The More Detailed A Story, The More Universal: An Interview with Eliza Niemi

Illustration by Taya Welter / Photo by Ben Mike

Upon first listening to the songs of Toronto-based multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, Eliza Niemi, I was instantly captivated by the direct nature of her writing. On her 2022 debut full-length album, Staying Mellow Blows, Niemi’s vocals are high in the mix and close to the ear as she utilizes indie-rock and folk sentiments alongside classical instrumentation to shape her world. The songs within it detail interpersonal relationships and her place within them, guiding us through personalized Toronto landmarks like Sushi California and Murphy’s, but also taking us within the musician’s fleeting moments of introspection and observational truths. Tracks like “Don’t Think” and “Trust Me,” come to mind, with lyrics like, “Are you here forever or just my muse? Why can’t you be both?,” and, “You can’t trust anyone with everything, but you can trust almost anyone with almost anything.” 

Eliza Niemi’s lyricism fuses detailed anecdotes of hyper-specificity with everyday revelations that shape her storytelling into songs with effortless relatability. On her sophomore album, Progress Bakery, out today on Tin Angel Records and Vain Mina Records, Niemi continues this trend with even more perspective and lucid collaboration. 

The title of the record is an ode to another real place in Toronto. Niemi frequented the actual Progress Bakery during the album’s writing process while she sublet a room across the street from it. The sign is partially eroded; it reads more like “gress Bakery” now, but its significance speaks to the space place occupies in Niemi’s music. 

“ I just love the name so much. I found it sort of relevant to my life and kind of both funny and sad at the same time. I think place really does hold a lot of memory and emotion. There’s a lot of referring to these very specific things, but in a way that makes them widely relatable because you're relating to it in this very specific way. I'm very struck emotionally by specific places, or you know, like the rock in the park that I grew up going to. It's a very human thing to be emotionally impacted by geography."

The aforementioned rock is referenced in the album’s opening track, “Do U FM,” where Niemi mentions Toronto’s revitalization of Ulster Park, where they did in fact, move a boulder across it. She details it in the track’s opening lines, “Why’d they move the rock to the other side of Ulster Park? Why don’t it look like it did in the dark? Why don’t I feel the spark now?”

The song quickly switches gears to discuss the usage of proper nouns in songs and how these details affect the understanding and relatability of a piece of music. Niemi ironically illustrates this concept by directly including more specific details in the lines, “Kenny hates names in songs, thinks it makes them not universal, and they might be onto something. What’s in a name? Something right, so I put it in my song or something,” she sings lightly. 

 ”I think there's something about being super specific that actually makes art more universal. There's sort of this argument in music about whether or not being super specific makes things sort of alienating, but I don't think that's true. I think you can be super honest in being hyper-specific, and then, maybe people will relate to it more on an emotional level."

Niemi’s ability to craft songs that contain such realistic details about her life yet feel so overarching and true is her greatest strength. These details and proper nouns yield the greatest understanding as a listener, as we’re able to get a zoomed-in, microscopic view of the events that shape the songs of Progress Bakery. These songs also spotlight a cast of characters and friends who frequently appear on her albums, keeping the collaborative, circular energy folk music historically has entailed, alive. 

This all remains true, even if the usage of names is a cheekily contested topic among Niemi’s friends and collaborators.

“ Kenny from Little Kid tweeted a couple of years ago about how they don't really like names and songs, and then I wrote that into ‘Do U FM’ without telling them and sent them the demo to play on. Little Kid also has a song called ‘What's in a Name,’ so that’s what the next line is influenced by."

Carolina Chauffe (hemlock, Little Mazarn) whose harmonies are featured on the track among others on the record, referenced the line in one of hemlock’s tracks,  “little miss anthropocene (nov 6).”

“ It's like an even further meta layer of this lyrical universe we've created.  It’s exciting to have that conversational aspect taken a step further, like in the way that Carolina did. It made me want to write a response song to the response song immediately. We're joking about how Kenny needs to write a song now about Carolina’s song."

Niemi wrote Staying Mellow Blows during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the greatest displays of growth and change between it and Progress Bakery isn’t the idea of collaboration, but how collaboration presented itself and came together on this new release. Both albums grapple with similar themes, but approach sound, arrangement, and production differently. If Staying Mellow Blows feels a little more insular in its lamentation on themes of solitude, mortality, and human connection, Progress Bakery approaches these topics in a more joyous tone during its larger moments.  

“I was recording Staying Mellow Blows on my own and then sending it to people who I couldn't jam with or see, and they were writing and recording their parts and sending them back to me. All the parts were conceived in a solitary way. I think you can feel that in it emotionally. With Progress Bakery, I was feeling really excited about being able to be in the studio with people again and record things live. It was just sort of like a reaction to the way in which Staying Mellow Blows was made."

You can hear these moments of pure, loose, and jangly bliss on tracks like “Dusty,” which begins with a clipped voice memo, electric keys and demo-esque vocals from Eliza, and light acoustic guitar that transforms into a full and bright band complete with strings, light percussion, and vocal harmonies that, in comparison to tracks from Staying Mellow Blows, feel like a breezy, live performance unbridled by quarantines or physical limitations. 

The album’s sequencing is one of its most special qualities. Interspersed between full-band tracks are sparse songs that are often the original demo takes of a song. To me, they harken back to tracks like “Death I” and “Death II” from Staying Mellow Blows or older tracks like "Glass." We get the best of Eliza’s sonic modes, vulnerable, quiet songs, often a cappella or with minimal instrumentation like cello or guitar accompaniment, intermixed with bright, fully arranged compositions. 

Niemi often writes lyrics before writing the music, which can entail being struck with inspiration for songs at inconvenient moments when an instrument isn’t present. Sometimes these different modes of writing produce demos that if tampered with, can lose the element that made them initially as interesting or emotionally poignant as they were untouched. 

“I wanted to illuminate the difference between those different types of writing. That's why some of the transition tracks on the album are just voice memos or weird little field recordings. I wanted to pay homage to this idea of not revisiting something. If you're not in the zone and you get an idea, just letting that nugget or seed exist as the final thing."

The album’s flow doesn’t feel at all interrupted by these quiet, short moments of hushed recordings. It almost eases the listener into the next larger sound, as the album begins its exposition with lush, full-band arrangements, but as it continues, it leaves us with more experimental and introspective tracks that close the album with striking, yet quiet instrumentation. One of the final lyric-based songs, “Bon Tempiii,” fades in faint organ and accordion-resembling keys that usher in Niemi’s sparse lyrics, “I let you smoke in my car to remember you by, cause after you’re gone the smell stays inside.” 

One of the album’s highlights and arguably its sonic climax, comes directly after, during “PT Basement.” The song, while only running slightly longer than two minutes, is lyricless, soundtracked by arpeggiated, dissonant piano keys, cello, and a field recording of a young child explaining what it means to be funny. The child feels far away at times, almost as if we’re present in a conversation where our attention is waning, or in an open field trying to eavesdrop on a conversation that is suspiciously clear despite our distance from the speaker. You can hear the distance and negative space that exists as your brain tries to fill the gaps, and you become aware of the limitations you have in those moments. The music swells, and we’re left with a sense of calm, despite the uncertainty of where the piano will lead thereafter. 

This song and several others were conceived during Niemi’s solo residency in New Mexico where she went to work on the album through the state’s Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. With about a third of the songs written for the record, Niemi’s solitude and loneliness informed that dissonance heard on tracks like “PT Basement.”

“ This little cabin I was living in had a mini grand piano. I was all alone, sort of in the middle of nowhere. I feel like that comes with this deep listening, and I was really into the resonant tones of the piano and how my cello was sounding in that particular room. I think there's something sort of cinematic about that song as well. I was trying to paint a picture of where I was at, even just visually. It's sort of like a meditation in a way. It started off with lyrics, and then I took that away because I felt like the music said what I wanted it to say sort of better. That's my cousin talking. I think he was like eight or nine-years-old when I recorded that. He was saying that I wasn't funny because I was too old, and I thought there was something hilarious about that. It sort of mirrored what the song is saying musically."

Niemi expressed the album and her music generally, as having a broken telephone quality, which puts into words what makes the pacing of Progress Bakery feel so kitschy, sentimental, and yet fully emotionally immersive. When listening to the words of others, we often are piecing together in our mind what those words mean in context with their writer, as well as feeling a sense of understanding in knowing we’ve been through a similar feeling, whether that empathy is evoked through lyricism or by the way a particular piano chord hits us in a particular arrangement. 

“You sort of feel something really deeply, but then try to convey it to the listener. You can't fully have someone feel what you were feeling in a particular moment, but I think you can get pretty close, sort of in like a relative way, or it's very relational. That comes back to the specificity of names and universality. [My cousin] is sort of saying some pretty profound stuff about meaning and communication and humor. I think it speaks to what I was trying to do with that song and the album as a whole. Sort of just illuminating the deeply tragic aspects of not being able to fully have someone understand how you feel. And also, the deep humor and beauty that exists in that as well."

The album leaves us buried within the more meditative moments it offers us. The following track details seeing someone unexpectedly at the Albuquerque airport alongside almost baroque-sounding strings that echo the confusion of seeing a familiar face in an unusual location. Whether intentional or not, Niemi takes us on a journey, through the the sites of Toronto and the communal feeling that radiates from the jovial, live-band tracks, and then takes us south to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where we reflect on those prior memories in solitude. Sometimes we’re unable to reflect on experiences properly until we feel physically distant from them.

The final track, “Mary’s,” is similarly lyricless, but feels conclusive, with a beautiful chorus of oohs, strings, keyboard clicks, and vocal harmonies that grow to a quiet and peaceful ending. After listening to Niemi’s accounts and anecdotes about playing basketball in her worst shoes, eating strawberry pocky with tears in her eyes, and queuing songs in the back of someone’s Nissan Rogue that you relate to but don’t make you cry, the natural ending to the album feels as if we’re able to experience the quiet. It’s a slow and easy stop on a route to a new destination; it’s pleasant yet different from where we began. 

Eliza Niemi’s knack for writing songs with emotional weight and humor uniquely showcases her singular, personal experiences and voice. If there’s anything to be said about the concept of universality in music, Progress Bakery is the greatest creative example to showcase that you should never be afraid of oversharing the details. Sometimes those small moments are what shape up a shared experience to be all the more universal to others. 

Progress Bakery is out now on Tin Angel Records and Vain Mina Records.