Hey there! It’s been a few weeks since I’ve sent a newsletter, but the good news is I never said this thing would come out on a regular basis! At best, I promised semi-regular, and I’m holding fast to it.

After turning in the final draft for my graphic novel, I was worried I’d have a creative fallow period. But that worry has proven entirely unfounded. In the past few weeks I had ideas for two new stories (novels? Maybe) and had a revelation about a novel I last touched in 2023. There hasn’t been a lot of time to sit down and actually do writing, but I feel like I’m in a good place.

Anyway, enough about my process! Let’s talk about someone else’s process in my semi-regular sub-series that I like to call…

So far I’ve spoken to two of my writerly ex-Wizard buddies. This issue is bucking the trend by speaking to a singer-songwriter who never worked for Wizard!

Meet Elora

Elora is a singer-songwriter weaving world-building lyricism into hypnotic indie pop. She lives and works in Brooklyn alongside her partner Theo Walentiny, who she frequently collaborates with on her music.

You may be wondering how a guy like me knows a singer-songwriter who weaves world-building lyricism into hypnotic indie pop. If you guessed that she’s my sister, give yourself a cookie. I mentioned recently that my father and my brother are both artists, and artists tend to beget artists. In Elora’s case, that manifested as a love of music and a desire to do it for a living.

I’ve long been fascinated with songwriting. I tried writing a couple of songs in college, and I even have a surviving MP3 of one. (No, I will not be sharing that here. If I ever want to monetize this newsletter, I’ll add a high-dollar “humiliation tier,” where you get access to that MP3 and pictures of me without my beard.) And I’m obsessed with watching songwriters at work, like the moment in the sublime Get Back where you can see Paul McCartney work out the titular song.

So I was intrigued when Elora announced recently that her next song, Scooter, came out of a challenge to herself to write, record and produce a song as quickly as possible.

“I had gone to work and just got kind of fed up with myself for only starting and never finishing any ideas for almost six months,” she told me. “So I decided I would set a timer for an hour and go in my room and I wasn’t gonna leave until I had a completed song. Since I didn’t have much time I couldn’t second guess much. When I finished it I didn’t think too much of it, but Theo really loved it when I played it for him so I thought maybe there’s something there.”

As someone who has experienced that kind of creative logjam, I was curious if the experience helped her write more songs afterwards. “It did!” she said. “It kind of started a whole new wave of writing songs. I didn’t use them same technique [of giving herself a limited amount of time] after, but I definitely think it helped open the creative gates so to speak.”

Elora’s normal process involves a similar technique of improvisation and recording, though. “I usually start by noodling around on the guitar and wait until I stumble upon something that feels like I could sing to, then I’ll record an improv to it and I listen to those lots of times and revisit them and keep editing ones I still think about and like,” she said. “I kind of hear at least the feeling of the produced version as I play it, which is why I like to produce it myself, because for me they’re very linked.”

Then there’s the matter of lyrics. I often think about how Paul McCartney (him again!) originally wrote “Yesterday” as “Scrambled Eggs” - not because he thought that would be the final song, but because sometimes you just need some words to figure out the vocal melody. I asked Elora if she uses a similar process with lyrics that change significantly along the way.

“I would say for lyrics, there’s always a few words or a sentence that comes with the improv of the melody at the same time, and then I’ll build a song around that,” she said. “Like, for my song Control Me Now, the words ‘control me now’ were a part of what I improvised. So I [wrote the rest of the] lyrics with that as my knowledge of what the song is about.”

“So,” she said, “the songs decide what they’re about more than I do.”

What else is there to say? If only I had a picture featuring Elora, my brother and Paul McCartney since I mentioned them all in this newsletter…

Oh wait!

My sincere thanks to Elora for her time! You can find her music on all major services, but you’re probably best off buying it on Bandcamp because it’s just that good.