The artist known as Barbara Nicole is a multi-hyphenate and when exploring her musical work it’s a true “choose your own adventure” – you can select one or several paths to join her journey.
As a DJ and performer, she began her career several years ago splitting her time between New York City and San Francisco, beaming her love of deep house, Italo disco, tech house, progressive house out onto dancefloors, and exposing audiences to new underground cuts and rare classics. After some recent sets, Barbara’s energy can still be felt in the following venues: in NYC – Super Ingredients, Elsewhere, Laissez Faire – in SF, for Midway’s New Year Weekend festival, Fresh Start, and in Milan Italy at Linea Milano and East Market. Her sets infuse her ever-growing catalog of released and unreleased Barbara productions, and many of her appearances also include a live vocal performance of songs. She’s never static, always moving through dance and broad smiles during her sets.
As a songwriter and vocalist, she has the gift for marrying relatable storytelling with infectious melodies. Barbara can go deep into the well of her life experiences as she does with her Good Crazy album release, Palm Dreams, which is a sonic movie delivered through 15 tracks. The release takes listeners on a musical journey across those same diverse genres she DJs, set to Barbara’s story of gaining her independence and power in the world of music. The album themes will resonate with listeners through songs such as ‘Ghosted’, ‘Church of House’, ‘Horse at the Disco’, and the female empowerment anthem ‘Let Her Do It’. Palm Dreams showcases Barbara’s ability to create enjoyable intersections between far-apart musical genres within single songs, you’ll hear tracks for example that marry ‘Country and House’ or ‘Indie Pop and Latin Freestyle’.
The gift of layered vocal melodies you hear on Palm Dreams comes from Barbara’s experience as a choir singer in the Handel and Haydn Society, a Grammy-winning Boston orchestra and chorus. She sings in several musical languages and easily can code switch, for example delivering a dirty spoken word deadpan for a tech house banger as she does on ‘Techno Barbie’ (Fantastic Voyage). Initially, Barbara studied with LP Giobbi and she now finds herself part LP’s Femme House collective; she drew inspiration from this mentorship to grow her songwriting and production work.
As a producer and music industry boss, she will impress you with the pace she operates and how she omnitasks. She is a Boston native but a globetrotting artist who’s in Los Angeles one day, Paris the next, Miami the following week, and Tokyo the week after that. The following artists recently found themselves collaborating with Barbara in various cities: Nhii and Lefti in New York City, Model Man in London, and Modular Project in Milan. With San Francisco-based Ed Hoffman she’s released sing-along house music anthems such as ‘Hey Gurl Hey’ (Data Transmission) and ‘Feet Money’ (Dirtybird Records). She’s stepped into the spotlight, leading her own label and brand Good Crazy, but expect to hear her productions on a wide range of important dance music imprints as she continues to produce music with these talented artists. Barbara has her finger on the pulse of dance music talent and is able to network swifty with them. It’s her superpower and it means there are always conversations ongoing with musical names one would want to drop, and more productions for Barbara, a true music industry pro, to put in the release pipeline.
