Due to Spotify’s generation of random playlists, I often find myself listening to music I might never have found on my own but that I enjoy nonetheless. Recently, one of those artists I discovered through a personalized Spotify playlist was Lizzy McAlpine; more specifically, I heard her song “doomsday.” I listened to “doomsday” on repeat for a while before deciding to explore the rest of her discography, which was exactly my taste in music. She climbed the list of my favorite artists quickly.
McAlpine gained fame during the pandemic, due to popular artists such as Phoebe Bridgers sharing her music, both covers and originals, and clips of her songs going viral on TikTok. She attended Berklee College of Music for two years before dropping out to pursue creating her own music; however, she has said, “The main thing I think I got out of Berklee was the people that I met, and the people I surrounded myself with who definitely influenced my music.” She’s released two albums so far, Give Me a Minute and Five Seconds Flat, with Five Seconds Flat being the more recent of the two. She wrote Five Seconds Flat while in London, and said that she “didn’t really have a goal in mind” and she “wasn’t really focused on the next album quite yet,” which suggests that her creative process is outside her control.
McAlpine’s songs are mostly inspired by her own life and events that have happened to her, which adds an element of vulnerability and relatability to her songs. For example, she has said that the song “Apple Pie” is about feeling at home in a relationship and about never really having a permanent, physical home due to moving around a lot in her childhood. On the creative process of this song, she said that once she wrote the line in the chorus, “Me oh my / I found you under an April sky / And you feel like / City life, apple pie baked just right” sort of unlocked the rest of the song for her. This would be an example of convergent thinking that she then built upon with divergent thinking in order to write the rest of the song.
When describing her creative process, McAlpine says that she goes through phases where she writes a lot and then nothing at all. She always waits for inspiration to hit her before attempting to write while in a creative rut. She specifically says that she “can never force it.” Her creative process seems similar to the idea that creativity comes from an outside source. She also makes her own music videos; on that process, she says that she doesn’t know where the idea for using specific motifs comes from, she just wanted to “find a metaphor” to “show the feelings more visually.” She shows more than just relationships in these videos, showing things that may be “out of the ordinary, to drive the point home.” For example, in the “doomsday” music video, McAlpine dresses up as a skeleton towards the end, and she shows up to her own wedding in funeral attire. This shows that she feels heartbreak “is like a small death, especially when it’s your first love.”
In terms of creative classification, I would argue that Lizzy McAlpine is a pro-c creative. She is a professional making music that has 7.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify, but she has not revolutionized her genre as a Big-C Creative would. I personally think she has the potential to become a Big-C Creative, but time will only tell on that front.
It's really interesting to see the come up of this specific genre of artists, especially ones like McAlpine who's music became especially popular through TikTok during the height of the pandemic, it really highlights the mood of the generation at that time and provides a lot of insight into our collective psyche. I also agree that her use of convergent to divergent thinking in the song "apple pie" is interesting, as she built the song around one lyric as opposed to the more traditional process of divergent to convergent thinking.
ReplyDeleteI really think it's interesting how she kind of just comes up with whole albums without much of a goal in mind. As an artist, her goal is to better express herself or a specific feeling, and this just seems to come so naturally for her. As a rapid consumer of this type of poetic lyricism, I am always amazed how artists like Lizzy seem to so easily connect to that pipeline of understanding from artist to creative. Especially in a world where things get really lost in interpretation, this ability to find the right words is so beautiful and valuable. The interaction between artist and audience can often be warped and not clear, but I think its artists like Lizzy who really display this interaction clearly, as her words directly penetrate the barrier separating humans from understanding eachother.
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