I went off to WFNM's showcase at Hotel Ziggy to catch Mara Connor. My chances of catching her in concert are not as frequent as prior years as she's spending time in Nashville. You can read a blog post that I wrote close to a year ago for her song "Someone New" here. Anyways, the first artist of the night was Eliza Spear who happened to mention that she's also from Los Angeles, but has since moved to Brooklyn.
 |
| Eliza Spear at Hotel Ziggy |
Strangely, as soon as she took to the stage, I had this feeling that I'd seen her before. While writing up this post, I decided to look through my artist / band lists that I keep to track all the bands I see each year. I came up blank so this was in fact the first time I saw a set. But why did I think I'd seen her before? I started to think about this and came up with two thoughts. First, I honestly think she could pass as Lexie Papilion's sister (I knew Papilion as Bloodboy, but after taking an extended break from music she is relaunching as Heaven Proper). Second, I was likely thinking of another Eliza that I used to follow way back in the day called Eliza Rickman.
 |
| Eliza Spear at Hotel Ziggy |
Her set was played solo with an acoustic guitar. A stripped down set for a December night just before the start of the 2025 holiday season. I half suspect that she was in town to celebrate the holidays with her family and friends and was playing a WFNM set as a way for everyone to get together. The song arrangements were scaled-down, but that helped highlight the storytelling behind her songs.
Part of me would love to highlight the song "Slideshow," but as I write this blog post, the song is up on Unreleased (though perhaps by the time this article posts, it'll be up on Spotify) and I do suspect that isn't a well known site. It is a song about "romanticizing" a 9 to 5 job, but realizing that she'd just hate it. It is a theme that I've noticed other singers address recently in their sets. I've written about it via my John Vincent III's "City Rain" (you can read that post here) and They/Them's Master Melody (you can read that post here). For some reason, I find this subject interesting, because a lot of Los Angeles concert photographers (me included) have standard 9 to 5 jobs -- be it corporate or otherwise.
 |
| Eliza Spear at Hotel Ziggy |
The song is on her third recorded album called The Brooklyn Circus. There is an interesting story behind that album. She mentioned that she fell in love with busking. Getting inspiration from that, the songs from the album were performed at various locations around Brooklyn. And via one video I saw, the music wasn't always performed under perfect weather conditions. I saw one short video clip where everyone was bundled in thick winter jackets.
For the song spotlight, I'm selecting a song from her sophomore album Protagonist called "Sweetheart." Her website has this insight about the album, "All of the lyrics stem from a particularly intense period of her life, and she interweaves them into a song cycle of sorts: an image or idea introduced on one track might surface again on another, given complex new resonance by its shifted surroundings and the passage of time."
 |
| Eliza Spear at Hotel Ziggy |
The song is a story about a relationship that took place over a period of time. One side initially sees it more as a friendship while our songwriter is hoping that it evolves into something more. That story is sung in a narrative fashion until hitting the verse that explodes into beautiful earworm melodies. After reconciling her feelings, the other individual starts to show some interest, but then maybe it really wasn't meant to be:
I hold onto the storyline of our imaginaryI really do
And that's why I'm leaving you
Setlist (probably not in this exact order or these specific songs as there were some arrows and strikethroughs on the setlist): Don't Die In Me, Money For A Maybe, Remembering The Rainbow, Sweetheart, Slideshow, Mother, All Aside, Circus.
No comments:
Post a Comment