INTERVIEW: Kaylee Bell on her new album 'Cowboy Up': "Thank god for women in music really leading the way, so powerful, so strong, but so kind and caring and human"
Interview: Shalane Connors
Image: Garth Badger
Published: 14 October 2025
Popular music is an ever changing art form with trends, styles and soundscapes coming and going perhaps more rapidly than in any other art form. But if one facet of pop music that has perhaps evolved the most this century, it is undoubtedly country, and thanks to the trailblazing of Shania Twain and Taylor Swift, more specifically country-pop.
One of the biggest artists in this arena is New Zealand born Kaylee Bell, who recently released her fourth studio album Cowboy Up. She first released music in 2013 after moving to Australia, but her career truly exploded in 2022 when she appeared on The Voice Australia, where she sung her Keith Urban tribute song ‘Keith’ directly to Urban himself.
Across her decade plus career, she has supported superstars Ed Sheeran, The Chicks, Brad Paisley and more on their tours, has won awards at the CMA Awards, Aotearoa Music Awards, APRA Awards and the Golden Guitar Awards and for the past five years has been the most streamed female country artist for Australasia
On Cowboy Up, Bell has delivered an album that is her most personal to date, as it explores her identify, growth, love and also the music that made her the artist she is today.
Title track ‘Cowboy Up’ opens the album and is an infectious country-pop track that celebrates the stages of falling in love but also delivers an ultimatum - Bell will not be waiting around forever if you can’t commit. ‘Cause I can see the diamond ring / The dress, the cake, the whole damn thing / But I cant wait forever for you to’. It is a theme she returns to on ‘Ring On It’, whose title is self-explanatory when it comes to the message behind the song.
‘Red Dirt Romeo’ and ‘The Thing About Us’ deliver that classic, addictive country-pop sound where the two genres blend perfectly, before Bell takes a step back and pays homage to her earliest days in music with two standout tracks. ‘Torn’ is a faithful interpretation of the classic Natalie Imbruglia track that Bell puts her country pop stamp on, with the addition of a uplifting ‘na-na-na’ refrain. It represents a full circle moment for Bell as it was a song she loved growing up in the 1990s and ultimately helped form her own artistry many years later.
“It’s one of those songs I just had to sing,” she says. “It’s iconic, and I’ve always loved it, especially the melody. It felt like the right time to finally record a song that’s shaped me so much as an artist.”
It is followed by ‘Song For Shania’, which pays tribute to another of her musical inspirations Shania Twain. It tells the story of how she heard ‘You’re Still The One’ on the radio as a child, which encouraged her to learn the guitar and ultimately change her life. She also references the impact Twain had on her as a person, and that women can have it all. ‘Showed me I could be a mother, I could be a wife / Or be a rockstar at the same damn time.’
The album comes to a close with ‘Walk In Tennessee Tonight’, arguably the most pure-country song on the album, followed by the tender ballad ‘Heartbeat’ in which Bell reflects on life when she finds out she is pregnant ‘we're turning two into three’. It brings the story of the album to it’s beautiful, natural conclusion - starting with a relationship that she needs commitment from, through to that relationship becoming fully committed as she starts a family.
Cowboy Up is a beautifully warm album that brings the gorgeous storytelling of country music together with life affirming, pop-speckled soundscape that is simply full of absolute joy. A true gem of an album, we recently caught up with Bell to chat all about its creation.
Hi Kaylee! So we're here celebrating the release of your brand new album. Cowboy Up. It's your fourth studio album, and comes off the back of a massive few years for you. How does it feel?
I'm not sure what the word is, maybe freeing? When you put an album out in the world, it's like everything that you've lived with for 12 months and now you can finally share it and talk about it and connect with fans. We did an album launch the other week, it was super intimate, super special, and was such a good reminder of the fact that God, I love being around people, and I love making music. Because it brings so many people together in such a nice way. It's the best feeling to be doing something that's just so positive.
is it a massive relief to get it out there, and how is it being received?
We've dribbled a few singles out this year, which has been fun. We actually had the record made in December last year and for the first time in my life I was like, we have these songs ready. Normally you're scrambling to get the record finished. So we have been kind of banging out singles every six weeks this year, that’s also so that we can inject some of those songs into the live shows. With the songs I release and the songs that I make I'm always thinking of the live show and wanting to play them live. That's the whole point. So it's been really cool that the fans have slowly had the chance to have some of these songs throughout the year, and now it's awesome to bundle it up with all the beautiful artwork and all the fun little nuances of making a record and being able to hand that over.
You're originally from New Zealand, and I believe you recorded some of this album in Nashville?
Yeah, so all the musicians that played in the tracking that was done mostly in Nashville. I was actually 34 weeks pregnant in December last year, we had just came off the Kane Brown arena run in Australia and at that point you're not allowed to fly anymore. So I ended up flying my producer, Tom Jordan, who is an Australian but he lives in Nashville, to New Zealand, and we made the record at home,. It was the first time I'd ever done that, and I really loved working that way. We'd walk down to the beach in the morning and grab a coffee and that’s just so not how I would normally go about it. Nashville's usually the way I do it, and it's frantic, and you're running around like a mad man.
Working at home meant we could start late morning and work right through the night. If we were feeling inspired, we'd just go through till two or three in the morning. I felt I've really unlocked something that I didn't really even know was an option, so now it’s the way I want to make all my records. To tie in more of our side of the world into the actual process of it.
It's a super fun album, super country pop, feel good, big stadium numbers, but there's also a couple of very vulnerable, deeply personal tracks, such as ‘Heartbeat’. Tell me a bit about getting that mix right and the decision to do that.
’Heartbeat’ was a song I wrote in Nashville last year after I found out I was having a baby. I've had a lifetime of health issues since I was 16, and just never really got a lot of answers or diagnoses, but was always told that I wouldn't be able to have children. So it was something that I'd really parked and just got on with my life. So to find out I was pregnant was pretty crazy and I actually cancelled some of my writing sessions because I was just not in the headspace. But for some I felt I just need to go and write and that was a song just sort of fell out into the room on one of those days. It was just the absolute pure shock of how everything can change in a heartbeat. It was literally that fast. One minute we'd just been to this house party in Nashville, the next thing I'm sitting on the bed with the pregnancy test and it's real. Your life flashes before your eyes with a little bit of what does this even look like?
Yeah, that's huge, in the middle of such big career moves to suddenly be reevaluating
It was terrifying, if I'm being honest. I’d just signed American management and booking agents and all the things that I'd worked for my whole life, you know? But that's just classic life, right? Everything always happens at once.
I'm really glad I wrote a song and captured that, because it's something that I'll always look back on. My partner works in the industry with me, and we were pretty quick to make a plan. We're both really driven, and he was like, ‘you're not giving up this anything, we're going to make this work.’ And that's the attitude that we've gone into parenthood with, and it's been serving us well. I'm still managing to have a career and be a mother and travel and do all the things, and it might look different to what I expected it to look like, but I can honestly say I'm really happy, and that's what it comes down to at the end of the day.
You are super driven, and that's something I want us to talk about, because it's immediately apparent to me how hard you work. There's this illusion with social media that things just come easily to people and it's so not the case. Tell me about the behind the scenes, how hard it is to get tours going, to get albums out, plus you're a mum. How do you make that happen?
Gosh, that's a good observation. It's not what people think it is, that's what's so funny! When you're in the industry, you really lean on friends that you make in this industry, because they just get it. It's 90% just hard slog and rejection and all the things. It's late nights. It's travel. The amount of travel we've done this year, I've been in Australia and I've flown home [to New Zealand] for a night to see my baby, to set him up for the week, flowing straight back to Australia the next day. Like, this doesn't actually make any sense, but you kind of just have to do what you've got to do in this industry. I've always treated it like a marathon, it's not a sprint, you're laying down foundations every day.
There's so much admin behind the scenes nowadays, especially when you're running it yourself and you're managing yourself. There's the live space, there's the making of the music and finding the time to be writing the songs and being creative, and then there's the social media side, where there's such an expectation to be all over it, but that is really time consuming. I think a lot of artists will agree that that's the part that we all struggle with the most.
But if you love what you do, it doesn't feel like work a lot all the time. I just love it so much. I think there's always a good mentality when you start as a fan of music as well. I grew up singing country, and I was just such a fan of it as a kid and I think that really helps put things in perspective. A bad day in music is still not a bad day. You still get to do something that you love and something that will inspire people or make people feel good. In a world of madness, we get to do a job that's pretty positive.
On loving country music since you were a kid, I have to say my favourite track on the album, as a fellow Shania Twain fan is ‘Song For Shania’. It's hard not to fall in love with you watching the music video of you as a kid, up there in your boots. How important are these female pop icons in terms of how they inspire us or pave the way for us?
They are everything and I really I'm not just saying that. I have tried to make a point every record that I do to put a cover of song by a female that's inspired me. The last record I made, we put ‘You Learn’ by Alanis Morissette on. That was a song that my brother and I used to have the cassette tape, and that was our jam song as kids for years. This record, we put ‘Torn’ by Natalie Imbruglia, that song was just a part of our upbringing. I want to keep doing that as we work through different records and just showcase females in songs that I think are just phenomenal. Thank god for woman in music, honestly, just really leading the way, so powerful, so strong, but so kind and caring and so human behind it.
I wrote ‘Song For Shania’ back in America last year, and there's a lot of moments on this record where I've captured different things, and I was starting to work out how I was going to navigate being a mum in music and what that would look like. All I could do was think back to being a kid again, and what inspired me. Shania was just like the GOAT to me. As a kid, seeing a female artist play stadiums was so influential. That was a space in country music that was largely filled by males. So to see Shania do that on her own terms was so cool. She had this amazing band of dudes, but she was the boss, and she was also a mother in music. I just find it so, so important as a female in music, to watch her journey and I think we're so lucky that there have been some incredible females that have come before us.
You of course came to a much larger audience being on The Voice, how were things coming off the back end of that and carving your own path as an independent artist?
Well, that's just what I've always been doing. Originally, no label would even look twice at me, which was almost a blessing, in a way, because had I signed up or got caught up in all of that side of it, I think you can lose your spark, and you can lose your way a lot. The reason I still absolutely love doing what I do is because I've had so much freedom in my career, and that's only because I've been independent. I can make my own decisions. If I write a song today, I can put it out tomorrow. I can tease it on TikTok. If the fans say they love that song, that's the one I go with. It's given me so much freedom that serves me even more so in 2025 than it would have 10 years ago, when there was a lot more gatekeepers - there was no social media, no TikTok or Spotify, there was a lot more reason to need a team around you. But I just never had one, and so I just learned how to do things by myself.
Coming off a show like The Voice, I just kept doing it by myself. I enjoy it this way. It's a choice at this point, because I feel it's a lot more empowering being able to make your own calls and owning your own masters is really important in this industry now. To know where things are going, where things are coming from, how things work, why things are the way they are. I really have learned to train my brain to have the business side and the creative side and I wouldn't give that up now. It puts me in a place where I get to love what I do.
Are you a country girl? Did you grow up in in the country, or was it just country music grabbed you?
I grew up small town, my town had about 3,000 people in the middle of the South Island, very much a farm community. I spent my whole life there, I had to travel an hour and a half to school, there and back every day. I've always grown up with that influence and that's why still now I try and go back regularly. Mum and dad still are in the same house that we grew up in, so we get back there as much as we can.
Are they country music fans?
Yeah, mum was the one that travelled with us when we were kids. She took us to all the talent quests and things, my older siblings and I would do it together. I came from a very musical family, mum loves it because she's been around it for so long, and dad kind of steps in and steps out when he wants to. They've been very supportive, because it was obviously a big thing when I was 21 moving to Australia to chase a career in country music, zero guarantee of anything, but they were both like if that's what you want to do, just do it properly. That was the advice they gave me, and so that's what I've tried to do ever since
Was there ever an alternative career path? Did you ever have a backup plan?
When I left school, I was enrolled in a physical education school, and a musical theatre school and I basically had a day to make a decision which path I was going to take. I took the music path, and I have no regrets, thank God! So I could have been a physio or on a sports field somewhere otherwise.
What was your approach to recording Cowboy Up in Nashville?
Given the circumstances of being very pregnant, it changed things a lot. The record before we did some tracking in a studio where you've had the live players right in front of you, and that was the first time really experiencing actually being in a room whilst the music is being played right there, which was really cool. This time, a very different situation, but working with Tom Jordan for the first time was such a beautiful experience, he is so talented, so collaborative. A lot of the tracking was actually done back in Nashville, we just sent stuff back to Nashville and some of the best session players, they've all got their own home setups now, they play the drums overnight, while we'd sleep, send them back and they'd be there in the morning. It's that quick now. I did get to have my my drummer Corbin playing on a few tracks for the first time. I've never had that happen before, and it was cool to feel like my band was so much part of what I do.
It was very collaborative this record. Tom and I would sit with the demos, and I’d say this bit needs a guitar part and I'd sing him an idea, and he'd play it. I've never worked with someone where we had the freedom of time by doing it in New Zealand. There was no ‘get out of the studio’ because we’re at home so it's like, work as long as you want. There was a lot more personality of mine that was put into some of the different sounds and guitar riffs that we could spend some proper time on.
Final question, what advice would you have to any young women hoping to get into the music business?
Oh, that's such a big question. Just knowing that it's a marathon will serve you well. If you go in and expect everything to happen overnight, well, that's awesome, I hope it does happen that way for you. But just know that if it doesn't, it's gonna be a lot of slog, and things won't make sense till they make sense. You might meet someone, and it doesn't make sense till 10 years down the line that you've slowly built this friendship, and now they're in a position, and you’re in a position, where you can work together or do something cool. Knowing that this is a long game is really important to not give up. It's too easy to give up and then no one wins. You just got to hang on and your time will come if you put the work in, and if you truly love to do this.
Cowboy Up is out now. You can buy and stream here.
Follow Kaylee Bell on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok
