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As a singer, 26-year-old Stella Cole manages to be old-school and modern at once. She made her career breakthrough with a series of TikTok videos that went viral during COVID shutdown. But she did it with the music closest to her heart, jazz and pop standards from decades long ago.
“It was bizarre, but the way my career started had a real effect on how I feel about everything now,” she said in a Zoom interview this week. “I was studying acting in college and I was a junior when COVID hit. I started doing TikToks to get myself in front of the camera, because all the auditions were self-tapes, it was my exposure therapy. That was a nightmare, so I decided to film myself doing something I actually wanted to do, singing all these old songs that I loved.
“I was very insecure in the beginning, it felt cringey to be posting singing videos,” she said. “I’d talk pretty fast for four seconds, and then go into the song. Suddenly I was getting these huge numbers on the phone — thousands of new people following me every day. And my parents live out in the middle of the woods, so I was completely removed from society, just being with my dog and my brother. So it always felt like this little game I was playing on my phone. It didn’t seem real at all, until musicians I’d admired my whole life, like James Taylor and Michael Bublé, started re-posting my stuff. And it felt really weird when my barista recognized me.”
Even the sound of an un-tweaked voice proved a novelty in this era. “My favorite thing is when people accuse me of using Autotune and I say, ‘thanks for the compliment. I wish I knew how.’ ”
She’s since graduated to making albums (her second full-length “It’s Magic” is just out) and playing concerts, doing two nights at the City Winery this coming Wednesday and Thursday. And much of her material, not to mention her inspiration, comes from the past — not only standards like “Cry Me a River” and “Over the Rainbow,” but deeper cuts she’s discovered over the years.
Her own musical taste was forged at age three, when she saw Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz.” “I think it confuses people because it’s not the generation I’m from, or anything close to it. But I had the epiphany so young that I can’t really explain it — It was just something soul deep, something within me connects with it. I saw ‘Shakespeare in the Park’ the other night and that reminded me that it doesn’t matter how old great art is, we still connect to the stories. A lot changes over time, but the feelings we want to express never do.”
She does do the occasional take on a newer song, like “My Future” by Billie Eilish, but those are the exceptions. “It was really a point of pride for me in high school, that there would be a Number One song that everyone was singing and I didn’t know it at all — I’d be saying ‘Justin Bieber, who is that?’”
Even her onstage presentation owes a bit to the era she loves. “I try to stay away from dressing too vintage, there are whole communities of people who dress like they’re in the ‘40s. But I don’t want to romanticize that time too much. I do think that there was this other world of old Hollywood that was never reality, it was this false world created for escapism back then. And that’s the world that inspires me so much, the dreamy colors and the ethereal dresses and the gowns. The Grace Kelly of it all.”
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