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.”
