Massachusetts-born, Brooklyn-based songwriter Eliza Edens is gearing up to release her second album We’ll Become the Flowers this October. A collection of songs which plays with the distinction between pessimism and hope in an attempt to understand what survives after the end. Be that of a relationship, a certain era, or indeed life itself. “I had just gone through a breakup,” Edens explains, “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.”
Lead single ‘I Needed You’ started life as “a sad little break-up waltz” as Edens puts it, but input from collaborators Pat Keen, Shane Leonard and Dex Wolfe lifted the track into something richer and more nuanced. A meditation on the strangeness of an aftermath, when nothing is as it used to feel and anger and longing are impossible split. “It’s about trying to discover and center your own needs when sometimes it’s easier to lie to yourself and ignore them,” Edens explains. “It’s about perhaps not even knowing what you need and being okay with that.” The result is an ambiguous space between the past and the future. A place where nothing is solid, and is therefore both terrifying and thrilling all at once.
Wasn’t kind of you, wasn’t always true when
I needed you
How cruel to be, this kind of free when
I needed you
Photo by Elizabeth Ibarra