Music has served as an emotional solace throughout my whole life. I’ve unfortunately never been very good at playing instruments nor singing, but I do take pride in the fact that my Apple Music app makes up a large portion of my daily screen time (Spotify fans please don’t come for me!). There is rarely a time in the day where there isn’t some type of music filling the empty spaces of my room and my mind.
“I’ve always been able to sit alone in my thoughts,” singer-songwriter Elizabeth Moen expresses, “but I can’t sit in silence.” In a time where the world feels like a broken simulation more than ever, I think a lot of people, myself included, can really relate to this feeling. Music almost serves as a filter, drawing out the inner emotional facets of our beings and helping to decipher them without us having to face these scary thoughts head on or alone. It’s the songs like Moen’s that really accomplish this.
I discovered Elizabeth Moen somewhat by chance. A friend and I bought tickets to a random show at the bar/concert venue Lincoln Hall located in Lincoln Park, and she happened to be performing the Chicago stop of her tour. When she walked on stage sporting a completely sequined, baby-pink jumpsuit and heart sunglasses, I had a feeling she wasn’t going to be your typical up-and-coming artist. The combination of powerful vocals and raw stage presence with bluesy compositions and introspective lyrics was unlike anything I had heard before. The 26-year-old artist grew up in the small town of Vinton, Iowa, always attracted to the “innate need to make noise” and teaching herself guitar as a teenager. She released her first album at age 22, after only five months total of writing her own lyrics. I remember one of the first things she disclosed to the audience was that she never believed she could seriously pursue this singer-songwriter concept as a career. At the beginning of her creative journey, it was just a hobby. After the release of her debut album, however, she started to gain a following and was being asked to collaborate with other artists. Since 2016, she has grown in popularity and as an artist, gone on various tours around the Midwest, recorded with Audiotree, and released two more albums as well as a few covers. It only took one minute of her first song for me to realize she was really someone special.
In an interview with a local Iowa radio station, Moen talked about having to overcome the pressure of picking and niching herself within one genre. She draws inspiration from folk, blues, bluegrass, rock, and indie, and her music is certainly a combination of those.
“It’s hard for me to find a certain genre to be in because it varies within each song,” she said. “Even within songs themselves sometimes it sounds bluesy, sometimes it sounds folksy, and I don’t even know, I’m just writing a song to write it.”
Her motivation is definitely rooted within. She began songwriting as a hobby and continues to write simply for the act of writing. What is interesting to note here, too, is the reliance she seems to have on her subconscious. Moen takes from these respective genres not necessarily because she wants to mirror them but because she is able to recognize and utilize elements of them that fit into the music that feels right to create. She doesn’t always know where the song is headed and lets herself be guided by intuition.
Moen recording for Audiotree, a label that records live music sessions.
This also lends itself to a discussion about Moen’s personality. If her outfit choice wasn’t indicative enough, her music demonstrates the presence of two of Sternberg’s creative traits. In the same interview, she explained her weariness of the music industry and her perspective as she gains a larger audience:
“I’m weary of the people, just because I’m a young female, them trying to control me or think ‘ah just some silly blonde girl from Iowa with a guitar.’ I’m not going to let someone take advantage of me just because they think I don’t know what they’re doing. Because maybe I don’t know like what their game is with it, but I want to try and hold my own and play music I want to play and not try and conform.”
Clearly, she seeks to depart from the conventional and break away from the overbearing, stifling hands of the industry. She desires to play music she wants to play because it is different. Additionally, she explores integration and intellectuality in the way she plays off of many different traditional genres and uses them to create a completely unique and non-conformist approach. She also is able to put things together in new ways when she does covers, recreating songs by anyone from Bob Dylan to Justin Bieber to sound like her own.
Creature of Habit cover.
A large portion of her newest EP, Creature of Habit, was written while in quarantine earlier this year. She used her “default coping mechanism” to create songs with lyrics and melodies that discuss mental health while keeping “a balance of accessible candor and existential profundity,” a combination that many can identify with.
If you’re interested, here are a few videos for you to check out. Unfortunately, recordings don’t do her voice nearly enough justice!
Her session with Audiotree (the first song she sings is one of my favorite and really shows her vocal prowess):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wdY7ggFZ8o
A single from her newest EP:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxsR3K7Y1eA
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References:
http://krui.fm/2016/04/18/artist-profile-elizabeth-moen/
https://philpapers.org/rec/ANDAJI
https://audiotree.tv/session/elizabeth-moen
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