (piano/hammond), contributing to the new heavier sound.
The album also features arrangements by Vikram Shankar (Silent Skies, Pain of Salvation), cello by Elianne Anemaat, was mixed by Guido Aalbers (Muse, Coldplay, The Gathering) and mastered by Andy VanDette (Porcupine Tree, VOLA, Dream Theater).
We caught up with Charlotte from her basement studio to talk about The Obsession, the writing process, as well as where it all started for her…
Sean: Hi Charlotte. It’s Sean from The Rockpit over in Perth in Western Australia. How are you doing?
Charlotte: That’s very far away. I’m doing fine, thank you. Thanks so much for covering the record. I appreciate it.
Sean: One thing I love about The Rockpit is all the different genres we cover. And symphonic metal is something I’ve only recently got into. Some of that’s thanks to you because when the press releases come in we get to listen to the tracks and I suddenly loved what I heard and that in turn sucked me in to want to hear more and now I‘ve just received the album in the last hour and I’m absolutely loving it.
Charlotte: I‘m so happy to hear that thank you so much.
Sean: How does it feel to finally be able to release it to the world?
Charlotte: I‘m very excited about this record. I don’t think I’ve ever been as excited about music going into the world so I‘m so glad to hear that people so far have been responding to it so well. September cannot come fast enough. I want everyone to hear the full thing because contrary to my previous records, which were compilations and just putting the songs together, this album was written to be like an album listening experience you know, so I want people to hear the full thing. On the other hand it is this time in between, like finishing the master of the album and releasing it, the photo shoots, making the artwork, the video recordings… I still have a few to go. And as you can see we’re set up for rehearsals in here. So we’re preparing for the first live shows. We’re getting crew together for a tour we’ve just booked. So fortunately, there’s a lot to keep us busy.
Sean: And of course, we never see that side of things. We just see a single pop up in the lead up to the release and think, oh, there we go. That was easy. But it’s all the nuts and bolts in the background that pull it all together. It’s wonderful to see the studio all set up, looking so busy.
Charlotte: Yeah, it’s a big mess, but I like it. [laughs] And also I’m also still releasing a song every month on Patreon, so I’m reconnecting, going from recording settings to live rehearsal settings, back and forth. So it’s always a big mess of spaghetti here. But at least everything is colour coded.
Sean: [laughs] Well, that will be the OCD I’m guessing.
Charlotte: Well, as my husband would say, unfortunately, I got the type of OCD that doesn’t make you a neat freak. [laughs] I’m quite messy, actually. So you would assume, but no, this is it.
Sean: Well, you just touched on the rehearsals for touring and playing live. I see you’ve got a launch night on October 4th in Utrecht, which must be exciting for you guys. And of course, a lot of familiar faces surrounding you on the album as well, which has been probably a really soothing thing for you to have so much support from close friends.
Charlotte: Absolutely. Yeah, normally I’d be pushing like that date, but I think, I don’t think a lot of people will make it over from Australia to Utrecht, probably. [laughs] But yeah, on October 4th, we cannot wait. And you’re absolutely right. Having this team be the team that I got to make the album with and that we get to tour the album with is really special. We have such a shared history. For those who don’t know, the drums are Joey de Boer, bass is Otto Schimmelpenninck van der Oije and then on the guitars is Timo Somers and all three of them were in Delain with me as well so we have this this whole shared history and synergy and just real life companionship. But then of course we also have Sophia Vernikov who we cannot forget, as she’s been with the band more recently, but she’s fitting in wonderfully. On the album she played the grand piano and the Hammond, and other additional key arrangements and orchestrations were done by Vikram Shankar, who did amazing also. But live she’ll be doing all of the keys. She has done all of the keys live for the past shows that we had so yeah, I cannot wait to hit the stage. We’ve got two festivals before we do the release show so we get to dip our feet.
Sean: I’ve only had one run through the album and I’m going to put it on a bit more later on tonight but ‘The Crying Room’ – oh my god what a track! Absolutely love it. That one jumped out at me immediately. Love ‘Breathe;’ and ‘Praise’ too. All the singles were fantastic. I could probably name them all and go through the whole list but what a fantastic body of work for a debut solo album. How did you go about putting these songs together? Do you have a method of song writing that you stick to?
Charlotte: So I still start down here in my studio or I try to go to a little cabin in the woods once every year but I haven’t done for the last year. I’m still trying to plan one because that’s usually where I gather a lot of ideas. And then I finish one song every month and put them on the Patreon. So it’s also interesting, like people who are on the Patreon. I’m not trying to push it, but people on the Patreon now, they can kind of see the difference between the first version of the song when I initially wrote it and I put it on Patreon and then, you know, what happened when I involved the band and we did the rearrangement. So if anyone is ever wondering how these songs started, the first versions of all of these songs do live on the Patreon page.
And yeah, where does it start? I still often start from lyric and melody hooks, but it’s become more on equal footing with starting from a chord progression or a musical hook or like an instrumental hook as well over the years and usually it will just be something that I want to get off my chest so yeah the way I do it now is I write and record the songs here. I use digital instruments. I have that mix that is the first version that goes to Patreon and then know, for the previous two albums, that was kind of the end of it. That was the finished version and those went on the record. But for this album, that was the beginning of it. You know, from there I still put the effort to make that first version stand as a song by its own right. But from there on, we started a process of seeing what could improve, rewriting, restructuring. I did a whole round of rearranging with Timo Somers, who went over all of the songs. And obviously if you’re gonna replace programmed guitars by Timo Somers, the best guitarist in the world, it’s going to make a huge, huge difference. And in some of the songs, it was that, it was just having him do the guitars. And also he often touched upon, you know, the bass and the drum arrangements as well to make them like really ready for the band.
And in other songs, like for example, like ‘Dopamine’, the first version on Patreon was really like an acoustic song. Like it was only harp and vocals. So there it really got built up to like a completely different version, like not just an improved version, but like a completely different version. So yeah, and then, you know, we got the entire band together, we recorded the drums first, but we had the entire band there to get that organic feel. We didn’t add it to drums a whole lot afterwards, like we didn’t pull it to the grid unnecessarily. So yeah, from there started this whole process of rearranging it and refining it and making it even better to see if it needs extra things. You mentioned ‘Praise’, the gospel choir on ‘Praise’, that was an absolute necessity. So yeah the song writing process still starts the same and it’s quite introspective still but then you know in the arrangement and rearrangement phase and the recording phase obviously this is where the team gets involved and yeah it makes a it makes a big difference.
Sean: Twelve tracks have made it on to ‘The Obsession’ but how many songs did you write and create in total? Was it pretty close to those those twelve or were there a few extra that made it hard to pick?
Charlotte: Because I’m still doing the thing where I write and record a song every month for the Patreon, I’m still going now. I’m working on song number fifty-three. Yeah, so basically as long as I keep that going, I’m always building, I’m always sort of building a new bank of songs, you know. Let’s see, they are in front of me on my screens now. So ‘Vigor and Valor’ was July 2022. So June ’22 was the first song that was written for this album. So from that moment, I kind of was already like, those were not going on the album, because ‘Tales Vol. 2’ wasn’t released at that point, but I did already hand in the master. So kind of from the moment that I handed in the master of ‘Tales Vol. 2’, I was like, okay, now I’m thinking of the new album.
Sean: Fantastic. But it’s interesting to find out how many songs are generated in the lead up to a release. And also, of course, we will link your Patreon to the interview as well. So you can say it as many times as you like [laughs].
Charlotte: Thank you. Yeah, it’s so much the basis of everything that I do, both creatively, but also just in terms of funding and also in terms of moral support. Like, it’s hard to talk about the music without involving it, you know, because it’s, yeah, it’s…
Sean: It’s something we love to support.
Charlotte: It’s at the heart of everything.
Sean: Obviously, you touched on touring. What’s the plans? Just obviously the album, a couple of festivals, and then I see you’re out with VOLA later in the year as well.
Charlotte: Yes, yes like you mentioned, we’ve got two festivals we got the the album release and then we have one show with Camelot, which is also amazing because we’ve toured with them so much back in DELAIN and then we do the tour with VOLA, which I’m very excited about – I’m a very big fan of VOLA so I’m gonna be checking out their set every night and we’re still planning after that. I’m hoping to do a full festival run next year but I don’t think that after the Vola run we’ve got things confirmed that I can talk about just yet so there’s gonna be more.
Sean: I’m sure as soon as we have any news we will get it up on The Rockpit. I’d love to talk to you, if I’ve got time, about your early influences because I read somewhere that there’s a very wide variety of music that influenced you were growing up. Artists like Pink Floyd, Genesis and Kate Bush were some mentioned but what was your earliest recollection of music as a child?
Charlotte: Yeah, I think like really early on my grandparents listened to a lot of classical music, my parents listened to music too. My dad loved The Beatles so that was always like a presence and I also got through my parents artists like Pink Floyd and Genesis and Kate Bush as well and my brother kind of started listening to metal and to heavier music – he’s only a year and a half older than I am so of course I looked up to him and his musical choices influenced mine but I’ve always been very eclectic. I remember that when I was… what do you call it in England? It’s when I was like ten years old or something I used to make mixtapes from the radio and I recorded Metallica and The Spice Girls, you know those were my jam. And it didn’t feel weird to me that those two would go together because no one had told me that that was weird. So, yeah, a very wide range of influences, I’d say.
And then, you know, as I got in my teenage years, the metal kind of stuck the most, both because it was how I was very much drawn to, culturally as well and also because I was singing and I was doing classical singing and you know in that time this musical trope of like the very high pitch female vocals with the very low grunts that was a very popular trope at that point. So I was in a lot of bands because people were, “oh, she’s a soprano”, you know. And yeah, so both musically just hanging out with my friends, that was when I started leaning more into metal. And of course, I met Martijn (Westerholt) when I was also very young. So that kind of developed very naturally into what I ended up doing.
Sean: I don’t want to take up much more of you time but I’ve just got a couple of general questions I’d love to finish with Charlotte, if I may please.
Charlotte: Yeah, actually this is the last interview so you don’t have to rush at all. It’s been fun.
Sean: It has [laughs]. If you could invite three musicians past or present, dead or alive, to join you for a bit of dinner who would you like to have sat at the table with you?
Charlotte: Okay, this one’s going to be girl dinner I think so it’s going to be Kate Bush because she’s just so wildly interesting and I would Amanda Palmer (The Dresden Dolls) because it would be fun and I want to thank her putting me on the path of Patreon and stuff. And I know I said girl dinner but now I was thinking maybe Nick Cave but maybe then it’s got to be Tori Amos or Sia I don’t know [laughs]. This is a very difficult question.
Sean: It’s always the third guest that trips people up [laughs]. I’ll let you have four guests.
Charlotte: Okay, thank you [laughs]. So yeah, it would be it would be Sia, Tori Amos, Kate Bush, and Amanda Palmer. That would be fun.
Sean: Interesting that you mentioned Nick Cave because I read also that you’ve got a little bit of thing for Nick Cave musically and for a bit of Radiohead and Muse. A friend of mine has just recorded an album at Radiohead’s studios in the UK at Courtyard Studios. He said it’s an incredible place.
Charlotte: I heard them for the first time when i was fifteen and I’ve been hooked ever since. They have always been one of my favourites, I love all of the albums – some take longer for me to love than others but I’m going through a Muse session at the moment. I’m loving Muse – just sheer power through some headphones! The first concert I ever went to without my parents when I was fourteen was Muse at this festival… it’s called AFAS Live, but it was called the Heineken Music Hall back then in Amsterdam. And it was when they had just released ‘Origin of Symmetry’. Yeah, my favourite album of theirs.
Sean: That nicely brings me to the next question – What was the last album you listened to?
Charlotte: Like start to finish? Hmmm. Let me check my Spotify. It was Willow, actually. What’s the name of the album again? I know that because Timo sent me ‘Empathogen’ by Willow. Yeah, it’s very proggy, jazzy, interesting. And I recommend it to everyone. I don’t even like jazz and I really like it. And I’ve seen like prog websites cover this record, which, you know, raised some eyebrows, but listen to the album and you’ll know exactly why. It’s really good.
Sean: I’ve saved the easiest question for last if you could be credited with writing any song ever written what song would you choose?
Charlotte: But is it just credited or is it like what song do you wish you had written? Oh, that’s a very hard question. Part of me wants to just pick something, you know, if it’s just about the credits, picking something like the thing that they play in front of the news, [laughs] because, you know, you’ll be rich but if it’s not about you know the creative fulfilment of having written it. I suppose it’s more about something you’ve heard and I guess ‘Paranoid Android’ or something like that but I just know that whatever I say here in thirty minutes I will be going, “Charlotte what the fuck?” [laughs]
Sean: [laughs] Well, you can have ‘Paranoid Android’. It’s all yours for 24 hours.
Charlotte: Okay. Thank you. [laughs]
Sean: Charlotte, thank you so, so much for your time. We hope you eventually get down to Australia with your band. That would be great to see you down here at some point.
Charlotte: It would be absolutely amazing. I’ve never ever been there so it’s way overdue. I would love it.
Sean: We wish you all the best for the album and we really, really appreciate your time and wish you all the best for the live shows, festivals and tour as well.
Charlotte: Thank you so much for the support and have a great evening over there.
Sean: Enjoy the rest of your day.
Charlotte: Thanks so much. Bye-bye.
