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The title of Lindsey Ell’s newest EP, Love Myself, may suggest there is a strong thread of feel-good self-affirmation in the songs.
That’s not to say that this sort of sentiment doesn’t exist on the five tracks found on the new record. The album, which comes out Oct. 25, is the Calgary-born singer-songwriter’s first release since 2020 and there is a general theme of self-acceptance while simultaneously expressing a newfound artistic freedom. Ell’s new record company has called this period her “liberated era.”
But it only takes a cursory glance at the lyrics of the title track to realize that Ell was prepared to cover some dark terrain when taking listeners on the journey.
The third line of the ballad is rather blunt: “I hate my body,” she sings. A few seconds later, she adds “I treat the scale like religion. It’s my skin but I struggle fitting in it.”
For those who have followed the news about Ell in the past few years, these are not cryptic lines. On the phone from her home in Nashville, she acknowledges that Love Myself directly addresses the eating disorder she suffers from. It is something the 35-year-old says she lived with for two decades without ever knowing exactly what it was or where it came from. A few weeks after being diagnosed in early 2023, she went public with it on the Off the Vine with Kaitlyn Bristowe podcast. The press picked up on it, including stories in People and Yahoo. So did her friend Maren Morris, an American singer-songwriter, who encouraged Ell to turn her experiences into a song.
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“I got in a room with some of my friends and we wrote an honest song when I was at the height at the hardest point of my recovery and my eating therapy,” says Ell, in a Zoom interview from her home in Nashville. “Now, two years after that diagnosis, I feel so inspired listening to this song.”
At the time of this interview, Ell had just returned from speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative’s 2024 Annual Meeting in New York City. Ell told her personal story as part of a panel about recovery. But she is also aware that her openness puts her in a position of advocacy for other survivors.
Love Myself not only allowed Ell to explore her relationship with food and her body but also to strip away the stigma that has hovered over eating disorders over the years. Ell has been in this position before. On the 2020 album Heart Theory, she wrote a sombre ballad with Brandy Clark called Make You. It was a song that directly addressed Ell’s experiences as a survivor of sexual assault. Earlier that year, Ell revealed in an interview in People that she had been raped at the age of 13 by a man who went to her church and again by a different man when she was 21.
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“Ultimately, I think that’s what developed my eating disorder,” she says. “That’s what instigated it when I was young. I didn’t necessarily know how to deal with all those feelings so I just started numbing myself out with food or lack thereof. It’s just crazy when you get to learn about the things we do as humans to avoid the feelings that we are feeling and how that trickles into our adult life and how being a woman today and being on social media, there are all these different societal pressures that everybody feels for sure. But, for the female body, there is a specific way it’s marketed for how a woman should ideally look, which is a load of B.S.”
Ell’s openness in discussing these traumas certainly has the power to overwhelm discussions about her music. But she says the past two years have been the most healing of her life and that this has directly impacted her approach to her art and career as well. While Love Myself is her first release of new music since 2020, she has hardly been idle and has continued to evolve. She has hosted two seasons of Canada’s Got Talent. After touring with her musical hero Shania Twain as an opening act, she joined the singer’s band as lead guitarist. On top of that, she left the Nashville-based record company that signed her as a 21-year-old. After signing with Universal Music, she has surrounded herself with a new team and says Love Myself is the record she has always wanted to make. After all, when she arrived in Music City from Calgary 15 years ago, she planned to become a “female John Mayer,” not a mainstream country starlet. But it wasn’t long before she was swept up into Nashville’s star-making machinery and, to some degree, lost her way.
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“There was a time (in Nashville) where I was so focused trying to fit into what terrestrial country radio needed,” she says. “I thought that was what could lead me to the next thing so I could then create the music I wanted. I don’t feel it’s supposed to be that way. I think it’s actually supposed to be the opposite way. I think I’m supposed to create music that feels honest and authentic and then it finds the audience and then it turns the cylinders.”
Alongside the title track, Love Myself includes the poppy Story I Tell Myself and The Hard Way, which focus on doubt, resilience, rebirth and silencing what Ell calls her “mean” inner dialogue. The latter directly addresses Ell’s career path, which began in Calgary at the age of 15 when she was discovered by the Guess Who’s Randy Bachman as a guitar prodigy.
“If anything, my songwriting has just become more honest,” she says. “I have taken away the list of rules that I thought I needed to write about. I remember my team told me for a long, long time ‘You are not country enough.’ I don’t think that I’m supposed to walk into a writing session and say ‘Alright, these are the topics I must cover in songs today.’ I don’t think the best music is made from marching orders of what it needs to sound like. If anything, my writing is a lot more free and a lot more focused on the things I’m feeling and what I want my fans to feel compared to feeling like I need to write about beer when I don’t even like it.”
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There may be a lack of commercial twang found on the new album, but fans will recognize Ell’s trademark prowess on guitar on the shredding solos that interrupt the pop sounds. Her talents were recently recognized by Twain, an artist Ell grew up listening to. She joined Twain’s band as her guitarist for her Las Vegan residency and on a tour that included a high-profile slot at the Glastonbury festival.
“She called at the beginning of this year and asked if I could come play lead guitar in her band,” Ell says. “I had no idea what to think of it because never had I ever thought I was going to be a sideman in someone else’s band. But first off, when the Queen asks you to do something you say yes. And, secondly, some of my guitar heroes have done that and have had such cool moments in their story. John Mayer has been touring with Dead and Company and Stevie Ray Vaughn toured with David Bowie for a number of years. (I thought) if I could work with one of my musical heroes, what an amazing experience that would be and what could I learn from her. This year has been nothing short of amazing.”
Love Myself comes out on Oct. 25.
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