It’s October, and I’m calling indie-pop singer, songwriter, and long-form essayist Eliza McLamb in a nexus of transition points: she’s between a farming sabbatical in the lush grounds of North Carolina, a year of New York City living, the leaving of the podcast she co-hosted Binchtopia, and the verge of the release of her newest album, Good Story. It’s not surprising, then, that her record (the one I’m calling to talk about) is a mimesis of the limits of coercive self-mythologizing and what it might look like to emancipate yourself from any grand narrative.
From Chapel Hill, North Carolina, McLamb rose to fame during 2020 with the virality of her song “Porn Star Tits,” a song representing a much earlier moment of McLamb’s career. Good Story follows the release of McLamb’s debut album Going Through It from early last year that soundtracked the intensities of becoming, especially as a woman. While the two works are not divorced, Good Story is a different articulation. It’s an experiment that sublimates between present moments of making sense of yourself and the moment after where any sense of identity melts away. “Like the Boys,” the single precluding the album release, meditates on the limits of socio-cultural narratives of femininity. Still, McLamb sees a dignity in the messiness of constructing and deconstructing the narratives that compose our life. As McLamb and I discuss philosophy, Indigenous stories, and her own life, it’s clear Good Story chronicles the somatic experience of fully-thought out theories told through the syntax of steady drums and a heavy guitar.
You are one of the few artists where I plainly see a lot of theory in your work. Maybe it’s the Substack effect, but you’re obviously informed by a lot of literature. Are there any pieces or ideas that are really sticking in your mind right now?
I was just thinking about Don DeLillo. He’s a postmodern writer from the ’80s who wrote a book in 1985 called White Noise. There’s actually a quote from it on the insert of my vinyl. Separately, I’ve been preparing research for another project and was reminded of that book because of its themes. I’ve been really into postmodern theory lately. It’s been a nice embrace after this last project, after figuring out what it meant to me to plot out stories from my life and what it meant to rely on a narrative. Postmodern narrative felt like a way to see how other people throughout time have broken out of that structure and found other ways to make meaning.
White Noise was a book where I had already written most of the album before I read it, and then when I did, I really connected with it. There’s a quote that goes, “We start our lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan.” The part I didn’t include, which comes right after, says, “it is a failed scheme but that’s not the point.” There’s a dignity and value in being a person and trying to figure it all out.
It feels like our generation is cursed by the need to constantly narrativize ourselves—to make diary entries, to find cause and effect, to make ourselves cohesive. Do you feel that impulse too?
For a long time, clinging to my own story felt like the most important thing. When I encountered contradictory information, it made me uncomfortable and afraid—like maybe my story wasn’t true. The second record was me working through, in real time, how valuable it is to have a narrative about who you are that’s chronological and thematic, while also balancing the fact that we can’t all live in a magical world where time and space don’t exist. Especially if you’ve been through something traumatic, having a sense of “this happened, and it felt this way” is really helpful. But once we’ve established what happened, is it useful to keep circling the dock?
I often look to nature for these narratives, especially in Indigenous cultures. I’m thinking about the story of the Three Sisters, for example. As someone who has undulated between being very involved and separate from nature, I’m wondering what that relationship to nature looks like for you—in general and as a narrative.
I’ve had periods of escaping into the woods. I actually just came out of one. I went through a big interpersonal and career shift and needed space. I went to rural North Carolina and read Braiding Sweetgrass, which feels familiar in your question in the best way. I was spending time in rural Appalachia, doing a work exchange on a farm. The farm was surrounded by miles of trails and a creek. I’d go down to the creek every day to think. When people talk about imagining a calm place during meditation, I realized mine will always be a creek in the middle of a forest. That atmosphere feels like home. It’s how I grew up in North Carolina, always near little creeks and forests. That’s why it was hard to be in LA for a while—nothing reminded me of that. Reading Braiding Sweetgrass got me thinking about the personalities of the trees, even the rocks. The forest and running water just feel alive to me.
Let’s talk about the nuts and bolts of your new album. Where and when did you write it? Who were you working with during that process?
The album is coming out soon. I’m ready for it to be out, for sure. I started writing right after the last album came out. I did sessions with my producer Sarah Hudson and Jacob Blizard, who both worked on the last record. We went to a little cabin in upstate New York, right next to Elizaville, which felt perfect, and worked on some demos. I took those ideas back to the city to develop further.
New York, even though it’s less present on the record, was a huge part of writing it. I wrote a lot of songs on the subway or walking home from the station. We recorded at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, North Carolina. A close friend of mine works there and got to be part of the project. I love Asheville. It’s lush, and the studio was beautiful. Everything was written by the time we got there.
On the opening track Better Song, you talk about change whether it’s who changes you or what changes you. How has your relationship to change evolved?
I think I’ve always really loved change, actually. I find it really invigorating to turn something on its head and have a brand-new experience. That’s what the song Getting Free is about, the last one. I think it’s natural to be a little scared of change, but I’m also attracted to the things that scare me. When I left my job and my podcast—that was my income—and when relationships changed, that was scary too, because someone you love and care about might exist in a different way now.
But I think why I love change is because so much of my life has been about building a strong foundation of trust with myself. Whenever something changes like that, it’s a reminder that I have to hold onto myself through it. It’s kind of exciting to see how I handle it each time.
It’s also interesting that you talk about trust between yourself. In your writing, I read a lot of tension between lying and making yourself digestible during the creating process. I heard this especially in your song Good Story. What does that song mean to you?
I think I always trust my emotions—it’s more about whether I trust how I deal with them. Good Story, for me, is about that process. It’s about feeling something and wanting to immediately crystallize it or narrativize it and the tension that comes from that. Sometimes it’s easier to describe something than to feel it, which I’m learning every day.
It’s interesting because when you said “lying,” I immediately thought of that as something you do interpersonally. And when you said it, I almost wanted to say, “No, you can’t lie in your art, because that’s not an interpersonal relationship.” This attachment to authenticity, this expectation of full disclosure—especially for women who write—it comes with this weird entitlement. But that’s not how art works. To me, lying means breaking a relationship contract where there’s trust between you and someone else—a friend, a lover, family. You lie, and you break that trust. But there’s no such contract between artists and fans. You don’t owe anyone anything. I hate that phrase in general, but in the realm of art it’s actually true. You create what you’re going to create. People will stick around if they’re interested. That contract isn’t so personal.
As an artist who really exploded online during COVID, do you find the relationship and trust between artist and audience different on the internet versus in person?
I think trust is more spiritual than factual. If you’re combing through an artist’s work for what’s “true” or “untrue,” it kind of undermines the whole point of making art which is about combining the experience of the real with the experience of fantasy. Trying to grasp something intangible and bring it down to earth. That kind of stan culture, picking apart all those details, is really different from being in community and sharing space. The trust I have between my fans and my audience is about integrity. I’m not going to make shit I don’t think is good. I dropped out of South by Southwest because U.S. military contractors and weapons companies were sponsoring it. I’m not going to perform in Saudi Arabia. That’s the kind of trust I care about. Whether line thirteen on my record is true or not, I don’t care about that.
You’ve worked across so many forms—writing, songwriting, podcasting. Do you get something different from each medium?
Music is really important to me because it’s so somatic. I love songwriting. I love artists for their writing, but I’ve always found it hard to connect what I’m actually feeling versus describing what I’m feeling. I love music because you can’t control how your body responds to something—you hear a song and your head moves, or you get a feeling in your chest. That’s healing.
Even last weekend, I was at a club listening to drum and bass and feeling it move through my body. That does something. I’m extremely thankful for longform writing—essays, novels—for being able to create a parallel world and explain what I see and feel, and for language to be a tool that helps me work through whatever’s coming in.
One last question, you’ve lived in New York City for about a year now where this city is filled with pockets of deep hope and despair. How are you feeling about the state of music and the state of the world?
I feel more hopeful when I’m in the real world and not on my phone. I think New York is an amazing place to feel hopeful. I can go outside and see normal people living normal lives, really acclimated to being around a diverse population. You can go to all sorts of neighborhoods and see people supporting each other—that’s what we’re actually dealing with.
It’s easy to look at Twitter and think, “uck, that’s what we’re up against.” But what we’re really up against is each other—and that’s not a bad thing. I was at Charli XCX’s set at Primavera Sound, and I looked around and saw miles of gay people dancing and having fun, and I thought, “They’ll never kill us.” That’s what we’re dealing with. It’s all of us. Especially right now, when it’s so scary for queer and trans people, and I have so many queer and trans friends and family. I feel like, in almost a delusional way there’s no way anyone could make them disappear from my world because I love them so much. That’s how I feel a lot of the time. I’m getting emotional because it’s emotional times. Being outside makes me feel more hopeful.