Eliza McLamb

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Singer-songwriter Eliza McLamb is coming of age right infront of us. When the beginning of the pandemic interrupted McLamb’s studies atGeorge Washington University, she eschewed the pre-law path she’d planned forherself and headed west. She started sharing original songs on TikTok whileworking on farms in North Carolina and Kansas, and was shocked to see hervideos find a devoted audience. “I'd been writing songs since I was six yearsold. It just never really occurred to me that there would be anyoneinterested,” says McLamb.

Soon, her intimate songs about relationships, body image,and the complexities of life as a young woman started racking up millions ofviews apiece. Her earliest tracks were deeply personal, made from nothing buther voice and a guitar and recorded in the laundry shed where she lived at thetime. Nevertheless, they contained something that resonated — an intimacy bornefrom her ability to speak to the universal while also speaking only forherself.

Her upcoming EP, Salt Circle, is the culmination of a periodspent focused on self-reflection. McLamb departs from stripped-back guitar andDIY production and ventures towards a lush sonic landscape, with the help ofproducer Sarah Tudzin aka illuminati hotties. On the single “Doing Fine,”McLamb is clearer-eyed than ever before, both sharp and soft in equal measure;and in chaotic times for all of us, her reflections on the confusion ofeveryday life feel prescient and necessary. “The EP encapsulates this idea ofprocessing the world and your life and trying to make some meaning out of it,”McLamb explains.

“The arc of the EP starts with songs about me feeling verydisillusioned with what my life is ending up to be — not so much in thematerial circumstances but in the ways that my consciousness is dealing withit.

“It’s this negotiation of, like, how can I hold on to thethings that I love in a world where everything is changing? How can I be happywith my circumstances when I have this war going on inside of me? And how can Ilearn to accept myself as a person who is deeply feeling and deeply sensitive?The whole thing is basically me deciding if I want to really live life the waythat I know I’m meant to, which is a deeply feeling person... And if I want tobe a part of that, or if I want to check out of that.”

 The subtle power ofMcLamb’s music is her ability to make every listener feel personally andintimately spoken to. To her audience, her music is a whispered revelation; itoften feels reciprocal, like a secret shared between friends. It’s an energythat’s also fostered in her writing, her warm social media presence, and herpodcast, Binchtopia, where her wry cultural commentary has drawn a legion offans.

 It’s perhaps moreaccurate, though, to describe experiencing McLamb’s music as peering into aninterior world — reading the diary, pulling back the curtain, catching aglimpse of the deeply personal machinations of someone else’s life. McLamb’smusic at times offers such an authentic interrogation of her own experiencesthat it can feel like something we were never meant to see. It’s all the more impressive,then, that there’s something so universal nestled inside her echoing verses andyearning vocals.

 “It’s always aninternal process,” McLamb says. “But when I write a song that’s principallyjust for me, that I wrote to figure out some emotion or to express some storyor something like that, and then I put it out into the world, there have alwaysbeen people who resonate so deeply with it. They look at that piece of art thatI made for me and say, ‘Oh, this feels like it's for me.’ And that in so manyways reinforces my spirituality, honestly — my inherent belief that we are allpart of one collective energy source, and that we all experience very similarthings and have solidarity in our emotions and our sensitivity.”

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Dan O’Grady