Courtney Paige Nelson’s latest track “Self-Medicate” is a powerful song about the effects of having social anxiety and what it’s like to feel constantly medicated because of it – this person does not want to get up from the sofa, nor to be surrounded by people and simply being in a highly social environment can put them in a stupefying -and terrifying- daze.

Although it is actually a very good job in musical terms -catchy and badass even- the song will hit close to home for many people as it poetically and accurately depicts a reality that is being addressed more and more in the music industry thanks to brave artists such as Courtney: The importance of mental health and how even in a more connected world, isolation still haunts many.

About this, the American singer and songwriter from San Francisco residing in Los Angeles says “I think the song self medicate shows what it means to want to medicate yourself to be better. Whether that’s better with social anxiety, or better with depression, it’s all relative. The pill bottles that you see in the music video kind of show what self-medicate means and I think it’s everything I wanted”.

Though Electro pop is Courtney’s home court, she took a bit of an edgier sound for this song, ending up with strong similarities to -broadly speaking- the Blink-182 emo phase of the late 90s and early 2000s pop-punk, now with some more modern synth twists thrown in for good measure.

About the visuals, Courtney assures that they wanted to “show the isolation aspect of what it means to be in a public space but have a separate reality in your head. Having scenes where I’m stumbling through a party was important for me to show how I feel internally sometimes. The directors came up with the idea to do the newspaper shower scene and they actually built the set themselves in their garage with a makeshift shower and makeshift walls”.

Courtney Paige began her journey competing in America’s Next Top Model Cycle 23, where she placed fourth and this allowed her to create a platform for her true calling in life; music and song composition. Nowadays she writes for Sync, with multiple features and cuts for/with other artists, including a remix of her song “Saved Me” by DJ trio BROHUG, which charted at #1 in Denmark. Her single ‘Sick For You’ with WolfPlayer and Creek racked up 1,000,000 plays in less than a month after release.

Courtney Paige has left her comfort zone in an act of courage and opened up her soul about a lot of things that have happened to her in past relations, now with “Self Medicate” joining other songs such as Cry Wolf and Sick for you as proof that music is a healthy and productive way of channeling emotions, turning them into a healing balm that can be shared with others who can relate to your own struggles.

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