Eliza McLamb is a singer-songwriter who grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She was a student at George Washington University when the pandemic forced her to move back to her childhood home, which she then left to work on farms across the country. She homed in on her incisive, conversational songwriting on her first two EPs, Memos and Salt Circle, before releasing her Sarah Tudzin-produced debut LP, Going Through It, last year. It wasn’t until this summer that McLamb decided to leave her podcasting job co-hosting Binchtopia – though she maintains a Substack – to fully pursue music. She reunited with Tudzin to record her sophomore album, Good Story, which is out today, recording it with guitarist Jacob Blizard, bassist Ryan Ficano, keyboardist Sarah Goldstone, and Death Cab For Cutie drummer Jason McGerr at Asheville’s Drop of Sun Studios. Written after McLamb relocated from Los Angeles to New York, it’s as wry and introspective as her debut while leaning into feelings of absurdity and chaos; not just taking stock of the changes in her early 20s, but unpacking the self-narrativizing patterns behind them. “Writing it down and making it real/ Skipping the step where I remember to feel,” she sings on the title track, reconciling by holding the stories lightly and reminding herself the present is all she has: boring and difficult, sacred and eternal.

We caught up with Eliza McLamb for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about home as a shifting star, self-narrativization, recording Good Story, and more.

I read that a lot of the new songs came to you while on the subway or during walks. What changed about the way you wrote after moving to New York?

I had not spent that much time on public transportation before I came to New York, and I was in LA before then, which I felt very atomized in. There was something about being on the subway, in this sort of collective energy, but also without any cell service [laughs] that made it seem conducive to writing. Something about the motion as well – weirdly, a lot of those songs were written on the train. For my last record, a lot of it was sitting down to write the songs. I had an express goal going into it, and I would have moments where I would really think about it. With this one, it definitely came spontaneously. At least half of the songs were written on literally the 10-minute walk from my subway stop to my house, just feverishly writing. It’s been an interesting inspiration, where I’m getting woken up in the middle of the night and being like, “I gotta write this down.”

Is it literally just typing, or is it also voice memos sometimes?

Well, an interesting thing that I’ve been doing with this record that I never did before was writing lyrics first. Usually I would write everything at the same time; I would always write with an instrument in my hand. I would never just write lyrics. But, actually, most of these songs, I would say I wrote lyrics first, while I was out somewhere, and then would come home. I wouldn’t have a melody in my mind when I was writing it, but I would have a meter, like a poem or something, so I would get a sense of the rhythm of the song and how I wanted to build out the structure, and then I could tweak it. Which helped me, I think, because sometimes if you’re writing with an instrument in hand, it feels like you get stuck in a structure, and you might leave a line in there that you don’t love because it works with the structure that you had. But when you write without an instrument, you always have to change something, so it’s okay to change things.

It started with ‘California’, and I wrote that in the van on my phone. And that one, I barely had to change. I got back to the Airbnb, and I was like, “Can I borrow someone’s guitar and just put it to music?” And it ended up working out.

That predates ‘God Take Me Out of LA’, right? Was that ever considered for the record?

Yeah. I think with ‘California’, I knew I was leaving, and I was feeling really fond of it. ‘God Take Me Out of LA’ was, like, kicking and screaming – I only recorded it because we ended up having studio time, and we were already there. The song wasn’t even totally done, but I was about to leave LA, and I had just written the song two mornings ago, and I was like, “I’m really feeling this way.” And I thought, let’s just put it out as another single with ‘Lena Grove’, and just have it be this thing that stands alone as a point in time to mark how I felt. But I’m glad I get to have ‘California’ on the record in a more formal way, because my feelings about LA and California in general are more complicated than the song that I wrote when I felt like I really needed to get out of there.

All of the material that ended up on the record was post-moving, then? Were you writing during that transitional period?

Yeah. A lot of it I wrote that summer after I moved in May, and then I wrote a lot of it that summer, and then at the end of the summer I went upstate New York with Sarah [Tudzin], my producer, and Jacob [Blizard], who plays guitar on the record. I tried to flesh out some of the songs that I had started working on and then wrote everything else pretty quickly after I got back and before we recorded. At the time, I was kind of oscillating – if I had a record out and I was focusing on the music while I was touring, I was doing that, and if I wasn’t, then I was working at my podcast job. It was in this period where I realized I had this balance that I wasn’t actually a big fan of.

I was having a really hard time mentally and emotionally the year after Going Through It came out. I started having these questions and thoughts about narrativizing your life or presenting yourself as a person with a legible story – or even internally feeling that way. When I got to New York, I felt like I could sort of breathe again, and I felt really unstuck, in a way. In LA, I mean, physically, I was not moving very much, it was hard for me to be active, I was in the car all the time. New York is just sort of a generative place, because you’re constantly constantly around so many other kinds of people, exposed to so much energy, you’re in transit. When I was getting back into writing, everything flowed pretty easily. I know some people are really like, “I must sit down for an hour every single day and work,” and I really respect that kind of work, but as a person, I’m just so cyclical, and my cycles are long. I just have to respect that if I don’t write a song for a few months, it’s okay, and I will get back to a place where I’m writing a song every day.

Your lyric “home became a shifting star” got me thinking that sometimes you have agency over it, and sometimes you don’t. And maybe the more you grow, the more agency you have over it.

I definitely feel like I moved to New York as a way to reclaim some part of my life. Los Angeles, for me, was just an amazing container for a long time. I moved there when I was 19. I had a lot to settle from a pretty tumultuous childhood and dropping out of college and all of a sudden starting this business, and I needed that place where – and I know this is not true for everyone – not a lot of stuff happened. And that was great for me, because I was doing so much internal processing. It was a similar question, actually, to what sparked a lot of the themes of the record, which is: I have this life in LA. I like where I live, I have friends, I have a job. I’ve checked off all the boxes, but now what? Now what does this do for me?

I realized I still was not happy in LA. The reason, I think now, is because I was very disconnected from the world around me, and I was actually feeling so insular and thinking about myself way too much. My own story, or my own arc. I was like, “I kinda gotta get out of here. I have to be in a place that makes it easier for me to not think about myself.” That was a big impetus of the move, and that was also a similar question to what had me writing about these themes. How helpful is it, actually, to think about yourself all the time? And how helpful is it to have this narrative that you cling to so tightly? How helpful is it to constantly be constructing this version of yourself inside your own head?

Was it freeing when you started exploring these questions in songwriting, or did you start feeling self-conscious about getting into this pattern of writing about yourself?

Totally, yeah. Obviously it’s funny now doing press about the album, and they’re like, “So what’s the story?” And I’m like, “Well…” [laughs] For me, when I realize something has to change, my impulse is to go to the other end of the spectrum. If I realize, “Hey, I think this whole narrativizing everything about my life actually has some drawbacks,” I think probably the first thing I did was swing all the way to the absurd and just be like, “Nothing matters, and everything is chaos, and there’s no story to anything.” I think that’s where I started writing the record – ‘Good Story’ is full of all those sorts of contradictions. In one moment, I’m accepting that there’s no mystery to me, I’m everything you see, but then I’m like, “But then I’ll change it if you don’t like it” – there’s this tense confusion about it. I think throughout the process of writing the record, I kind of slid back to the middle.

‘Every Year’, for me, is sort of the thesis song of the record, that verse about “the story is a lifeboat” – when I was really struggling, when I needed to make sense of my life and the things that had happened to me and how I was gonna metabolize it, I really needed it. And I needed to tell myself that it was true and it happened. But then after that, I didn’t need to be stuck there. But that doesn’t mean I have to then throw away everything that was meaningful to me. I’m still an artist and a writer and a musician at the end of the day. If I didn’t like stories anymore, I’d quit my job and never take in art ever again, but that’s obviously not true. So I feel like I arrived at a place where stories are so valuable and I love them so dearly, and also, what are the limits of that? How can I, being cognizant of those limits and respecting those limits, make my interaction with those stories richer and more meaningful and less, you know, graspy – I talk about holding it lightly a lot. The story is something that I sort of hold lightly.

You talked about these contradictions in ‘Good Story’, and one thing I latched onto was that you sing “I don’t care care about sacred,” but in a post announcing the record you said you still love to “work the magic of storytelling.” Are there times when it does feel like the thing you’re grasping towards has that sacredness to it?

I mean, let me not show my living in LA for 3 years too much, but whatever you think is happening is what’s happening, you know? Let me stop generalizing, because it really is just my personal experience, but for me, if I’m saying to myself I’m having a horrible period of my life, I’m a failure, and every day it’s really hard to get up and do what I’m doing – everything about that’s gonna be true. [laughs] I think realizing that storytelling also can go in this profoundly creative, hopeful direction, where I’m like, what if I do embrace a little bit of that absurdity, of nothing really means anything? If I do need these physical things to latch onto in my world, this idea of truth, let me see if I can be a little fun and creative and optimistic. Let me see my life as this interesting creative project. Let me try to toe over some of the boundaries that I thought existed for me of, I couldn’t do this, I couldn’t be this type of person. Boundaries that existed because of other old stories that I had for myself. And in that way, that feels incredibly magical and sacred. Because the story, if you allow it to evolve, becomes something that actually frees you a little bit. I don’t know if that answers your question exactly, but that’s what it made me think of.

It ties into this idea of stories about stories, but there’s also stories in conversation with older stories. The more songs you have in your catalog, the more inevitable it becomes to begin framing things around what’s publicly out there. I don’t know how conscious you were of how some of these songs may relate to ones on your first record or your EPs.

I wasn’t conscious of the songs in relation to other songs until a few of them had come together, and I realized that I was sort of circling around similar ideas over and over again. I haven’t thought about it too much in conversation with the first record, only that I’m astounded at how old the first record seems to be now, even though I didn’t write it that long ago. But I also do think, I’m 24, and the record came out last year, so this is a time for a lot of people that involves a ton of personal growth. In my mind, the way it works in conversation is that the first record was very much me being like, “I need to tell my story. This is all the stuff that has been circulating around my brain from my childhood, and I need to put it down and make it real, so that I can…” And I didn’t know at the time that the end of that sentence was gonna be, “so that I can move on from it.” When I was writing that record, I was like, “I kind of feel like the most interesting thing that ever happened to me in my life is that I had a mentally ill mother, and that really shaped everything about the way that I grew up. And if I write this record about my childhood and that experience, well, then it’s over for me.” [laughs] I thought that the second record would take me much longer to write, and I would have no idea what to write about. Turns out that very train of thought ended up being what I was writing about.

The flow of Going Through It had a very clear trajectory in terms of the arc of the album. I’m curious if you were drawn to trying a looser approach in terms of the concept and sequencing of the record. 

It’s not as clear as the first record, where it is that down-then-up motion. But it’s interesting, and I didn’t even think about this while I was ordering the tracklist, but I pretty much, in a loose way, wrote the songs in chronological order. Obviously, ‘California’ was the first song I wrote, but all the side A songs I wrote before the side B songs – except, weirdly for ‘Suffering’, that was one of the last ones I wrote. As I say, I’m holding it loosely. I was having trouble with the tracklist, and I was like, “Oh, wait, the whole thing is kind of about how this is a framework that has diminishing returns at a certain point.” It was hard to make the tracklist, too, because I think there’s a lot of different sounds on the record, and something was gonna sound a little bit out of place, no matter where we put it. But I was like, “I’m pushing through that discomfort, because that actually works structurally for the thing that I’m trying to do.”

When you were talking about leaning into the absurdity a little bit, I was thinking about the middle stretch of the record, from ‘Promise’ and ‘Mausoleum’, which strikes me as a kind of blurry representation of that metaphor in ‘Every Year’ of tying your story to the dock when you find land.

That’s the chunk of the record that I wonder how people are gonna respond to. ‘Mausoleum’ is that absurd chaos – that’s the real breaking down of the story. It’s almost a song about grieving – that you have to take down this grave, basically. And ‘Water Inside the Fence’ is also this totally chaotic thing. I hadn’t even really thought about the fact that they’re in that same little section with each other, but I do think ‘Water Inside the Fence’ and ‘Mausoleum’ are the two Dark Knight of the Souls on the record. When concrete things stop serving you, you have to get a little absurd and out there. To me, it made sense to have both of those things be in the middle of the record on either end of these cleaner, more legible songs.

You mentioned having the rhythm of a song in mind – obviously, part of what’s so disarming about ‘Mausoleum’ is the drums and the additional instrumentation feeling slightly out of time in this very intentional way. How was that tracked?

So, I sang and Jacob played the guitar part. ‘Mausoleum’ is one of those songs that I wrote fully on paper, basically, and the demo sounds so, frankly, bad and different. But we got into the studio, and Jacob and I figured out a better guitar part. Jacob and I sang and played it, but then I just told everyone to come into the live room. Actually, Jason [McGerr], who played drums on the record and is in Deathcab for Cutie – brilliant guy – had this idea. We all walked into the room, put on headphones, and around the chorus, you can actually hear everyone stepping into the room and closing the door and moving around. It was the first time that Jason and Ryan [Ficano] had heard the song. I told them to just jump in on the second verse, and just try to figure it out. I’m sort of conducting from the side; I’m on the piano, and you can hear me actually, right before the last chorus, count them in – 3, 4 – because they didn’t know the chorus was coming.

Weirdly, we tried it two more times after that, but I think we ended up using the first take. I think we could only get it that way because no one had heard the song before. That’s a magic moment. When you were asking me about sacred and magic and stuff – when we landed on that last chord, and then you can hear me actually sigh in the recording, I was like, “I can’t believe we did that.”

It’s almost like the opposite of the sigh at the end of ‘Suffering’, which is kind of sarcastic. 

That’s really true. I actually didn’t even realize until now that there’s two sighs on the record. [laughs]

The production on the record also feels like it’s mirroring whether the song is more in the present or the past, looking back or feeling in the moment. Were you thinking about how to sonically represent time? 

Yeah, that’s a really great observation. I will say that’s probably more Sarah’s wheelhouse than mine. I do think that present moment is, to use that word again, those more legible songs, and then when everything sort of blurs together – when it’s past, present, future, everything – then I feel like it can get a little fuzzier. ‘Better Song’, for instance, is a pretty reflective song, but then at the end explodes into this big thing that really brings you back into the raw feeling of the moment. I hadn’t thought about it specifically in those terms.

Do you have memories of recording that guitar solo at the end of ‘Better Song’?

We did “Everybody Gets a Guitar Solo” night. [laughs] It was at the very end of tracking, and we were kind of burnt out because we had maybe 11 days, and we recorded 17 songs. Most everyone had gone home, we started the week with a bunch of people, and then it was just me, Sarah, Jacob, and Lawson, our engineer. It was so late, and Sarah was like, “I think we should all try a guitar solo,” because it’s distorted and crazy. Maybe it’s some Frankenstein combination of all of our guitar solos, but I have all these videos just turning the lights red in the studio, and everyone went in there and ripped this distorted guitar solo.

That was actually a last-minute addition. I wanted to end it, almost like everything pulls out at “Well, I love you and I don’t regret it,” but I was having some realizations about the feeling I was having with that song. That is one of the tricks you can do with narrative: “I know you hate me and now you’ve said it/I love you and I don’t regret it,” and on this placid little note, wow, isn’t she the bigger person? This other person looks like they really did some bad stuff, and she realized that the relationship just wasn’t serving her anymore, and she just calmly stepped away. And then I was like, “That’s so not fucking true.” [laughs] There’s so much emotion in that situation for me. It was a situation where I sort of felt like I had to be “the bigger person,” but wasn’t in reality. I wanted something to represent the real truth of that situation. I was like, “I actually just need to go fucking crazy.” It almost feels like when you have a tough conversation with someone, and you’re really composed, and you’re good – and then you hang up the phone, and you’re just like, “Urgh!” That’s exactly what that was.

What was it like being back in Asheville, and specifically at Drop of Sun, to record the album? 

I’m still working on being comfortable in the studio, actually. Being around the band has made it a lot easier, but also, anyone’s energy in the room can affect how comfortable I feel making a suggestion. It was really important to me that the environment felt really right, and part of that was every single person in the room I knew and loved deeply, pretty much. Except for some new faces who I now know and love deeply. But having Lawson, my friend of many years, be the engineer and have Sarah producing was amazing. We were mostly inside all the time, we did not get to see so much of Asheville. But it was really nice to be there, and to be around even just vegetation and forestry that I recognized. Actually, that was a really hard thing about being in LA – not being able to see a tree that I recognized. For the last record, we recorded at Bear Creek Studios in Washington, outside of Seattle, which was absolutely beautiful. But still, Pacific Northwest is not where I feel home. So, Asheville was really wonderful. I could definitely see myself recording another project there.

Speaking of home, I love the line in ‘Talisman’ about it being like a talisman you hold when it gets dark: “It’s as real as anything that has and hasn’t happened.” 

There’s that line, and there’s “home became a shifting star” – I didn’t realize that that was actually a through line in the record. There’s a great quote by Catherine Lacey – God, I feel like I’ve brought up this quote in every interview I’ve done, but it always feels relevant, where she says, “I always finish writing a novel, and then I read it back and notice that I’ve revealed something.” Something huge about me has been so plainly clear, and has been revealed through the process of me writing this novel that I was not aware of at all during writing it. I always feel that way about records, and that was a moment where I was like, “Wow, I am talking about this idea of home as more of a concept and something that you can create and take with you and hold in non-tangible ways.”

Do you think the record reflects your relationship to home in a way that maybe wasn’t as clear when you were writing it?

Yeah, I think so. There’s this song I wrote when I was 18 called ‘Lena Grove’, and there’s a line, “How can you call it home if you can’t take it with you?” When I wrote that, I was traveling across the country, and I was literally just in the middle of nowhere and feeling actually homesick for a spot, a home. But also, as I’ve grown older, the thing that has really improved my life and brought me a lot of peace is cultivating this sense of belonging within myself that’s not rooted in anything, that doesn’t depend on me feeling a certain way or being in a certain place – almost like the Buddhist idea of eternal, present, meditative self.

I think that’s what allowed me to hold these stories lightly, is to be like, “If I let go of this, it’s not like I’m gonna disappear.” I have this other grounded sense of being here and of belonging, internally with myself. It’s intangible and hard to put into words, but that certainly was a huge part of feeling as though I could let these things go a little bit, feeling that groundedness – and that is, to me, a sense of home. Home to me is belonging, feeling like you are somewhere where you are safe and welcome. I had to make that space inside myself for myself in order for it to feel safe for me to let go of these other things that I was holding onto.

Something that felt like an expression of that meditative self to me was your piece ‘The easiest thing’. It’s been almost a month now since you posted it, so I’m curious how it’s sat with you in relation to what you’re saying about feeling grounded.

Yeah, I wrote that in a period where right after I made the announcement that I was leaving the podcast. I experienced this really crazy spiritual clarity; I really don’t know how to describe it any other way. I felt like a newborn baby for three weeks, in the best way possible. I was in an incredible environment for that, because I was at this farm. Things just started feeling really clear to me, and I felt that it became simpler for me to see what are the things I’m doing because it feels truly grounded and true and real to me, and what are the things that feel like they are covering up for other things. I wanted to write that piece also as a way to immortalize that spiritual clarity because I knew everything comes in phases. There would be a time when I didn’t feel that way anymore, and it would feel a little muddled again.

That piece reminds me, too, of ‘Girls I Know’, and what I was writing about in that song, which is that having actually just a normal, functional life is so hard and boring sometimes, you know? There are moments of this beautiful spiritual clarity, and you feel so grounded and you’re connected to everything, but mostly, it’s brushing your teeth at night, buying produce at the store, and remembering to do the dishes – it’s this series of, it can feel like, depressingly arduous tasks. I think there’s a challenge, when you have a brain that is used to chaos and maybe drugs or substances, having to find peace and joy and meaning in these mundane things, and needing then to imbue those things with the sacredness, which I think has always sort of been there.

So it’s a matter of recognizing that, and that has been really important for me to clear away the other stuff – to just feel more present. Because when you’re making up a story, you’re not present. One way to practice holding that story lightly for me has been to practice presence, and that is what that piece was about, too. There’s all these things I was doing when I wasn’t present. I’ve been vegan for the last you know, month and a half, and that’s something that requires me to be present in every single meal. Every single meal I have to think about it, because it’s not easy to eat that way and I’m still learning how, but I have to recommit to my principles and be present with a decision that I made every time. And that is actually very rewarding for me.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Eliza McLamb’s Good Story is out now via Royal Mountain Records.