Ella Jane Talks Becoming a Pandemic Popstar, Releasing Her New Single ‘bored&blind,’ and What to Expect on Her Upcoming EP
ella jane makes a lot of eye contact. It’s the first thing I notice when I sit down over Zoom to interview her, and it instantly gives her a sense of warmth. ella seems like a pop singer tailor-made for the year we’re currently living through, establishing herself through TikTok while stuck at home during the pandemic, before jump-starting her music career within the confines of her Tufts dorm room with the additional time provided by the shift to online school (she started as a freshman this past September). In between college lectures and music meetings, ella writes songs. And it’s a strategy that seems to be working. With the release of her debut song, ‘The City’ in February 2020, ella introduced herself as a musician with a cohesive style whose diaristic lyricism and bouncy yet delicate melodies undoubtedly owe a lot to her bedroom pop predecessors as well as her three primary influences, Lorde, Phoebe Bridgers, and Maggie Rogers. Eventually catching the eye of FADER Label, The FADER Magazine’s record-label offshoot, who signed her in March 2021, ella now joins label-mates including Clairo and Matt and Kim, a transition that positions her front and center as she enters the next phase of her career.
But, given music’s current landscape, what makes a great pop star today? Good songwriting, sure. The interaction and openness with fans necessitated and trademarked by an entire generation of music-makers (and music-listeners) who were raised online, an ability to bend genres while simultaneously paying homage to the greats who came before you, and an ability to say fuck you to streaming algorithms, while also possessing expert knowledge of those algorithms at the same time. It’s a tricky balance to maintain, and one that, for eager new artists just finding their bearings within the industry, results in a faster rise to the top, oftentimes followed by, unfortunately, a harder plummet to the bottom. The digitization of music has removed any sense of longevity the industry once enjoyed and makes the perpetual quest to maintain musical relevance a pointless struggle against an undeniably trend-led, algorithm-based, mode of creation and promotion, where the artists’ craft often gets lost in translation. But, fortunately for ella, this is where she sticks out. Her process is rooted in affecting and deliberate songwriting, a nod to Lorde and Taylor Swift, two artists ella signals as the preeminent pop musicians of our time for their ability to craft beautiful lyrics that aren’t diminished by a catchy hook, but rather enhanced by it. With ‘bored&blind,’ her new single, ella continues the journey she began just a year ago, and with a new home at FADER and plans for an EP to be released this summer, I’m not sure where she’s going, but I’m sure it’s exciting.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Tell us a little bit about yourself and your music.
[ELLA:] I’m ella jane. I’ve been writing songs since I was eleven, but this past year has been pretty cool. I’ve been putting out music, and I have a song coming out at midnight tonight, (ella’s new single ‘bored&blind’) so I’m super excited.
[UNPUBLISHED:] What has your journey into the music industry been like up until now?
[ELLA:] It’s been wild because it's happened solely during the pandemic, so my only context for existing in the music industry has been Zoom calls and sessions. It’s been very weird and I think in a sense it’s kept it from feeling ‘real,’ you know? I haven’t really gotten a chance to perform in front of people who know my music or even meet a lot of people I’d normally be meeting in person. So it’s still really kept up that element of surrealism and sense of ‘I don’t know what’s happening right now.’ It’s been interesting to process that this past year.
[UNPUBLISHED:] What was the process like behind creating ‘bored&blind’?
[ELLA:] It was a three-year-long process. I wrote ‘bored&blind’ when I was sixteen at a songwriting camp, and my songwriting process changes every time, but that song just came quickly and there’s no explanation for it. It wasn’t until this past year that I started getting into production. Back then when I was writing I had no idea what I wanted the produced sound to be. With some of my older songs, it's easier to imagine, but with that song, I always had trouble envisioning what I wanted it to be. Over the past three years, I’ve known I wanted to put it out because I’m really proud of it, but it’s been hard trying to match the sound that I don’t hear as clearly in my head but still feels authentic to the song. So I finally tried to make some of my own demos and never really got them to where I wanted them to be. However, two months ago my manager put me in contact with a producer named Mike Irish who heard this small snippet of a demo I’d made and emailed me this version he had made based on that snippet. It immediately had that sound and it clicked and I just heard what the song was. Over winter break, I went to Brooklyn in January and finally recorded it, and that’s the song.
[UNPUBLISHED:] How would you describe your music to someone who hasn’t heard it before?
[ELLA:] I would describe it as indie-pop with a little bit of confusion because I feel like that whole indie genre is by definition all-encompassing. ‘bored&blind’ is especially pop, but my influences come from a range of genres. I like people to be a little confused about what they’re hearing and what they’re feeling.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Where do you find inspiration, either sonically, lyrically, or in terms of visuals?
[ELLA:] I’m someone who is very drawn to different words and phrases, so if I’m reading a book I’ll have a pen with me just to underline things that inspire me and would be good for lyrics. It’s almost subconscious at this point. I’m very tuned in to the words that people are saying. My notes section on my phone is full of words and phrases, and half of them don’t even get used. Visually, my inspiration comes from movies and shows. But in terms of sound, like I was saying before, it’s about that versatility. It’s been interesting trying to get more into production because there’s a part of me that listens to folk and a part of me that listens to jazz and a part of me that listens to pop, so it gets into this really strange mixed area that’s really fun to play around with. I’m curious to see how my sound turns out.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Do you have any artists right now that inspire you, either musically or in terms of career trajectory?
[ELLA:] The three I talk about all the time are Lorde, Maggie Rogers, and Phoebe Bridgers. I was always a Billie Eilish fan and it’s such a weird experience to see someone your age go through that. This morning I was in the middle of watching her documentary and she’s very inspiring so that’s very cool to see.
[UNPUBLISHED:] How do you balance school and music at the same time? Do you have any advice for someone who knows that they wanna make music and is maybe making music now, but is also juggling school?
[ELLA:] Honestly, I’ve had a lot of difficulty balancing it, so I don’t know how good the advice I could give is gonna be. I’ve had some learning issues; I have ADHD and Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) which already make it difficult to deal with online school, and I can just be a bit of a procrastinator when it comes to school because I focus so much on music. It’s been a really important wake-up call in terms of writing things down and making sure I’m doing everything. I’ve really learned that just because you’re not doing something doesn’t mean it’ll go away. I also think it’s been a strangely weird advantage doing this in the middle of a pandemic because there aren’t all the demands of doing everything in person with school and with music. I’ve been in my room for the whole semester like boxed up in this tiny little prison cell but it’s given me a lot of extra time to write or just get stuff done because I have nothing else to do.
[UNPUBLISHED:] What is your songwriting/composition process like for each project?
[ELLA:] It’s different pretty much every time. There are two primary things that always make it the most successful for me in terms of finishing a song I actually like. One of them is that I have a tendency to get melodies stuck in my head, so I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and my phone’s voice memos are filled with me mumbling random melodies, and those are usually the ones that end up turning into something. I’ve never been so good at sitting down and having chords and singing along; even though it works for me, it never really turns into something I like. I think that’s because the melodies I randomly come up with are things my brain just needed to spit out. The second thing that I’ve learned is that it’s always better to finish a song if I have at least some general lyrical concept nailed down, even just the title of a song. Because I have so many, literally hundreds of unfinished songs, that I realized were just never really going anywhere. It’s helpful to have a trajectory in mind.
[UNPUBLISHED:] How do you actually write a song?
[ELLA:] It’s funny because I literally feel like I blackout during every song. I’ll try to look back on it and I just can’t. Some of my songwriting sessions are twenty minutes, and some of them are over the course of years or months at least. But I feel like for one of my faster ones, normally the sweet spot I get into is when I have a lyric idea that’s been sitting in my notes for a while that I know I want to use, and all of a sudden I have this melody idea and the two line up. I’ll look through my notes and see the words I’ve been collecting, and play around on the piano, and it’s combining things together really helps it become something. I think it also really helps for an event in my life to spur it on, which has been hard right now because there’s nothing to write about. But in a way, that’s really forced me to look outside of my own life and play around with perspective and writing stories.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Do you have any collaborators you like to work with?
[ELLA:] It’s been a really strange process to find collaborators because, with the exception of recording ‘bored&blind’ in January, the last time I was in an in-person session was in November 2019 when I was finishing up my first song. It’s been a very difficult process finding a producer or co-writer you immediately click with. It’s so much harder to do over Zoom. There’s something you can’t really put words to about being in a room with someone. I work very well with Mike who produced ‘bored&blind’ and in the meantime, until I can get back in the studio it’s been helpful to try and get as much of the production done on my own so that I can go to someone who might potentially be a really good collaborator and say “this is what I want,” and you can just hear it so I don’t have to try and explain it. But in terms of producers I’d want to work with, I’m a huge fan of everything Jack Antonoff does, as well as Ethan Ruska and Rostam.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Do you have a favorite song you’ve written up until now?
[ELLA:] I have a song that’s called ‘Thief’ that hasn’t been released yet but I’m really excited about it. I wrote it junior year of high school and it means a lot to me.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Were people generally supportive of you wanting to make music? Do you feel any pressure to go to college?
[ELLA:] Oh, absolutely. I think it was just the general mindset of where I came from. I went to a small public school in the suburbs of New York City with the same kids I’d been with since kindergarten. It’s a really strong public school so it was a really competitive atmosphere, especially among the sixty of us who were in the honor program. I did put a lot of pressure on myself and I wanted to do well and I did do well. I think it was this whole idea for so long of thinking “music will just be a hobby” and I’ll do it on the side, and if it works out it works out. In reality, it wouldn’t work out if I was just thinking of it as a hobby. It’s really interesting because I’m so curious what would’ve happened had I gotten more into this while I was applying to schools because I didn’t apply to music schools and I just thought that I had to have this exact trajectory in the life of getting good grades and going to a “good” college.
[UNPUBLISHED:] What do you hope people take away from listening to your music if anything at all?
[ELLA:] I’ve been getting that question a lot recently and my answer is always that there’s no desired takeaway. I love when people can take away their own messages, but I write really as an outlet for me and I put it out so people have something to listen and relate to because it’s so cool when you have a song that matches the way you feel [as a listener]. But, coming from me I think it would be a bit insincere to be like ‘there’s a goal to the song.’ Because in reality, a lot of these songs, especially the songs that are on this EP and are about to come out, were written in high school and they’re about mental health and unrequited crushes and shit like that. There’s no underlying goal or overarching theme that’s intended. I write to be honest and if people like it, they like it.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Do you feel any specific pressures as a woman currently in the industry to behave in a certain way, to release certain things, to listen to certain people. In terms of you being independent, do you think it’s better to be independent than if you’d be signed and in the same position?
[ELLA:] I think I’ve had a really distorted and unusual experience of being in the music industry because everything so far has just been me in my room on my computer. I think any micro-aggressions or subtly sexist things I’d have been subjected to if I’d been in the studio or going to meetings in person, I haven’t experienced. I’m also white and cis so I think that plays a big part, but it’s something that I’m a really big advocate for. When I was in my senior year of high school, I did this project for my women studies class, and at the end of the semester we got to teach the class for a day, and being very on the nose, I chose to discuss women in music. That was the first time I saw these statistics about songwriters and producers in music, and reading that just changed my life. It sounds so cheesy, and it’s funny because I’ve recited these statistics so many times but they’re so ingrained in my head. It was basically this inclusive study from USC that’s been going on for years. They study the Billboard charts and the Grammys and other bodies over the past few years, and less than 16% of the songwriters of those billboard songs are women, and under 4% of the producers are women. If you think of just how influential music is and how skewed those proportions are if music controls our lives but the stories within music aren’t being told by half of the population, we need to change that. That’s why I’m really passionate about being in music right now.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Is there anything you haven’t gotten around to yet musically that you’d like to, genre-wise or project-wise?
[ELLA:] I’d say ‘Melodrama’ (by Lorde) and ‘1989’ (by Taylor Swift) changed my view of pop, and I just want to make a pop album so badly. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do since listening to ‘Pure Heroine’ (also by Lorde) and ‘Melodrama.’ But, at the same time, especially over the past two years, I’ve gotten so into indie-rock and that kind of stuff so those two influences are pretty much reflected in my music right now, but at some point I do wanna make a totally left-of-center indie album too.
[UNPUBLISHED:] What's it like working in the pandemic and scheduling things to be released and running publicity when you’re independent?
[ELLA:] I just signed with FADER. As of now, I’m no longer independent which is very exciting. They’re really cool because they have the wider resources of FADER magazine but are still a small, indie label, so there’s not a lot of pressure and I can have as much control as I want. Over the past year, since I released my first song, I got connected to my manager, Ben Locke, who used to be the head of A&R at Level and I’ve been releasing songs through Level with his help. This is the first time I haven’t had to input any of the boxes on Spotify and other streaming sites and figure out any of the codes I need so that’s a huge weight off my shoulders. It’s been pretty easy and exciting. When I released my first song, “The City”, before I met him, I started getting into promoting myself on TikTok and the engagement came organically and that’s what sparked my inclusion in the more editorial playlists on Spotify. Now it’s nice to have that backing behind me and a bigger audience.
[UNPUBLISHED:] What’s it like using TikTok as an artist?
[ELLA:] I think it’s revolutionized the music industry, but it’s also made it something so tricky and weird to navigate. Something I personally don’t want to have happened to me that hasn’t happened is having that one viral moment. Artists of my generation are like ten times more likely to become a one-hit-wonder because all of a sudden everyone’s using the same sound, and a song can become bigger than that artist. What I’ve been trying to do over the past year with my audience on TikTok is talk about my music and show my personality in a way that gets them to search up my music on their own rather than having this fifteen-second viral moment. I don’t write with virality in mind. The songs I put out are songs that I wrote in my bedroom about my crush so they’re not written with any kind of catchy chorus in mind. For me and the type of music I write, TikTok has been an advantage and I think my career wouldn’t be happening without it.
[UNPUBLISHED:] What is the hardest decision you’ve made up until now in terms of your career?
[ELLA:] I think the whole college thing has been a really weird conversation, so I’m taking a gap year next year. I’ll see what it turns into. My parents are open to the idea that your education will always be there, but this opportunity won’t, so I’m really lucky to have that kind of support. Especially now that I have a label it’s a lot easier. It’s definitely scary to not do what you’ve been told your entire life you should be doing. The idea of not having a degree is scary to me because that’s what I’ve been trained for the past ten years to think of as the goal. But at the end of the day, I just want to write songs and I’ve got this amazing chance to do it, so I’m going for it.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Is there an EP coming?
[ELLA:] Yeah, I’ve got a few more singles that are in the works right now and two more songs that will be on the EP along with everything I’ve released so far. The rest of these songs, they’re all songs I’ve written from sophomore to senior year of high school, so it’s this entire project and piece of me from when I was sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen. I’m really excited to have that out in a whole project because before I go on to writing, this is the only opportunity I’ll get to release all of it, and for me, it was about growing up. My life was changing and my confidence and mindset were changing, so I think this is the last opportunity I really have to present that and have the theme be change and growth. The person I was at sixteen and eighteen were very different people so I’m excited to have that and put it behind me and get ready for whatever else is to come.
[UNPUBLISHED:] What was creating an EP like in a pandemic without having access to a studio or any of the other supports that usually go along with recording a project?
[ELLA:] I got really into production around June. School had ended, I had nothing to do all day so I got into production and started writing more and it’s really interesting to think about because since these songs have been a collection that was written over a long time, I never started those songs thinking they would be on the EP. They were just, at that point, these things I had written. Nothing was written with that goal, but now with the recording process, it’s trying to get it to that goal. It’s interesting to revisit these songs from a while ago and try to bridge it to now. Especially in terms of ‘bored&blind,’ the songwriting is a lot less mature than I think my songwriting is now, but it gives a lot of room for really exciting production that I feel like reflects more of what I want now, so it’s been fun to connect the two.
[UNPUBLISHED:] What’s next for you?
[ELLA:] In the next couple of years, hopefully, I’ll have an album or another EP, and then an album. It’s so weird to think about a month in the future let alone a year. I’m just taking it day by day and I’m gonna keep writing.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Do you have any favorite songs, albums, artists, or podcasts you’ve been enjoying at the moment that you’d recommend?
[ELLA:] I’m a big fan of Popcast, the New York Times music podcast.
[UNPUBLISHED:] If people wanna check you and your music out, where can they find out more?
[ELLA:] They can find me on Instagram @ellajaneofficial.
Watch the lyric video for ella’s new single ‘bored&blind’ here.
You can check out ella jane on Spotify and Apple Music.