An Interview With Ella Jane

by Mollie Smith

Ella Jane has the kind of voice that commands attention. It’s prominent in her songs, but it’s also prominent as she sits down to speak with me, projecting over layers of voices in a packed cafe in downtown Los Angeles. If you're a fan of indie-pop and had a phone in 2020, you’ve probably heard her voice before, too. Her voice rings out through the speaker on my phone in New York, when we make the time to chat about everything that’s changed in her career since she last publicly interviewed.

The 23-year old indie-pop princess will be the first to admit she’s very different from the girl who went viral in 2020. At 18, she had her first brush with fame when she posted a TikTok featuring her song “nothing else i could do,” which was written about Jay Gatsby for an AP Lit assignment. Overnight, the young musician found herself with a dedicated audience, most of whom have happily stuck around through her evolution. They’ve now seen her through a myriad of changes: a move to Los Angeles, leaving her record label to go independent, and even garnering attention most recently for her (valid, in this writer’s opinion) criticism of the latest Taylor Swift album.

Today, the ternstiele team chatted with Ella Jane about her evolution of sound, creativity in the digital age, and finding inspiration in the unlikeliest of places.

Author’s note: If you like what you’ve read, you can come see Ella Jane perform at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn, New York, this upcoming Tuesday, October 21st. Tickets can be found here. Come out and support — we’ll be there!

Mollie Smith: What’s the last song you listened to?

Ella Jane: Oh my god, I was sending it to a friend literally five minutes ago. It’s one of my favorite songs in the world – “Dialing Drunk” by Ethan Gruska. 

MS: How would you describe the music you make?

EJ: I mean, I always just kind of say indie pop, but I always deliver that with an eye-roll. [Laughs] I think it’s evolving, but I think that still feels like the fairest descriptor because it literally is a mix of like indie and pop. 

MS: You’re from New York but you live in LA now – I feel like those are both cities with such rich musicality. Do you feel like they’ve influenced you, and played a part in the evolution of your sound?

EJ: Oh, great question! I think it has – but the fact that there’s been an evolution I don’t think is necessarily geographically related, but it’s a lot about how my music scene has shifted in general. I think the scene over here is less about, you know, shared history and is maybe more about the sheer volume of artists who live out here. I find my sound definitely being influenced by friends, but all of my friends out here, almost none of them are from LA, kind of in a similar way to New York. I’ve met people out here who have such a richness of taste, and I think my friends’ tastes have in turn influenced me. I moved out here three years ago when I was 20, and so I think part of that evolution has been less about where I am physically and more just about growing up. The things that I thought were niche and alt before here, coming from suburbia, were, like, the Cure and stuff!

MS: Are there specific musicians or artists that you get a lot of your musical inspiration from? Are there people you’re listening to that you think have played a part in that evolution of sound?

EJ: In terms of LA, I definitely feel influenced by the artists that shaped the classic “LA sound,” and the generations of LA-based artists they spawned - for instance, the Fleetwood Mac to HAIM pipeline. Joni Mitchell, Beck, Elliott Smith, etc. But I’m also listening to my friends a lot, and they live all over. My friends in New York inspire me quite a lot: Kevin Atwater and Jake Minch, to name a few.

More details from this shoot and session can be found here.

MS: That’s awesome. [Laughs] Okay so, I read a bunch of your interviews and I feel like everyone is always asking you the same 10 questions. Yes, you started on TikTok, but I also think there’s so much more to be said about that platform, and your experiences with it. I actually remember that first TikTok that you went viral for, with the song about your AP Lit class! I know so many musicians have complicated feelings about TikTok, but that’s also how the industry is shifting. How do you feel about it, almost six years later? Are there any reflections that you have on the TikTok of it all?

EJ: The reason I don’t mind it being brought up is because it’s true! That video really gave me my own career and I also don’t ever want to speak badly about it because the reason that video blew up is not because of someone else’s thing, it’s a video that I made in my dorm room. Resenting it would only be resenting something I did that gave me a platform, and that would be counterintuitive. That is what feels special about that, even though I have many conflicting feelings about how TikTok has changed music negatively and positively. What feels special about that is the way that these videos blew up. The way that TikTok virality worked at that time from 2020–2022 was that you would have a sound blow up that became bigger than any of the artist’s other songs and it became recognizable as a sound bite as opposed to a piece of work from a specific artist. And what was very, very unique about my video and the way that my song blew up to this day is that that song still has under I think 400 uses, but it’s my most streamed song. The video of me talking about its story and its background blew up far more than the sound ever did, which I think uniquely really gave me the ability to keep promoting myself and flourish from there, and also gave people the chance to listen to the whole song instead of maybe a 30 second snippet. I think that is how I’ve been able to sell tickets and expand my fan base, so I do feel grateful for the way that it panned out, even if, you know, I feel maybe weird about TikTok in general.

MS: Absolutely, TikTok has changed the music industry so much. I know we spoke about Boston college radios – so many universities used to have such thriving college radio space where people would find music, which has in turn been sort of obliterated by social media because everyone consumes the same content.

EJ: It’s super interesting! My first live show happened in the wake of all that and it’s both brought some extremely, uniquely special experiences, but also I think, especially with my younger fan base, a lot of the time these kids’ first time going to a live music scene is post-pandemic. They have no context for concert etiquette, and they have no context for enjoying live music without a phone being there. People go to concerts now to see a specific song from TikTok.

MS: Do you feel like you’ve had to tweak set lists for these expectations and metrics of what people are expecting to see based off what they’ve seen online?

EJ: I do think it’s definitely part of my consideration because of how things worked out for me with TikTok, but I also think that I can do that less so than a lot of my peers because my virality built my brand rather than took away from it. I think it’s funny you say that because I’m about to play my first live shows in a while, and I’m building my set list for the first time since my UK tour. I think because of the way TikTok has slowed down and since I’ve gone independent, my new music happens to be less streamed than my older stuff. I’m in this place of choosing between playing this older stuff that I don’t really resonate with anymore that’s some of my biggest streamers, and deciding how to cut or include them for my audience.

MS: It’s so interesting you mention that because when you speak about TikTok engineered music, it’s impossible for me to not think about Taylor Swift, and the twitter controversy you just got into over her latest album! [Laughs] The algorithm and icons like Swift have, perhaps rightly, been criticized as of late for pushing lots of trad-forward content.

EJ: No, yeah, I agree, it all does feel very thematically connected to the rise of mainstream conservatism. That’s why I think it’s getting a bit crazy to say that it’s not that deep. Like, What do you mean? This billionaire who has made her whole career centered around her own business expertise and talents is now like, Travis is gonna sign CDs. Like, What?!

MS: Oh, for sure! It feels out of touch with the girlboss feminism she’s known for, and how she created such a controversy around buying back her masters.

EJ: TikTok has skyrocketed music into the space where at the same time it’s it’s most culturally impactful, literally changing cultural trends and being more important than film for the first time ever. It changes everything! But it’s also occurring at a time when writers are being prioritized to the very least, already existing in a world where the general public has no idea how the music industry works and no idea about how there are no actual rights for artists. Even seeing people get mad at Chappell’s Grammy speech felt ridiculous, because she was just saying that writers deserve health care. It’s hard to comprehend them coexisting.

MS: Yeah, absolutely. When we apply an analytical lens to these personas, they fall apart.

EJ: I think the persona is also really Taylor Swift’s impact on how people relate to artists. It’s changed so much – even on my own social media, I get people constantly commenting and offering unsolicited song suggestions, lyric changes, titles. I think if not for her involving her fans in decisions as such a marketing ploy, we would not have people who feel they have this kind of license towards artists.

MS: It’s artist autonomy – if every aspect of your persona is monetized, why not offer people the chance to invest in every aspect of it so that they assume they have a say in it too? It becomes personal to them.

EJ: It makes it so that criticizing art is criticizing them–with my tweets, even if they were silly, they all came from the perspective of a supporter. Like everyone, I grew up with her!

MS: Are there other artists that you grew up with that stand out as influences?

EJ: I think the more time I spend in LA, I think, I realize that it stirs a lot of inner competition. At least for me, something I always end up thinking about is my personal brand. It’s so hard to think about having a visual identity and all of this when you don’t have a budget, when you’re independent. I think Lorde is the first artist that I really connected with whose brand is her songwriting and her artistry.

MS: Are there any non-conventional inspirations of that same vein? People or things or shows — I know you mentioned loving medical dramas — that fans might see come through in your writing?

EJ: Everything! But, also, I’m a huge House fan, and I love The Pitt. I read with a pen and I’m always writing little things from books or conversations that stick out to me. I find inspiration in everything around me, honestly.

Fans of Ella Jane can find her on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok under @ellajanemusic. Fans of her music can find her on any streaming platform as Ella Jane. Keep an eye out for her newest single 10-Blade, and hopefully even more New York shows in the near future.