The Transient Peak Interview: Eliza McLamb on Suffering, “Suffering”,  Power, and Authenticity

Eliza McLamb is a Brooklyn-based songwriter and essayist from North Carolina. She makes sparkly indie rock with this very intense, confrontational edge that’s captivated me since I first heard her music. 

Upon learning she’d taken the Ophelias on tour, a band I’ve championed for a few years now, I got into her music and loved the mix of hooks and neurotically literate songwriting. I quickly realized I’d already read a bit of her writing on her newsletter Words From Eliza, where she fearlessly explored body image and womanhood (and the reductiveness of saying someone “writes about womanhood” when they’re just writing about the human experience.)

I wrote about the lead single “Like The Boys” earlier this year, a song about vicariously living through masculinity/being one of the guys, only to discover not even the guys always enjoy being one of the guys. 

Any of the densely written songs on Good Story could come with their own essays, whether from McLamb herself or anyone who engages with her work; that won’t be surprising to anyone who’s read Words From Eliza or listened to the podcast Binchtopia, where she was once a regular co-host. “Suffering” in particular is this relentless onslaught of unhinged lyrics: the bridge goes “Self-awareness on vacation/Over-explaining inclinations to self sabotage/Really it's just my fault.” I sent “Suffering” to a friend and they just wrote back, “is Eliza Catholic?” (No, she’s not!)

I didn’t realize until researching for this interview that McLamb used to be considered as a “TikTok artist,” which makes no sense to me when she’s closer to the gritty alt-rock of Squirrel Flower or Julia Jacklin. On its own terms, Good Story is an especially strong project from one of the sharpest songwriters working today, and I really enjoyed speaking with McLamb.

First of all, what inspired the vegan farm sabbatical?

I knew I was gonna make the announcement that I was no longer doing Binchtopia anymore.

I thought that I would like some space from the world and my life as I knew it after I made that announcement. One of the most special times of my life was farming in 2020; I went across the country from North Carolina to California doing a work exchange program. My friend found this spot, I wanted to do it with them, and just have some time. We purposefully looked for a spot that was in North Carolina. But also this is my best friend who's also like my life partner, and we one day want to have a self-sufficient homestead-type thing in North Carolina. So it was also visiting this family who had done that to see “how did you guys do this, and what does it look like for you?”

And then you get back and you’re faced with the real world and Taylor Swift discourse, and the pressure to comment on everything. There's just an expectation, especially for writers, to have a take immediately -

- and have it be something that people read. I was going to write something, but I thought, you know what, maybe the most radical thing I could do is stop talking about Taylor. The one thing I have been thinking about constantly is, did you ever read the email from her dad to her former manager in 2005?

Nope! [it’s Page 21 of this document]

Because when I heard Life of a Showgirl, I was like, is she gonna talk about the letter? The letter is basically her dad being like, I have poured hundreds of 1000s of dollars into this 13 year old who's gonna make us all rich. And I don't get any thanks for it. It’s full of resentment, with all the details of the calculated financial moves that he made. But I think the billionaire of it all, is starting to affect the public persona.

That reminds me of what you wrote when the Addison Rae album came out, about getting culturally fatigued with “Authenticity”, personal brands, and parasociality. Does that have anything to do with leaving the podcast?

This is one of the first interviews I've given after leaving. I think to an extent there is something about being able to communicate with the culture in a way that is legible. I showed up every single week for like four years of my life. to make a successful business in some sense requires a relatively stable “personal brand”. And I think that having that be a part of the way I made money had a lot of personal downfalls for me.

That reminds me of the title track, which goes “I try to pretend you'll never know me/But you know me.’ One of the questions I sometimes ask musicians is about deciding between an authentic song and a better narrative. The album answers this, but do you often think “this person is going to hear it and it’s not accurate to what happened. But it’s a good song?”

A lesson I learned with my last record is that the people you write the songs about are going to hear them. I almost had some magical thinking about it where I thought art making protected me from that. But philosophically I'm really not interested in the idea of like, bringing truth into art. I don't know whether true or false, fake or real is necessarily a helpful metric in terms of art. And I think that is what I got fatigued with, being this public persona on a talk podcast.

[Hannah note: there was more about authenticity and exiting the podcast, but I'd accidentally stopped recording. I've reached out to McLamb for further comment and will update accordingly]

You have a particular way of writing about the body - I’ve called that style of writing “brute force empathy” before. What inspired you to write this way? 

I know she's a very complicated figure, but I do think Lana Del Rey has always been a big influence on me - she’s unafraid to talk about the messiness of her experience, which in so many ways does not align with my experience of womanhood. 

Right.

But what she’s doing is really successfully transmuting what it was like to feel the things that she felt in the body that she was in, even to this day. That's something I feel a lot of songwriters in their late 30s hit a hitch with sometimes, because we're taught that women should just put that away. But in A&W, she says, “:ook at my hair. Look at the length of it and the shape of my body” You know, she's still very aware of that  stuff. There are a lot of songwriters that do that to me. Like Sufjan really puts me there with Carrie & Lowell, his record about his parents, even though we had different experiences.. There’s also a Brittany Howard record called Jaime, and the song "Goat Head."

I haven’t heard that record.

You must listen. It's so amazing. It’s the record I listened to when I was traveling in 2020. But she just is such an evocative songwriter and of course like an incredible guitarist and vocalist and singer. I've always been drawn to people who have that ability to really translate their experiences the way that it helped them and to make other people feel that way.

How did you find Sarah Tudzin?

I was posting music to TikTok and I was being approached by people wanting to manage me. I found my manager at Votiv Management, who said “I think you would really like Sarah. She doesn't say yes to everything, so don't feel bad if we send her your stuff and she is not available or doesn't vibe with it.” And she really liked it! We were both in LA at the time so we started hanging out and shopping demos around to labels. And through that time I just got so close with her; she and her now-wife are some of my favorite people in my whole life. That's one of the things I miss being out in LA, is that I used to just go over to Sarah's house and we would make a demo. 

How involved are you in production and arrangement?

I'm pretty involved. I won't ever let anyone touch my words. I was really scared the first time I co-wrote with Sarah and my guitarist Jacob. Which was a great experience because they are both very skilled musicians and also are not trying to be the loudest voice in the room. I'm pretty in there when it comes to arrangement most of the time. But I do, especially this record, we tracked a lot of stuff live band style. I leave a lot of room for people to throw in their own thoughts and ideas and I take a ton of people's ideas. 

I love the strings on “California.” Can you talk about that arrangement?

I used Andrew Jocelyn, who we've used for basically any strings you've ever heard on Eliza projects that Sarah has produced. He's so great. He just can play everything and is super fast and really intuitive. And I think we sort of, there were some, like that string part in California was originally a slide guitar line. Oh. And then we sort of wanted to feel a little more cinematic. I love Lana Del Rey and I'm writing about California and she has a lot of love for that place, so it's a little bit of a reference there. I can't intuitively say what exact string parts will sound good in a spot. But I have a sense of where I would like them to go and where I think they could be a real value add.

Another favorite moment is the piano part on “Suffering.”

I was inspired by a Radiohead song, either “Let Down” or “Black Star”, where it starts super heavy with all the instruments, then pulls back to just acoustic guitar. I think the more interesting choice for this song was to just do a total juxtaposition. I was sitting with Sarah Goldstone who played keys, and we tried a bunch of different ways. I didn’t want it to be too over the top. Long piano chords sounded like a joke. And then I was like “you're an amazing piano player, you certainly grew up doing piano recitals. Can you like, play something that you would've played at a piano recital?”

It makes sense you didn’t want to get over the top here. Your early TikTok breakthrough “Porn Star Tits” had this twee, cutesy irony to it as you talked about being sexualized as a kid, and by design that song is now impossible to find anywhere. 

My manager was like “'Suffering' should be the lead single” and I was almost triggered, like, no! [laughs] I was terrified.

But I’ve never thought of you as a TikTok artist. I was surprised when interviewers labeled you that way.

That means the world to me, Hannah. That means everything, actually!

Back on topic, can you talk a little more about this song?

Have you ever watched CJ the X on YouTube? 

I have not!

CJ is a friend – well before they were my friend, they were someone I thought was very smart on the internet, and they still continue to be that, but now they're also my friend. They talked about this book called Existential Kink in this video they were working on. It’s this book written by this woman Carolyn Elliott, who has a PhD, but also she's very mystical and spiritual. The book invites you to enjoy the experiences that you’re having in your life, even the ones that seem undesirable or difficult. I was applying that to different things in my life, just experimenting with that idea. There’s something cliche about artists being like “what if I get happy and then I can’t write songs anymore?” But then I realized suffering is a meaningful part of my life that I am happy to have experienced, that's so powerful and has required me to grow in all these ways. I am happy to have loved something and been attached to something, then proven wrong. That’s required me to grow in all these ways. And just like, the experience of something totally ripping you open. I love it! 

It was extremely freeing to take accountability for my desires and to admit to myself “sometimes I do put myself in a situation that’s gonna cause me pain because I want pain,” and that’s much more empowering than to say “yeah, I’m constantly in situations that cause me pain, why is that?”

It's like, no, I chose this.

Yeah, exactly.

That’s why I transitioned!

[laughter]

Now that I said that, let’s talk “Like The Boys.” Can you walk me through writing that song?

I think one of the interesting parts of my life to look back on and reflect on was my promiscuity as a teenager because it was something that was so discussed by the adults in my life and by my friends at school, or people at school in general. I had a complicated relationship with that period of my life, so I decided to start thinking about it. Why is there this cultural narrative of “girls love bad boys, and they love pissing off their dads”? That doesn’t seem true to me in my experience. For me, coming of age as a girl, I thought it sucked seeing the boys get driver’s licenses, going out late, saying ‘fuck you, mom’!” - And also this is in the sphere of where I grew up, which is Chapel Hill, North Carolina, very affluent and very white. So that’s the context of my situation. 

I started reading a little bit of The Second Sex recently, which is 800 pages, but I also know who I’m interviewing.

[laughs] Totally.

Of what I've read, I noticed how Beauvoir talks about how masculine characteristics are associated with power but aren’t inherently powerful, which reminds me a lot of this song.

I think you're so powerless as a child and as a teenager. You're getting to a point where you're seeing, you're trying to understand what power is, and who has it and why, and how you could get it or how it would be impossible for you to ever get it. Thinking about it in a gendered way I thought at the time, I can basically sleep with any boy I want and that's cool because that's me making something happen in my life. As a child who went through so much chaotic family destroying turmoil, I was like, “well, it's cool that I can create a cause and effect in my reality.” [Laughs] 

Does this then make me happy? Not necessarily, but there were these guys who of course wouldn't look at me in public and wouldn't tell their friends we were sleeping together, and would be totally humiliated to be even seen with me. But they would be like, “do you wanna drive 90 miles an hour on the road to my house”? And I would be like, okay. And there was something in that where I felt like I glimpsed this freedom. 

At the time, I didn't understand that everyone is pretending - when he wants me to drive 90 miles an hour. There's a part of him that's posturing, and showing off to me. It’s not like I'm just observing and he's the real thing. I grew up and I was thinking about that tension of trying to figure out questions I had about power and running into the fact that we all have like, questions about power. Although of course undoubtedly there are some people who just literally have more of it in the world than other people.

As I wrote in my piece, as a trans woman, it’s a complicated thing where “okay, if I transition, I’m going to lose all this privilege”. I grew up in New York, and if you’re raised in New York and you internalize that power is all that matters it becomes very complicated. 

But it's also like, what kind of power? No one would ever say that the power to decide where you live and how much freedom you have or whatever is not important. I think so much about the trans attack from the right, because it is a power to be able to have that sort of self-efficacy and to be like, “I am going to create the person that I want to be in the world.” Regardless of whatever is happening. I think that's so threatening in a way. Like it is a sort of personal power.

And you directed the video!

I got the visual idea ‘cause It's how I felt so much in different ways throughout my life, this proximity to something that I wanted without the ability to get what I wanted. When I look back in hindsight, it's almost like that meme of like that guy in the corner at the party. Like “no one knows I'm...” whatever. But me writing "Like The Boys" is trying to assert some of my personal power through the narrative. And there’s something that was fun about going like “yeah, I’m standing here and they’re not giving a fuck, but I’m also doing my own thing and I’m singing my song that I wrote about this whole situation.” We’re orbiting around each other in this way, but also I knew I had my boyfriend and his best friend at my disposal and I absolutely wanted to see them wrestle in the grass and shoot guns [laughs].

Oh my god.

I was like, men have done this to women a million times throughout history, it’s my turn.

I feel like there’s this fascinating hetero female gaze – the objectification is different, almost like an idealization.

It's an overused and misunderstood term, but I did want it to be "male gaze, but what if a girl did it?" The opening shots might as well be gay porn. [deadpan] Which is also what women want to see men do. 

And there’s the counterpart, “Girls I Know”. “Like The Boys” is envious of a linear boyhood, and then this one is like, okay, what did the girls experience and go through? And now you’re in this place where you lose the intensity of that time and it’s better, but something’s lost. Were you thinking of those songs as parallels?

It wasn’t like “boy song” and “girl song.” I did think about that after the fact that there is, “Like The Boys” and “Girls I Know”. A part of that song is exploring what I think is like the more acceptable version of metabolizing female pain, which is to direct it inwards where men approach to direct it outwards. 

But also the song to me is about how much it sucks to get better! And how there is something thrilling about being so self-destructive all the time and getting better is actually just making a series of incredibly normal boring decisions. And it's difficult to do that. And thinking about people that have not been as lucky as I am to have come out the other side of a really self-destructive point in their life too. 

Talk about constructing “Better Song”, the opening track.

I knew I wanted that big instrumental release right at the end. I mean it's about a relationship that I had for a very long time that had so much tough history in it, and so much, so much love. But got to a point in our adulthood where I didn't know how to make a new thing with it. We couldn't grow together with each other.

We never had a conversation where it felt like either of us really understood the other, and it ended in a really difficult way. I had a long time of being “the bigger person”, but I also was able to see how it's frustrating to deal with the person who thinks they're the bigger person. It did end with the person saying like, "I hate you", I was like, "well, I love you, but this isn't gonna work". And so the song ends with "I know you hate me now you said it well, I love you and I don't regret it," which is like, I'm the bigger person, whatever. But then it just opens up into this huge like, like, yeah, I love you and I don't regret it, but fuck, dude. Like, this is so hard and I'm so fucking mad at you. [Laughs].

I love the telepathy imagery in that song. I have a whole playlist of things like that.

I think there's something about those friendships that you form really early on in life where you, you actually are forming around each other so intimately. Like you're growing, especially if you're extremely close to someone. You're growing up right alongside that person and you're forming in similar ways. And maybe for a while it really worked and you guys are really close and you're  growing together. But then sometimes you grow apart - but you don't have experience with what it's like to be apart and some friendships survive that stage, sometimes they don’t.

I have a twin brother!

Oh, really? Okay. [Laughs] I don't have siblings - actually, I have a sibling, a younger half-sister who's like 10 now. So we didn't, like, grow up together. But this song is almost how I imagine some people would feel about a sibling.

What did you learn from writing this album? 

To me, “Every Year” is kind of the thesis of this record. I know that narrativizing my life has been very valuable to me, but I'm noticing that perhaps there is more to my experience than a narrative about it. And I'm noticing that there are limits to what a narrative can do for me and it can potentially even cause harm. This whole record is exploring like, what's the use basically? With “Every Year”, there's an inclination to when, when you realize you've gone too far with something to reject it entirely and to say, well, “everything's absurd and nothing is a story”, it's only what we put on it. And of course that is all true, but it is still important to have meaning.

I feel like that’s true for any sort of trauma, where you’re on any truth. It's like, okay, this will heal. No this will heal.

And it was so meaningful for me too 'cause trauma just makes nonsense of your life [Laughs]. Or at least that's what it did to me. I absolutely needed to create some sort of space container for it to live in. And it was so helpful for me and so important, and I wouldn't change any of that. But then I was like, okay, there's something that happens after this. On “Every Year”, I compare it to a lifeboat, which it totally was. I'm seeing that there's more to this than that. And I don't have to freak out if I encounter information about myself that seems counter to that story, or if other people have a different perspective. I just don't need to grasp so tightly anymore. And that's a privilege to not be in a space where you need to hold onto something so, so severely, and I think that's like the phase of my life that I'm in now, is holding a little more loosely but not rejecting altogether. 'cause If I wanted to reject stories altogether, I'd stop writing and stop making music. 

Even for Binchtopia you went, this doesn’t have to be my life anymore.

Yeah.

I heard “Getting Free” and thought it was foreshadowing.

I wrote that totally for myself, as a hype song [for leaving].

So this wasn’t even a “I wrote this before I knew song”?

I wrote it knowing and needing encouragement. [laughs]

I love the lines on “Forever, Like That” that are like “I tell my stories and then I forget them” You can write something down, and five minutes later you're like, “who’s the person writing this”?

For me, I've often gone through my life with grand unified theories about the way that I am. Jia Tolentino recently wrote about this in regards to Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir. She talks about the cycle of like a lot of pop stars or artists where it's like, “here's my new thing and, and the thing I was doing last album cycle, like I thought that was the thing, but it's not me anymore. And now here's my new thing”. I really identify with that cycle. And so I think that helps me, once again, hold the story lightly. I can still believe that this is my story right now and remember that I forget them, and come up with something new.

It’s like every album is the most personal project to date.

Although I can get cynical about that as a branding strategy, I'm like, that's so real. You know? You're always like, “I'm never more me than I am right now”. And I think it's close to the real truth, which is that we change all the time and like, we're not fixed. It's like you're technically right.

It's like, this is the most personal project that I can do at this time.

Yes, of course.

Which honestly should be the phrasing. I loved when Ellie Goulding said “this is my least personal album.”

I'm dying for someone to make a least personal project. That's awesome.

That could be the next album! 

I've been writing a lot of character songs recently that are not about me at all.

I love that!

They’re in dire straits at the moment, but who knows!