With a new album rushing closer and the intensity of an autumn tour with alt-electro rockers Sports to prepare for, Allie Nixon is trying hard to pace herself. The artist, who works under the project name Pool Girl, is well aware that her natural excitement needs to be tempered. 

“I’ve been working in music for 10 years. I think I’ve been grinding so much that I’m now thinking holistically how I’m going to sustain a music career,” she says. “Is it by kind of diving into things really fast and figuring it out as I go? Is that sustainable more long term as I continue to build my career?”

“I’m down to say yes to things before I know how much work it’s going to be!” she continues. “But I’m trying to balance out my life a little bit because I think that I’ve maybe swung too far on the other side of it.”

Speaking with Nixon, it does not take long to realise that she is one of those energetic  but self-aware kinds of people who is always keenly aware of how the people and places around her are affecting her own development. Take, for example, her description othe dichotomy of life in in the creative melting pot that is Los Angeles.  

“You’re just so surrounded by it. So many of my friends are artists, and we all kind of get what we’re doing, and there’s something really special about that. The flip side is that you kind of blink, and you’re like, ‘Oh, shit, I need to also be a human and remember that music isn’t everything, you know?’” 

Nixon herself grew up surrounded by music and took up playing piano at age six and then guitar at 11. 

“Which sounds like I should be really good – and I’m super average at both!” she says with endearing self-deprecation. “I was around [music] for my whole life and I just really loved it. But I never thought that music could be a career by any means. My dad was a firefighter and my mom was a stay at home mom, so I just couldn’t be less of an industry kid, you know?” 

Nixon studied psychology at college and at one stage planned to become a therapist. But, maybe inevitably, music won out – and it was the pandemic of 2020 that was the catalyst. Finding herself with plenty of spare time, Nixon realised that learning to produce music could help her overcome one particular frustration she had been feeling. 

“If I was writing a song on guitar or on keys, I could feel what I wanted it to sound like, but I couldn’t communicate to someone else,” she explains. “So I realised I needed to learn how to produce, because that’s the only way I’m going to get the language to understand and communicate the sound really.”

“My poor roommates at the time, you know, were just like, ‘Oh, my God. Shut up!’” she remembers.

After this, a short-lived duo project led to Nixon first experience of releasing music and then of a musical split. She began to explore working solo before an introduction to enigmatic California-based artist and producer Michl gave her a further boost in that direction. 

“He was the first one to be, like, ‘I think you just start over… Who cares about the band? Who cares about you being scared?’” says Nixon. “I needed those extra pushes because I just was down bad and was just very scared to do it…” 

“It took a year of working on it, and I still didn’t have the name, but I started to have the songs,” she continues. “I told myself that I would only do another artist project if I could absolutely nail it 360: from the visuals to the live set to the music. I kind of knew I couldn’t half-ass it if I was going to do it again. I had to fully commit.”

The project name Pool Girl came almost randomly (although Nixon has explained that it fits well with her background, with multiple family members on her mother’s side running pool cleaning businesses) but immediately felt right to her. 

“When I thought of the name Pool Girl, that was seriously the click for me. I knew that I had to do it because I could immediately visualise a colour palette and videos and merch and the whole theme. It was so true to me. It was something I knew I could actually do,” she says. 

The project has helped Nixon learn new things about her abilities.

“I think a lot of creative people have a lot of self-doubt, like, ‘Shit, this probably sucks. This isn’t good, you know?’ … And so I think I’ve learned a lot about how to trust myself more and trust my taste and my intuition and my voice. And that’s been a really cool process for me.” 

Inspired by her life in California and her favourite 2010 indie artists, the Pool Girl sound as heard throughout her album ‘Melancholic Beach Town’ combines what Nixon describes as “surf rock textures” with one of her biggest loves in life: synths. 

“I also absolutely love electronic music… I think that kind of brings a little bit of a darker texture into the music, even if it’s really quite subtle.”

There is a nostalgic, moody feel to her mixes, too, influenced in part by the time Nixon spent in recording and producing her record in Marseille. The songs themselves touch on the contrasting ideas of movement and waiting, themes which seem to echo Nixon’s own musical development.

“Very practically, I’ve been processing almost for a year now, ‘Should I move out of LA?’ It’s been something I’ve been thinking about a lot… Then, moving on from things, moving on from chapters of life, moving on from people and letting things go.” 

“I write a lot about being patient and I write a lot about waiting and the concept of waiting for someone or waiting for things,” she adds. “In my music career even, it felt like in the very beginning there was just a bunch of momentum and I just felt like I was thrown in really fast. But then last year, it felt really slow and really like, I don’t know what’s happening!”

While navigating these concepts and learning how to build them into her music, ultimately, the Pool Girl project has led Nixon to a place of confidence and truth – and it’s a place where she is satisfied to be.

“Honestly, the more I know myself and the more I’m comfortable with my own skin and my own taste, the truer the music is,” she says.