Trixie Mattel on Her New Halloween Album & Special: ‘This Was The Most Fun I’ve Ever Had Making Anything’

Trixie Mattel has achieved many things in life intentionally. You can’t have the kind of success that she has earned without moving with intention. But her Halloween album ’Till Death Do Us Part had a very different origin story. It just sort of happened.

“I didn’t set out to make a Halloween record,” Trixie tells GO. “I think I was just in the spooky mood and [had] written a few things that all were spooky because I love horror so much.” At the time, she recalls her house was decked out in Halloween decor for a video she had been making, and some of those visuals worked their way into the lyrics of her music. “The metaphors happen to be spooky, but the content I was writing about was my real life,” she explains. Before she knew it, a holiday EP had come together. The result is a marriage of her early folk-infused sound with the synth vibes of her recent expansion into DJing. While holiday albums often feel like novelties, ’Till Death Do Us Part is far more sincere and feels intrinsically Trixie. Despite having tracks with names like “Vampire,” “Ghost on the Moon,” and “I’m in Love with a Ghost,” it’s the heart and the yearning that ring through.

On ’Till Death Do Us Part, Halloween isn’t just an aesthetic—it’s a metaphorical language for aging, marriage, workaholism, and the parts of success that Trixie has come to question. “Vampire” began as a song for a musical Trixie had been playing around with writing, but it soon became something else entirely, “the fatigue of being a drag queen,” she shares. “You’re up all night, you sleep during the day, you’re drinking a lot, blood, alcohol, whatever. And to be successful in entertainment, you kind of have to be a blood-sucking monster a little bit,” Trixie jokes. “So I just was kind of getting really disgusted with the parts of myself that were interested in success, and so that song is kind of about that.”

The album grew out of a personal reckoning. “I had this real crisis of faith where I had my little ‘menty b’ a couple years ago, and it was like ‘I’ve got everything I’ve ever wanted. All my dreams have come true. I make more money than I need. Everything I’ve ever wanted to do with my career has happened and I’m more unhappy than I’ve ever been.’” It was this realization that made Trixie decide something had to change. “It was a real shakeup for me because the things that I thought would make me super super happy, like being successful and stuff, ultimately don’t really mean much if you don’t have your other parts of your life together.”

That sent her on a journey into her past, even pondering what her life might have been like if she had never left Milwaukee to pursue her dreams of working in entertainment. This reverie and yearning comes through on the track “Polish Moon,” which is named after the Allen-Bradley Clock Tower, known locally as the Polish Moon. “I was spending a lot of time in Milwaukee and looking up at the big clock and wondering, like, what if I never moved away? What if, you know, I didn’t do entertainment? What if I stayed here? Would I have been happier?”

That self-reflection gave way to another kind of realization: coming to terms with where she is in life and the expectations she once had for herself. “[The EP’s title] ‘Till Death Do Us Part, it’s like getting older and not having been married. I remember I asked my mom if I ever have a wedding, and it’s not a big wedding, ‘That’s okay, right?’ And she was like, ‘Well, yeah, it’s not like you’re young.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my god, okay.’”

But perhaps her biggest realization was simply that how she felt about her career had evolved and was no longer serving her emotionally, which comes pouring out of the EP. “It’s about really being disgusted with my own extreme workaholism and my extreme pressure on myself to achieve the lengths at which I would work too much, and skip family birthday parties, and stay out all night, and hobnob, and play the game in a way that’s just kind of gross, and I just don’t feel that way anymore.”

The songs document the emotional piece of a much larger pivot that Trixie has made in her life since. “I wrote these songs at a time of transition with relationship stuff. It also really is really mostly about my values changing as an artist. It’s about a huge shift in my personal values.”

For years, Trixie’s approach to all her creative projects came with the incredible pressure of having to have a proven value and worth. Creativity for the sake of making art was sacrificed in the process. “I used to create really with the stress of like this has to be good, and you have to be able to sell it. And your personal value is only worth what the success of this is.” As a result, all of her self-worth got tangled up in the success or failure of each project. “How I feel about myself will reflect how I get people to feel about this, or how much it sells, or how many tickets I sold, whatever.” Regardless of how successful she became, this approach was destined to leave her feeling hollow and disillusioned.

Today, Trixie has flipped this dynamic on its head and reembraced the joy of creating for its own sake. “My relationship to making is only that. So I’m all about making. It’s all about the experience of sitting down and discovery,” she explains. “I used to be, like, ‘what if I make this? What if I work all day on this and it sucks?’ And now I sit down. I’m like, ‘wouldn’t it be hilarious if I worked on this all day and it sucked?’” That reframing changed everything for the music, drag, podcast, and cosmetics mogul.

Now she’s approaching everything as an exploration rather than a production. “Allow yourself to have discovery. Allow yourself to play and try things and create and flop. Allow yourself to make something that the next day when you listen to it or look at it, you’re like ‘that was stupid.’”

This playful and exploratory mindset has completely changed Trixie’s relationship to her art. “When you’re really tuned in with your artistry, it feels like you’re uncovering something that’s already there. It’s like the sculpture is in the marble, and you’re just, you know, removing the negative space or whatever.”

That willingness to play and experiment is ultimately what allowed the EP to emerge. “I love Halloween. I love horror movies. A lot of these metaphors were already kind of spooky. The things I was going through in my life were genuinely scary to me. So it just was a fun way to process that.”

This newfound sense of freedom and play is also evident in The Trixie Mattel Halloween Mattelathon. “I don’t really like doing music videos, but I would love to do another scripted special because when I did my Critics’ Choice Award-nominated [but] losing special, One Night Only, that was like my favorite thing I’ve ever done, and so I was like, I want to do a Halloween version of that.”

It will undoubtedly be a treat for both drag and horror fans alike, as Trixie’s influences span both camp and horror classics. “I was really inspired by that movie Shock Treatment, the Rocky Horror sequel, where it’s a musical that’s happening in a TV studio on live TV,” she explains. “That idea mixed with like Late Night with the Devil, which I loved… and then obviously Scream, like being home alone and being harassed on the phone.”

Like the EP, much of Trixie’s own recent journey is woven into the themes of the special, which sees the drag star increasingly desperate to get funding for the production. “I want to see Trixie clearly struggling to financially produce the special, but trying to keep a poker face on because it’s a live telethon,” Trixie jokes. “She’s having a crisis of faith about like, what am I doing? Why am I doing this if I can’t even raise the money to do it?”

It’s a contradiction that many artists will recognize. “You want to be an artist, but you need money to make things. And how do you balance the two without feeling like a sellout or an artist who is too cool for school, and therefore can’t package something and sell it because you kind of need to be able to do both.”

Drag, she explains, is perfect at this intersection. “We are the cash economy. I mean, drag queens do their art and then walk around going like this,” she says, miming holding out her hand to take money. “It’s a perfect art form to be begging for money in. And I, personally, am excited to see Trixie beg for money on Halloween.”

Rather than trying to resolve that tension by making everything bigger or more polished, Trixie decided to lean into the messiness of it all, mining the humor in imperfection. “I knew I wanted to do something that was like a car crash, a ‘car crash on live television’ feeling,” she says. “People like to see drag queens trying to make the best of a bad situation. We like for a drag queen to come out and lip sync, and the music to skip, and their wig to fall off. Like, I love that shit.”

The other thing Trixie loves? Making Halloween specials. Perhaps the clearest sign that something has shifted is that, instead of worrying about whether the project is or will be successful, she’s focused on how much she’s enjoying the process—to the point that she immediately began dreaming up next year’s special. “I had so much fun making this. Like now I want to do an Easter special, now I want to do Halloween specials annually,” she says. “This was the most fun I’ve ever had making anything, and I think it’s going to be something I’m really proud of in the future.”

’Till Death Do Us Part releases today, and The Trixie Mattel Halloween Mattelathon airs October 5 on Trixie’s YouTube channel.