Immediate success for Hollie Rogers' new album Everything's Fine

Unsigned Horsham musician Hollie Rogers found herself competing with Hollywood royalty when she released her new album.

Everything’s Fine was blocked from number one in the Jazz & Blues chart by a surprise Jeff Goldblum release: “So I'm currently the filling in a Jeff Goldblum/Miles Davis sandwich!”

It’s a huge achievement. Hollie is 100 per cent independent with no label and no management behind her, and the album was largely crowdfunded by fans.

As for the title of the album, she confesses that it is very much sarcastically meant.

“My last album in 2022 was Criminal Heart. I don't take myself too seriously but maybe with the last album it was about more serious subject matter. It was where I was in my life at that time. When you are in your 20s, you feel things more intensely because it might be the first time that you are going through these things. But as you got older, though you still do feel things, you feel that you have felt them before and so they are not so intense. And I think this new album is more reflective of where I am now, a reflection of my life and the things that I am juggling.

“And ‘Everything’s fine’ is that thing that you say when someone asks you whether everything's OK. It is what you say even though the house is burning down, everything is falling apart and you're really struggling. And yet you still say that ‘Everything’s fine!’”

Everything’s Fine features collaborations with Elles Bailey, Beth Nielsen Chapman and The Budapest Symphony Orchestra. It’s available now on all platforms and reflects happy times working with Squeeze’s Chris Difford at his writing camps.

“He's really good at putting people together. He is the man behind the curtain. He is present but he does not give too much direction. He just orchestrates the camp but I got so much from it in terms of writing songs and also the people that you meet and you connect with and that you stay in touch with. To write with Beth Nielsen Chapman and to open for her and to have her at the end of the telephone, it is all down to Chris. He likes to connect people, and he likes to put emerging artists together with people like Beth. It is just great.”

As for the album's subject matter: “It is just really taking a look at modern adult life. It is about life in all its unpredictability and all the unexpected turns that it can take. It's both serious and light-hearted at the same time. I don't ever take myself too seriously, and I do like to inject a little bit of humour. I want to have a bit of fun with this.”

Hollie’s first album was as a teenager, an album that she doesn't really count. It's not officially out there though she suspects her mother is still “hoarding a number of copies!” The first official album was in 2014. She has now done three albums and one EP.

“I feel really proud of this one. I put absolutely everything into it. I have not cut corners and I've put into it everything that I've learned. I've spoken to other independent artists and shared with them what has gone well for them and what hasn't gone so well, and I've done this to the best of my ability. And I've tried to put proper money into it too. I did a crowd-funder which raised more than half of the cost of the album. And that feels nice. It feels like a proper collective project. These are my songs but without the fans this album just would not have happened.”

As well as the title-track collaboration with Beth Nielsen Chapman and Elles Bailey, the album also features a collaboration with The Budapest Symphony Orchestra on the song Spaceman.

“The album is varied in terms of genre and subject matter because it's half co-writes and half things I've written on my own. My last album was almost all things I'd written alone.

“Co-writing is such a different beast to solo songwriting, like apples and oranges. Writing on your own tends to be more deeply personal and often cathartic. When writing with others, you may be total strangers, and you may be writing about somebody else's experience not your own, or even something entirely made up. Musically songs can end up going in a different direction to where you might have taken it on your own, so co-writing is great for professional development and learning from others. “Spaceman is a great example of a co-write going somewhere unexpected. I wrote it with my keys player Ed Blunt, who I write with often. The song came out of a shared personal experience when we saw a huge meteor flying very low over our heads before it landed just a few miles away – an amazing thing to see. It prompted the opening line ‘Remember the night we saw the light in the sky’ – but then took on a whole new narrative, which listeners have interpreted as being a metaphor for lost love or grief. I don't think that would have happened if it had been a solo write.”