Several years ago, when singer Elah Hale was still a teenager, she asked for songwriting requests from her growing number of social media followers. Having spent ages nine and ten memorizing songs from teen sitcoms, the New York native was eager to find inspiration anywhere she could. She wrote about breakups that weren’t hers, “a girl whose boyfriend cheated on her with someone the grade below,” a fan who flew across the country to meet their partner and “eat pineapples together.” In 2015, Hale, who was recording under the early moniker Easy Socks, batched some of those requests into an acoustic digital EP with an extremely literal title, These Ideas Were Not Mine.
The fan response was unlike anything Hale has seen since. “My tagged posts in 2016 and 2017 [were made up of] fan art, drawings of me, covers,” she says. “There was a really different relationship between artists and listeners; it felt more direct than it does now.”
Such a following was how music transitioned from being Hale’s hobby to her career. In 2018, she found her management and A&R off the strength of a neo-soul ballad called “Six Missed Calls” as well as her already-devoted fanbase. “I think that’s the nature of the industry: if you’re doing well, and you have followers online and some streams, people are talking about you.” (Hale says this was back when 10,000 users was considered a sizable following; today, she boasts three times as many.) In 2019, after years of paying for studio sessions out of pocket, she signed to Interscope and re-released her debut full-length, Room 206, the following year.
Now that Hale boasts nearly 70,000 monthly listeners, the days of recording songs and premiering them that same random weeknight — how Hale would for her earliest listeners — are technically behind her. Having relocated to Los Angeles from her hometown of New York City to prepare her sophomore release, Hale finds herself trying to remember how creating music used to feel back in high school. “I was having so many new musical experiences. I was drawing on my life but also on the sheer excitement of watching a song come into fruition. I’m honestly trying to channel that right now. Sometimes I think you get so used to writing a song and putting out a song that you don’t stop and take a second to think, ‘writing music is so awesome.’”
This means that Hale has also been thinking about the connections her music forged back then. “I’m trying to find a way forward where I can foster that same kind of intimacy from when the people who were listening to my music were directly influencing it, because that’s the truth.”
For now, inspired by the likes of creative director Sage Adams, Hale occasionally takes time on her feed to explain that – while her profile may be filled with sun-dappled selfies – she too has struggled with maintaining friendships in adulthood, for example. She’s pulling back the curtain, fully aware of the modern-day pressures to ‘create a beautiful, perfectly curated’ life experience. “Being an artist, it’s so awesome. Being online, it’s so awesome. Moving to LA…has been so awesome to me,” Hale jests.
Opening up is also how Hale is embracing this current moment in her career, while she’s still on the rise. “Why not take this opportunity to also be vulnerable and honest?”
Fortunately, her listeners seem to appreciate that logic. Last fall, during her debut solo tour, a fan direct-messaged her: My cat died, and I made this [video] to your song of my cat. Now, every time I listen to this song, I think about my cat.
“It makes me so happy, that I’m still in a position where it feels impossible to believe that people listen to my music and care about it, especially because it’s not just 10 people listening, or it’s not just my friend in high school who was like, that song’s really good,” Hale says. “I’m trying to retain that intimacy.”
