i should tell you: Watercolours

Well hello there, and welcome to volume nine of I Should Tell You, where I interview musicians who comfortably straddle the venn diagram of being both cool and answering my earnest emails. The same three questions about food every time. Why? Just to see what happens. 

This week I'm talking to the super swell Chelsea Jade, aka Watercolours. Every time I go to write something elegant and encapsulating, all my brain can come up with is "swoon". But I'll write something further than that, for the sake of not being unhelpful.  

Watercolours' music is way dreamy, summoning that moment just before I wake up and I'm trying to grasp onto the dream that I'm having but the effort of fighting off waking up overpowers that. (Side note: depending on the dream, isn't that such a let-down?) It's also dreamy in a more general, reviewer-pulling-a-nice-word-out-of-the-air-or-thesaurus sense as well. Dreamy squared. I'm significantly infatuated with her single Pazzida, not least because the music video features a tap dance break (my favourite instance of a music video with tap dancing in it since Mya's important 2003 song My Love Is Like...Wo) but also good to listen to is Over and Under, a remix E.P of some of her older tracks by cool people like Haz'Beats and Jeremy Toy. I saw Watercolours in concert recently when she opened for Cat Power and she was excellent, and that night she tweeted me a photo of an ugly donut which, if those aren't the actions of a person whose music you should be listening to I don't know what is.

Finally, if you're one of those lucky Auckland types living in the city where most of the stuff happens, Watercolours is having an album presale event on April 3 at Alleluya Cafe in St Kevin's Arcade on K Road. Which sounds like fun, although the precise nature of the fun to be had will likely unfold on her Facebook page, so go like it if you like.

Thanks Watercolours! The interview will start...now. 

Where's somewhere you've eaten that you kinda like to brag about or drop into conversation? 

Last night, with mostly strangers in my periphery, I bellowed at a television because I had dined on honey-laden pizza at a Girls season 2 finale location - Roberta's in Bushwick, NYC. Which could qualify as a less than elegant brag. Another awkward brag would be that once I was in Brooklyn looking after Carlen Altman's demon bunny in her bunny palace/apartment and every night I would buy a tub of Ben & Jerry's and eat it alone in her bed while the rabbit ran rampant, gnawing on any dipped limb. I mean, have YOU ever been terrorized by a rabbit whilst eating Ben & Jerry's? Did I mention I'm a self-diagnosed lactose intolerant?

What do you fix for yourself, or where do you go to eat, when it's just you on your own?

I've aleviated my diet of meat recently and will now exclusively cook spinach, coconut cream, paneer curry until it is absolutely vital that I learn a new thing (I get bored of the flavour/there is a world paneer shortage/I have an altercation with a coconut)

What's one of your favourite food memories from your childhood?

Once my well-meaning aunt prepared fish-fingers and placed me alone in a room with them. Somehow I percieved that they were meant to be hidden around the room? They were discovered days later and everyone was pretty disturbed. It's a good memory because it still makes me feel really bad and I suspect I'm some kind of masochist. Later in life, I yelled at a fish stick over a chicken nugget that had fallen on the floor: "IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN YOU!!" So I think there are still some underlying issues there.
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I Should Tell You archives:

Jeremy Toy, She's So Rad (March 14)
Hera and Jed (March 7)
Eva Prowse (March 1)
Jan Hellriegel (February 21)
Dear Time's Waste (February 14)
Flip Grater (February 7)
Tourettes (January 31)
Anna Coddington (January 24)