Taylor Bickett didn’t initially set out to make an album. She was just writing more songs. But, with two EPs and some singles under her belt, plus a TikTok hit to her credit, the Nashville-based singer was up for the challenge. She sifted through her work looking for songs that she might want to release together. In the process, Bickett saw two themes emerge. “One, this idea of being afraid of commitment, wanting to run away from things,” she says on a recent video call. “Then this contrasting idea of craving intimacy and safety and love.”
Those ideas became a push-and-pull on Bickett’s debut full-length album, Nothing I Can’t Undo. Released in mid-July, the album drops listeners into this conflict with opening song “The Arsonist,” where Bickett sings, “nothing is permanent/if you’re brave enough/to burn it down,” the tension continuing through the collection of soft pop songs that flit between electronic and folk production.
“How do you balance those? Not just in romantic relationships, but also in my life,” Bickett asks of the paradox. “I kept feeling this dichotomy and I feel like it comes up in a lot of the songs. To me, that felt like the main, overarching idea.” That’s also the sentiment behind the song’s title track. “I felt like it encapsulated this idea of attachment and permanence and flightiness and all these things, wanting to keep things open-ended.”
Raised in Indiana, Bickett headed to Nashville for college and has lived on-and-off in the city for close to a decade, with stints in London and New York in the midst of that period. The moves may have played a part in the album’s themes. “I have this desire to experience. I think a lot of artists feel that way. I have to live before I can write about it,” she says. “It brought me to London. It brought me to New York and then it brought me back to Nashville because, I think, yes, I loved having the new experiences from moving, but there’s something about that stability that kept pulling me back to this place.”
If Bickett’s name sounds familiar, it might be from social media. In 2022, when Bickett dropped her song “Quarter Life Crisis,” TikTok users picked it up and the singer-songwriter scored an unexpected, viral hit. “We didn’t put a dollar behind it the whole time it was blowing up,” she stresses.
What did happen, though, was that Bickett noticed a handful of people posting then-and-now images corresponding to the songs lyrics. “I had been trying to figure out how to make a trend for the video, but couldn’t figure out how to make the video,” she explains. “I saw other people doing it and I said, okay, I’m going to do this. So, I posted the video and it just took off.”
In all, some 1.5 million videos were made with “Quarter Life Crisis” and the song racked up over 50 million streams. Bickett was fortunate, she says, in that she got to see the “power of TikTok” work in a way that had positive results. “It changed my life and my career and it’s the reason I’m able to afford to stay independent and put out this album independently and all these things,” she says.
But, there’s also a drawback to that kind of success. “I think the pressure was definitely real. I felt that- now, I have to top this,” she says. The thing, though, is that trying to go viral doesn’t necessarily work. “Sometimes, it does work for other people and you’re kicking yourself and you’re like, they clearly wrote this so that it would be a trend,” she says, “but, for me, I feel like it kills my creativity if I’m like I have to write something that’s going to blow up and people are going to like. My brain closes in on itself.”
More importantly, “Quarter Life Crisis” wasn’t written to become part of a TikTok trend. It just happened. “I wrote the song top down, verse came and then pre-chorus came and it was just like a journal entry, me spilling my thoughts,” Bickett recalls. So, she had to remind herself to keep writing in the way that came naturally to her.
What gave her a bit more direction was the song “I Like Mondays,” the single Bickett released on the first day of 2024. “‘I Like Mondays’ had a mini-moment, not as big as ‘Quarter Life Crisis,’” she says. But, the success of another song that was written with a similar stream of consciousness narrative did help ground Bickett in the maxim that guides her songs. “When you write honestly and authentically and from the heart and try not to overthink it, a lot of times, it really does work,” she says. “That song, in particular, informed my writing process for the album.”
Bickett heads out on tour, her first nationwide trek as a headliner, in the fall. “I really want to give people an opportunity to sit with the album,” she says. Even though a viral hit pushed Bickett early in her career, she’s thinking more about her music’s longevity with the release of Nothing I Can’t Undo.
“There never has to be a time where it has to stop being relevant to someone,” says Bickett. “It’s not social media, even though it feels like music is social media. It is a lifelong art form- and past your life, long past your life, it can be— it’s something people can consume at any point, which gives me comfort as an artist in this digital age that it’s not all or nothing right now.”
Nothing I Can’t Undo by Taylor Bickett is out now. Catch her on tour across the U.S. this fall and at Moroccan Lounge in Los Angeles on November 4.
Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Follow on Instagram or sign up for the weekly, Beatique newsletter for updates on new stories and gigs.
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