Press photos
Top photos by Juliet Farmer. Photo at bottom of page (w/ cactus) by Matt Gaillet. Click on photos to download.
Long Bio
On Eliza Edens’ sophomore album We’ll Become the Flowers, she seeks to understand what happens after the end. Whether grappling with heartache or a loved one's mortality, the Brooklyn-based songwriter reimagines endings not as finite events but as devotional experiences that give way to new beginnings. Edens takes inspiration from folk luminaries such as Nick Drake, Karen Dalton and Elizabeth Cotten, sowing her compositions with introspection born from her own grief. What emerges is a glowing collection of songs that serve as a map through tumult, toward hope.
Edens sings and writes with an equally tender reverie as in her 2020 debut album Time Away From Time. But where We’ll Become the Flowers diverges, is in its narrative vulnerability. Each song is bursting: with sorrow, with anger, with the miracle of existence. “I wrote this album out of emotional necessity,” Edens says. "I had just gone through a breakup. And around the same time, my mother was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease. I was spending a lot of my time trying to understand what it means to watch the hopeful person who raised me seem to slowly fade away before my eyes.” As the pandemic loomed, Edens turned to music: "This project was a rope I used to pull myself out of misery, to view the despair I was feeling from a different angle. It was also my escape.”
After a successful crowdfunding campaign, Edens recorded We’ll Become the Flowers during a two-week session in July 2021 in a Minneapolis attic. She worked with her trusted friends and collaborators – co-producer and bassist Pat Keen, audio engineer and guitarist Dexter Wolfe, and drummer Shane Leonard. Going into each session, they envisioned an atmosphere of experimentation which led them to reconceptualize many of Edens’ songs. “I Needed You,” for example, changed from “a glum breakup waltz” into “a song that’s feeling good about feeling bad,” Edens says, recalling Leonard’s words after he suggested changing the time signature.
In We’ll Become the Flowers, Edens’ voice rings out sweet yet sorrowful; playful yet certain; hers is a voice capable of embodying emotion in all its complexity. When Edens asks, in the record’s opener, “How do I get there?” she stretches out the last word as if to emphasize its infinite possibilities. Yet Edens never remains in the abstract; instead, she takes us along on her emotional journey, speaking honestly, intimately, and specifically about her process: “I tried to start by weeding through the trauma in my bones,” she sings in the next verse of “How.” “To rearrange the memories / Forgive and not keep score.” In “Tom and Jerry,” Edens’ songwriting becomes more whimsical. “Oh it’s getting so hard to choose / And I’m chewing on all the alternate routes,” Edens sings, using a playful rhyme with alliterative echo.
In “I Needed You,” Edens uses the repetition of her hook to convey how her feelings toward her former lover have shifted over time. The first time she sings, “I needed you,” her voice is steeped in nostalgia, romanticizing the lover’s “flannel shirt and calming words.” But the final time Edens sings, “I needed you,” her tone has shifted: she’s harsher, irreverent even – and as if in response to remembering how much she thought she needed them, she breaks into laughter. But Edens’ conviction as a songwriter comes across most clearly in “For the Song.” “And when the rage comes around,” she sings, “And every critic’s tearing up her ground / The truth becomes power.” In this last phrase, her voice is as direct and unwavering as her words.
Creating We’ll Become the Flowers started as a way for Edens to plant her grief. What took root, however, is a series of offerings. These come in the form of scenes that are both familiar yet deeply personal to Edens: singing loudly on the highway, wandering a graveyard, dancing in the wilderness, watching her mother plant flowers, wishing to create her own shine, reminding herself that the only seed worth planting is hope. Through Edens’ words, we glimpse the possibility of change, of forgiveness, of acceptance and, in numinous spurts, joy. If we see Edens’ album as a conversation—between Edens and herself and between Edens and the listener—then the conversation opens with a question that she poses in the first song, “But how do I get there?” In the album’s denouement, “Julia,” Edens returns to this question, changed, and with a final offering: “The pen is in your hand,” she reminds us. “And the key is in your certainty.”
Short Bio
Born and raised in rural Massachusetts and currently living in Brooklyn, NY, Eliza Edens weaves together disparate influences of people and place into her work to create mesmerizing sonic tapestries with guitar and voice. With a love for tinkering with alternate tunings à la Nick Drake, a curious harmonic ear from years of childhood classical piano lessons, and an ever-expanding affinity for words and stories, Edens’ songs build a kaleidoscopic world that documents the parallels between hope and heartbreak. The resulting sound is a diverse palette of guitar-based, experimental folk-rock centered around Edens gently cradled voice and brimming at the edges with pockets of sonic whimsy. Edens is due to release her sophomore album We’ll Become the Flowers on October 14th.
PRESs
“The Berkshires-born artist, now based in Brooklyn by way of Colorado, is no stranger to transition, examining love, death and nature in turns… The indie-folk artist’s sophomore release finds her intensifying the questions of her debut with a sharpened, vulnerable edge.”
“Edens' vocals have a way of cutting to your deepest feelings with their husky intonation and a warmth that proves itself soothing even at moments of despair and worry. … We'll Become the Flowers is a sturdy little album that allows her to assert herself as someone who is quite skilled at delivering their message with power and a beautiful grace.”
“We’ll Become the Flowers is superior singer-songwriter music…”
“Edens has given us a great gift by transforming her own grief into art. We’ll Become the Flowers carries that magic needed to take the listener’s hand and walk with them through life’s greatest endings, or to simply sit with them on the sand while they look beyond the horizon into their own.”
—Lucky Lamond, Women’s International Music Network
“[I Needed You] is a powerful song that reveals the complex and beautiful way Edens moulds a song. … Like a good photo, how you frame a subject makes all the difference and Edens provides a masterclass in composition.”
“A meditation on the strangeness of an aftermath, when nothing is as it used to feel and anger and longing are impossible split.”
“‘I Needed You’ delivers a twangy, understated charm that leaves a lingering impression.”
“[We’ll Become the Flowers] possesses a quiet power, forever pushing itself to the foreground no matter where one’s attention lies, reminiscent to an extent of Suzanne Vega and Shawn Colvin. … Eliza Edens is a talented singer-songwriter whose work deserves to be heard.”
“… a detailed creative musical touch that draws its inspirations from folk, roots, blues, jazz, classical, you name it. … Edens has that sensitive, sophisticated lyrical touch that is quite intimate, but escapes mundane at every step.”
“Spending time with [We’ll Become the Flowers] allows it to reveal its tender, contemplative charms…”
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