Eliza McLamb and the art of getting free

The piece retroactively chronicles the North Carolina-bred college student as she navigates her first year living in Los Angeles. It’s 2020, in the pit of the pandemic, and McLamb is living in a family friend’s laundry shed. She doesn’t want to return to her dad’s house in Chapel Hill, so she’s working odd jobs to make ends meet.

McLamb writes about her time as a solar panel saleswoman, door-knocking dressed in a company polo and manufactured grin. She nannied full-time for a boy who knew McLamb better than his own mother – a high-powered television producer. Then, she found herself working for a commission-based agency that manages sex workers’ digital profiles. At the site’s peak hours – 10 pm to 2 am every night – McLamb would post photos, respond to messages, and endure vicious sexualization on her female clients’ behalf.

At the conclusion of McLamb’s “meditation” on her year of rude awakenings, she writes: “There’s nothing I can say to this end that hasn’t been said better by someone else in a way that feels more concise and less trite, but I still put my hand out into the ether for you to hold.” Two years later, this offering is a testament to McLamb, in friendship, love, writing, and music. As she approaches the release of her second record Good Story, the 24-year-old is still committed to hand-holding.

McLamb joins our call from her kitchen table in New York City, sipping an iced oatmilk latte. “I’m a little embarrassed because I just noticed my closet door is fully open,” she laughs. I didn’t notice before she mentioned it. McLamb is effortlessly cool, wearing a simple “RISD” crewneck and sliding a streak of platinum blonde hair behind her ear.

Growing up, McLamb described herself as a “latchkey kid.” As an only child of young working parents, she had to entertain herself often, making up songs and clattering on her plastic keyboard. When her parents were home, their music rotation was “adult alternative Pandora station vibes.” Her dad loved Wilco, and her mom loved Fiona Apple. “I used to be like, ‘Ugh, Wilco’s a dad band,’ and now I’m like, ‘Yay, Wilco’s a dad band!’” she says, naming Jeff Tweedy as one of her biggest musical inspirations.

Like many of us, McLamb was an avid Tumblr user – before the term “chronically-online” existed, she was chronically online. She lived her teenage years through Lana Del Rey phases, discovering her personal style by re-blogging American Apparel circle skirts and the pastel grunge aesthetic of the early 2010s. Coming of age in a preppy college town gave McLamb her craving for individuality. “I grew up in Chapel Hill, where it was weird that I was dressing like a quote unquote ‘Tumblr girl’ or that I was listening to Lana Del Rey or wearing black,” she said. “It made me feel very special.”

In 2020, McLamb was a student at George Washington University in DC. When her world shut down (and everyone else’s), she spent the summer working on a farm in Kansas before traveling further west. She had always intended to finish her degree but couldn’t, due to “purely financial reasons.” Working full-time to pay her tuition while attending school full-time was impossible.

After her stint in the laundry shed, where she gained a following on TikTok and recorded her first EP Memos, McLamb found a more functional living arrangement. In December 2020, she moved in with friend-of-a-friend Julia Hava. The roommates would go on to start Binchtopia, a podcast that allowed McLamb to quit her account manager job – which, at this point, had taken a profound toll on her mental health.

Binchtopia became an outlet for McLamb to share the passion for pop culture she had been fostering since her days on Tumblr. She and Hava could discuss celebrity gossip, viral Internet trends, their favourite books, and social justice movements, all through a critical feminist lens. For four years, Binchtopia was an outlet for McLamb to reflect, learn, and build community with a band of 40,000 likeminded listeners – mainly leftist twenty-something women who are always being accused of “caring too much.”

All the while, McLamb was writing and releasing music. After signing to Royal Mountain (Calpurnia, Mac DeMarco) in 2022, she released her second EP, Salt Circle. “They’re Canadian, so they’re all very nice,” she quips about her Toronto-based label. Salt Circle was McLamb’s first project mixed and produced by Sarah Tudzin of illuminati hotties, a now frequent collaborator and found friend.

McLamb and Tudzin’s collaboration continued into her debut record, Going Through It, which she released in 2023. Going Through It is a diary gone public. Written between ages 18 and 23, the songs are raw, impassioned, and at times, painfully relatable. McLamb forces herself to reckon with her most difficult memories. “I was trying to make sense of my childhood and teenage years, which I think is, for a lot of us, part of that early 20s moment…” she says. “That record was very much me trying to process all of that stuff and just make sense of it, and figure out what it meant to me.”

Going Through It was a liberating release for McLamb. By writing these songs and sharing them with eager audiences, McLamb could honour younger versions of herself – in trauma, heartbreak, loss, and understanding. However, something was still missing. McLamb realised that, perhaps, she had been doing too much storytelling. What started as a means to take back control of her lived experiences now felt burdensome.

In her second record, Good Story, McLamb is taking a new approach: what she describes as “holding loosely.” “I really, really appreciate storytelling and the ability to craft a narrative. I still think it’s important for us as human beings,” she says. “I love art, and art is stories – I obviously do not think that [storytelling is] useless or totally harmful, but I realised that holding on so tightly had some diminishing returns for me.”

Written over the last year and a half, Good Story leans into metanarrative writing, or stories about stories. McLamb was heavily influenced by American writer Lidia Yuknavitch, with whom she feels “kindred spirits.” In her 2011 memoir The Chronology of Water, Yuknavitch, too, processes the meaning of her memories and the passing of time.

Despite being released after Good Story was completed, Yuknavitch’s second memoir, Reading the Waves, is a “meta-memoir” about telling the story of her life fifteen years prior. McLamb and Yuknavitch follow similar trajectories – relentlessly tell stories, then relentlessly question them.

After a pendulum swing toward deep confusion and nihilism, McLamb found herself rocking back to a sweet spot in the middle. “An expanded idea of my own agency is to be able to say, ‘I don’t need that story to prove anything to myself. I now have this larger sense of presence and acceptance that accepts me more as this multi-faceted, fluid, changing person, as we all are…” she says.

McLamb regards the second single “Every Year” as the thesis of Good Story. Reminiscent of Leith Ross, McLamb is soft, yet resonant. She compares her stories to lifeboats: “My stories kept me safe but now I understand / A story is a lifeboat and sometimes there is land.”

“We can love them and keep them at the dock,” McLamb says. Leaving her stories at the dock has been a trust exercise, though. “With anything that we identify with and then choose to stop identifying with in some way, it’s really painful,” she says. “But, I also feel freer to be in this new atmosphere that doesn’t depend on this, sort of, grasping as much anymore.”

McLamb’s metanarrative is also apparent in the album’s first single, “Like the Boys”, where she grapples with power and her fascination with masculinity. What begins as a nostalgic recollection of a dream about McLamb’s teenage self launches into a full-throttle pop anthem. “Coming of age as a teenage girl feels like the rawest fucking deal ever, because everyone hates you so much,” she says. “You feel like you should have more power, but you don’t. And everyone starts objectifying you, and you realise you have no control over whether or not that’s gonna happen to you.”

In “Like the Boys”, McLamb discovers that power is performative. “He drove fast and made me scared / Then laid me down and pulled my hair,” she sings. If McLamb wasn’t in the passenger seat, though, this boy wouldn’t have someone to assert himself upon. “A boy asks to go 90 miles in a truck, and you say ‘Yeah.’’’ she says. “When he says that to you, he is trying to perform a type of power that he actually doesn’t have access to. He is only able to access that because you are sitting there.”

McLamb’s discussion of gender in her music parallels that of her songwriting idol Fiona Apple. We agree that Fetch The Bolt Cutters is among the best albums of all time. “[Apple] is just so brilliant, and she’s so unflinching in the way that she depicts the stories that she wants to tell,” McLamb says. “I don’t know if this is really true, because I don’t know her, but it feels like she’s not sparing anything on account of making anyone else more comfortable. She is writing the songs in the way that she would like to write them.” Much like Apple, McLamb’s voice – as a writer, thinker, and artist – is all over her music, in every era and iteration.

I tell McLamb that I know people who skip the 20 seconds of dolphin noises at the end of “I Want You To Love Me”. They think it’s “too intense” or “too loud,” as I put it. “Have they ever considered that life is too intense and too much and too loud all the time?” McLamb asks.

The first song McLamb wrote for Good Story was the third track, “California”. Before she could deconstruct her personal narrative, McLamb had to admit that she was ready for change. After four years living in Los Angeles, she wrote her parting words. “California, you gave me all of my nerve / California, I came to you a weaker girl,” she proclaims in the chorus. The song is bittersweet, with McLamb’s bluntness peeking out from behind tales of hot summers, shot through a glimmering lens flare.

Good Story follows McLamb through a time of major change. Last year, she made the move from Los Angeles to New York, where she currently lives. “[LA] was a nice little holding container for me, and it was totally brutal, because it’s a desert, and you have to constantly look at yourself in the desert,” she says, “…you have to constantly come up against things that are antithetical to your nature, which then forces you to learn about yourself. It is profoundly beautiful and profoundly lonely at the same time.”

McLamb believes that moving to New York reinvigorated her creativity. “I think that it, sort of, unstuck me, in a way,” she says. While much of the record was written in personal moments – in her apartment or at Fort Greene Park – Good Story was McLamb’s first time inviting others into her writing. McLamb, Tudzin, and Jacob Blizard (Lucy Dacus, illuminati hotties) took a writers’ retreat in upstate New York, suspiciously close to a town called Elizaville.

Admittedly, McLamb has been resistant to working with other writers in the past. However, she has met her match with Tudzin and Blizard – fellow artists who she feels truly value her autonomy and creative processes. “It’s nice to know that there’s a kind of collaboration that can happen without me feeling like I have to sacrifice anything,” McLamb says.

This summer, McLamb also made the decision to leave her podcasting job to pursue music full-time. She had grown into an adult on Binchtopia – from her first weeks out of the laundry shed, to the release of her first record, to her cross country move. In this moment of fear and uncertainty of what will happen next, McLamb found herself listening to “Get Free” by Lana Del Rey on repeat.

“Get Free” is the final track of Del Rey’s 2017 record, Lust For Life, an album that raised McLamb through her teenage years. Much like McLamb, in “Get Free”, Del Rey makes a commitment to herself. “I never really noticed that I had to decide / To play someone’s game, or live my own life,” she sings.

“I was listening to that song every single day when I was in the process of making the decision to leave [Binchtopia],” McLamb says. “To me, that song is about deciding to really commit your life to art, no matter the consequences.” Similarly, the final track of Good Story is called “Getting Free”, representing McLamb’s commitment to herself. “I love that phrasing, ‘get free.’ Like, the idea that freedom is something that you have some agency over – that you could participate in,” she says. In the final lyrics of the record, McLamb sings over slashing guitar, “When it’s just me and the world I make a place I can find escape from / Running down the street, away from what I thought I wanted / Getting free.”

With her sophomore record, Good Story, Eliza McLamb is finally letting her stories speak for themselves. More than ever, she is practicing the art of holding loosely, of reaching her hand out into the ether, of getting free.