Cassie Kollman

MIXED MESSAGES

THE NEW ALBUM

Available October 23

Mixed Messages, Cassie Kollman’s second album, begins in the unsettled space between what is said and what is understood. Its title suggests contradiction, but also multiplicity: the different meanings a voice can carry, the distance between intention and reception, and the emotional truths that resist a single interpretation. Kollman does not attempt to resolve these tensions neatly. Instead, she allows them to become the substance of the music.

Working across jazz, R&B, blues, rock, pop, and folk, Kollman draws from Black American musical traditions in which improvisation and transformation are fundamental. On Mixed Messages, these genres form a fluid vocabulary rather than a set of fixed categories. Building on the intricate harmonies, layered arrangements, and vocal ambition of her 2021 debut, Lady in Shoes, the album brings her evolving artistic identity into sharper focus. Melody, language, rhythm, and breath become responsive elements, capable of shifting shape and revealing meanings that the written lyric alone cannot contain.

Produced by Brian Charles—whose wide-ranging credits include Moby, Dispatch, and Weakened Friends—the album brings together two artists comfortable working beyond conventional boundaries. The result is music that does not smooth away its contradictions, but gives them weight, texture, and presence. Mixed Messages inhabits the spaces between composition and improvisation, intimacy and performance, clarity and ambiguity: a place where several truths can exist at once, and where the voice becomes the point at which they meet.