Nell Mescal joins the call a few minutes early, her damp hair framing her face, a green half-zip thrown on like a quiet declaration of comfort. It’s a small, human detail that somehow feels emblematic of her music. There’s a lived-in honesty to the way she moves through conversation: unguarded, bright, and brimming with the kind of optimism that doesn’t deny difficulty, but grows from it. “I have a few of these calls today, there’s always like 10 minutes between each one,” she says lightly. “In my break between the last one and this one, I showered, so now I feel great”. It’s an offhand remark, one that captures the rhythm of her current moment: a life caught between calm, chaos, and creation. Her new project, ‘The Closest We’ll Get’, feels like a culmination of that delicate balance. It’s a body of work that lingers in that quiet space between yearning and acceptance, tracing fragile lines of love and self-belief. Since her earliest singles, Mescal has written with a diaristic tenderness, crafting songs that sound like whispered confessions and unsent letters. 

Here, she steps further into herself - voice assured, her storytelling luminous. ‘The Closest We’ll Get’ isn’t just a title; it’s a phrase that holds both distance and devotion. 

We go back to the start, writing songs in her bedroom and performing in local choirs. When Mescal discusses the beginning, she does so with an easy kind of honesty, without mythology or a grand origin story. “Actually, if I tell the truth, I was writing songs when I was really, really young,” she says with a laugh, before clarifying that it wasn’t until her early to mid-teens that the songs began to sound like something she’d want to share with the world. She’d fallen in love with artists like Birdy, drawn in by that rare honesty that seems to hit somewhere deep. It wasn’t about imitation so much as recognition - “I wanted to write music that made other people feel the same way she made me feel”. From then on, songwriting became a daily act; a quiet ritual that’s never really left her. That relationship with writing, she explains, hasn’t really changed. “It’s definitely a deeper relationship now because it’s longer and I know myself a lot more,” she says with ease, “but it’s kind of stayed the same. When I pick up a guitar or sit down at the piano, it’s the same feeling I’ve always gotten”. If anything, it’s her understanding that’s evolved, not the impulse to create. 

There’s a steadiness in what she says, a sense that, even as everything around her shifts, this remains a constant. It’s a zip line that carried her from the privacy of her childhood bedroom to the vastness of arenas. A shift that, surprisingly, doesn’t feel as jarring as most may expect. We laugh about the thought of the two in comparison, one with isolation and complete freedom, and the other with thousands of eyes watching your every move - “two very different things,” she laughs. “When I was younger, in my bedroom, I was holding my mic up pretending that it was an arena. So they’re kind of the same,” each word delivered with both wit and sincerity. Now that the crowd is real, the energy remains the same, just maybe a little louder. With her unique sense of optimism, she admits she tries not to overthink it. “If I think too much about it, I’ll freak out.” Mescal continued, and so she focuses on having fun; that sense of fun seems to link to every part of her creative life. “When I’m really deep into writing a song that I love, it’s the same feeling I get when I’m on stage and I look to the left and I’ve got my friends there. That feeling in my stomach, that’s what I’m always chasing.” Her face lights up, it’s something you can clearly see she’s passionate about, something that fuels her. Performance, after all, has always been her foundation. Long before she was writing, she was singing. She’s trained in it, confident in it. The writing came later, untrained and instinctive. It’s something that she admits can still bring out imposter syndrome, “When I’m writing with other people I’ll sometimes be like, Oh my god, I’m an imposter in this room. But then you grow out of that, and realise you do love it”. Over time, she’s learned to see live performance as the space where her confidence lives.

The more she’s played live, the more she’s stepped into herself as Nell the artist, not just Nell from the choir. That confidence has made her feel freer, in the best possible way. “It’s actually made me feel more like a kid than ever before,” she explains, grinning without realising. That looseness and sense of play spills into the small, yet loyal and deeply connected community that’s formed around her music. Every artist hopes somebody out there connects with the art they’re creating, some have intentions of finding people, and to others it comes more naturally - for Mescal, it was natural, in an unexpected way. “Obviously, I hoped people would join this community and want to stick around, but I’m really bad at making friends. I get too anxious. Her piercing relatability and undeniable charisma make it hard to picture that making friends is something she struggles with. It’s impossible not to be drawn in by her kindness & magnetic warmth. Though she did hope people would connect with her music, the friendships that have formed through her songs still surprise her each day. She describes meeting fans after shows who only met that evening but look like old friends - “it’s completely out of my control”. She insists it’s nothing to do with her, really, but with them and the everlasting kindness they bring to the space. 

She notes that in every place she can remember something very specific about the crowd and very specific about the people. However, there’s a particular story she keeps circling back to, a recent Maisie Peters support slot where a few die-hard fans yelled a lyric during the second verse of ‘Carried Away’. “The whole audience turned to look at them and I was like, yes, that’s my girls,” she remembers fondly, “I looked back at those videos for days after with the biggest smile on my face”. Girlhood threads through so much of her work, completely unintentionally and not in a nostalgic way, but as something still being understood in real time. Growing up with brothers, she says, made her hesitant to lean into it at first; she often felt like the ‘tomboy’ growing up. As she began to write about friendship, she started to realise how much of it came from that space - the inbetweens of growing and letting go. “Girlhood and friendship - they’re so intertwined. You can’t really get one without the other,” she laughs softly. “I’ll write a song and months later I’ll figure out what it means.” Most of her songs are unintentional like that. Their meanings often reveal themselves later down the line, as if time finishes the thought she started. It’s part of the magic in her process, the way her songs almost grow up alongside her. She laughs at the idea of it, her songs predicting her life. “I’ll write something and then a year later it happens, or it happens again,” she says half half-amused, half-amazed. “It’s almost like a manifestation,” I question, and we both laugh. “You get it. Like a bad manifestation,” it’s a strange yet shimmering loop that almost defines her work - life inspiring the song, the song inspiring life. Something is endearing about the way she discusses it, equal parts awe and amusement. In her world, the songs are alive, unfolding slowly over time, teaching her what she meant long after pen met paper. 

Nell Mescal has spent a lot of time away from home, and the tension between wanderlust and homesickness seems to follow her everywhere. She talks about it with a mixture of longing and acceptance. “Trying to stay present is really important,” she confesses, “I only get FOMO for my actual life, like my local coffee shop in the morning, but when I’m not on tour, I miss it so much”. She recalls a day off in London on her recent adventure opening for HAIM. She spent most of the day feeling sad. The tour wasn’t over yet, but she already anticipated missing it. She seems to find comfort in the fact that she loves all the places she inhabits, reflecting that “it’s nice to always be missing some place”. 

That feeling of longing inevitably creeps into her songwriting, in ways that often come as a surprise to her. Mescal notes that writing about home is something she’s accidentally returned to repeatedly, even if the context slightly shifts. “I obviously have a song called ‘Homesick’, but I wrote that song almost as a joke, to have fun…I’d never written a song with a beat like that,” she explains, taking a moment to sip her drink. She was amazed by how people resonated with the track, noting it as something amazing. 

Other tracks like ‘Electric Picnic’ or ‘Warm Body’ on her debut  EP, ‘Can I Miss It For A Minute?’, she describes as “so much more about home and so much more riddled with it”. Subtle explorations of memory and place. She admits the closest she gets on her latest EP to writing about Ireland is through folk-infected tracks, which tend to give her a sense of grounding. “I’m really glad I got to do a project that’s really folky because that brings me back and gives me that sense of stability amongst these songs,” she says. The folk turn, she notes, was almost instinctive - “I just really love folk music, it’s all I was listening to during writing this EP… really sad folk songs”. She’s eager to explore further, bridging her folk tendencies with more live, atmospheric sounds in future work. 

Thinking about the future, Mescal speaks with a kind of reflection that feels both tender and urgent. “I would hope that five or ten years from now, I’m still just in awe of this as I am now,” she says, recalling a recent trip to Nashville. She found on her trip that the feeling of writing a song was almost ineffable: “It’s literally… I can’t explain that feeling. When you write something that literally matches up every line, you’re like, wow, I didn’t even know I needed to hear that”. Her hope is simple yet profound: to keep chasing those moments. “I hope I’m still writing songs that make me feel like that, so I can play shows that make me feel like that. I hope I’m still having fun”. Even for newcomers to her music, there’s a lesson hidden in the tension that Mescal navigates: sadness can co-exist with optimism. She points to ‘Thin’, a song written in a dark place, as an example: “there’s positivity in there, but you have to be willing to look for it”. She hopes that listeners approach her music with curiosity and care, noticing not just the melancholy but the moments of light woven through it. “I hope people look for optimism just as much as they look for sadness,” she reveals. Mescal’s music feels like a diary for anyone learning to hold many contradictions at once - it's tender, honest, and quietly luminous.

By the time the call winds down, it’s clear that Nell Mescal’s music exists in the white spaces between things: home and the road, melancholy and hope & the intimate and the vast. She carries the tension of these spaces lightly, with a mix of curiosity, honesty, and gentle humour that makes her as compelling in conversation as she is on record. Talking to her, you get the sense that every song is a lived moment, or a moment waiting to happen. Even when she’s far from home, tours stretching on and cities blurring together, there’s a simple steadiness in the way she approaches her art. She writes because she has to, she performs because it makes her feel, and she allows her experiences, community, and emotions to seep into her work without overthinking or forcing it. What emerges from the process is music that feels deeply human, layered with vulnerability and strength. She reminds us that closeness isn’t always about proximity; it’s about attention, care, and willingness to let ourselves be known. In this, her music offers something rare. A space where listeners can feel simultaneously seen, soothed, and inspired. Her sophomore EP, ‘The Closest We’ll Get’, is out now. 

Anna Louise Jones

@annalouiseachives

Image: Tia Johnson 

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