Eliza McLamb’s bio on her social accounts is the phrase “renaissance woman,” and it’s a very fitting descriptor for an artist who does as much as she does. The singer-songwriter released her debut album “Going Through It” in January of 2024 and co-hosts the podcast “Binchtopia.” She also publishes short essays on Substack, an online platform for creators to publish newsletters and gain subscribers, with both free and paid content.

A few hours before her Oct. 25 show in St. Louis at the Atomic by Jamo, McLamb sat down with Student Life. In the green room above the venue, we sat in leather desk chairs at the end of a long wooden table while she detailed the process of creating her first album.

“Going Through It,” McLamb’s first full-length musical project, features songs written several years prior that needed the increased narrative context of an album, as well as newer additions. The calming and sincere album opener “Before” is the oldest song on the album.

“I wrote ‘Before’ actually a pretty long time ago — I think I was 18. So that was five years ago … It seems a lifetime away from me now, to be honest, even though I’m not that much older than I was,” she said.

Recently, McLamb went through a period of stagnation, so she turned to her past for inspiration. She later realized that it wasn’t as stagnant as she thought, and a lot was happening emotionally that she did not realize at the time. Along with writing songs through a retrospective lens, she often uses songwriting as a method of actively processing feelings.

“Sometimes I write … to figure out how I’m feeling about something … I write almost every single song chronologically, top to bottom, and the verses [are] when you get kinda specific — you’re thinking of these charged images or examples, and then you make your way into the chorus and find out the theme of how you’re feeling,” she said.

McLamb described herself as never being the type of person who can maintain a consistent writing practice, especially while touring. This year marked her first headline tours: the “Anything You Want” tour in the spring and the “Anything You Want (And More)” tour throughout October. Although she got into the groove of touring after the spring, her hectic work life has often led her to write songs on the go. 

Many of McLamb’s newer songs originated from lyrics written in her notebook that she carries around everywhere, and were later molded into full songs. Before recently moving to New York City, McLamb lived in Los Angeles, which inspired her song “God Take Me Out of LA” that was released in August. McLamb remembers constantly being on the highway in LA, a time that resulted in recording numerous voice memos of different song ideas while driving. 

McLamb sees the restrictions of writing a song in the car or on a train as beneficial. To her, these guardrails force her to be more creative, because there is less at her disposal. Even more broadly, she sees the inevitability of limitations and their benefits in every art form.  

“I think any medium is inherently limiting, which is what’s attractive about it to artists, because the artist is this person with so many big ideas that kind of need those constraints … The thing that’s really beautiful about a song is having to be economic with the amount of words and the amount of movements in a piece,” she said.

This approach to songwriting is what makes McLamb gravitate towards writing essays. Topics related to social commentary are difficult for her to address in the medium of a song, and she has realized that she expresses her ideas on these subjects best through long-form writing. She publishes essays as @elizamclamb on Substack. McLamb has over 21,000 subscribers and posts essays approximately twice a month, with topics ranging from “The Eeriness of Fame” to “My Personal LA Vibe Curation List.” 

Each of McLamb’s creative outlets gives back to her in different ways. Although she thoroughly enjoys creating her podcast “Binchtopia” with cohost Julia Hava, McLamb primarily views it as a job. It is not the medium through which she thinks that she expresses herself the most, but she acknowledges that it may appear that way to listeners.

“I think that might be confusing for people to hear because it seems like, ‘Oh, the people I’m listening to are having hours of conversations all the time — it feels like this is the way to get to know you the best.’ But I really don’t actually feel that way. I feel like the music and the writing is the way that … I would like for you to get to know me,” McLamb said.

During her concert at the Atomic by Jamo, in a small venue hidden in the back of a bar, approximately 200 audience members sang along with — or at least swayed to — the honest lyrics of McLamb’s songs. She appreciates how performing songs live is a new experience each time, as the energy of the crowd and how McLamb is feeling varies for each show. The St. Louis crowd consisted of constant shouts of “We love you!” and contained an energy of chill admiration.

“I feel like my crowds are incredibly sweet and polite, almost to the extent that sometimes they don’t move around and dance unless I kinda give them a little permission to. So … towards the end of the set, I play “Modern Woman” and “Mythologize Me,” and usually that gets people moving around, and that’s always fun,” she said.

When McLamb sang these two songs, the intended effect was immediate. People started dancing more and singing louder. In the middle of “Modern Woman,” after singing the line “Sad girl sings a simple song,” she got the crowd to loudly sing the line “All the others sing along” on their own, embracing the line’s satirical nature.   

McLamb concluded her pre-encore set with “Forever Like That,” an unreleased track that opens with the honesty of the lines “All my friends wanna kill themselves / And I love them like a fool / It’s the only thing I can do.”

In the chorus, McLamb’s lyricism relates to her thoughts about time and getting older. In the first chorus, she sings “I remember being 17,” which changes in the second chorus to “I remember being 23,” her current age. 

McLamb is currently in the process of writing her second record, and she said that its themes are starting to come together. She has hinted at a 2025 release date for her next album, but for now, you can listen to her debut album “Going Through It” wherever you stream music, listen to her “Binchtopia” podcast, and read her essays on her Substack @elizamclamb.