And sometimes I think I kill relationships for art
I start up all this shit to watch ‘em fall apart
I pay my bills with it
– Julia Michaels, “Happy”
Allie McDonald’s voice shades with a hint of guilt as she quotes Julia Michaels. We are discussing mining for emotion in music and she feels conflicted, “There’s a balance between being in the moment and turning the moment into music,” she said, adding that she needs to feel something to write. However, in our new era of isolation, moments of passion and emotion have become few and far between for the budding songwriter.
McDonald is the frontwoman of the band EXES, an indie group she started with her friend Mike Derenzo during their college years at Loyola Marymount University. With monthly listeners in the hundreds of thousands and millions of streams under her belt, McDonald has worked for years to create music that allows to her to feel her feelings and process her emotions. She’s an observer, scrutinizing the world around her and regurgitating the material through her own lens.
But what happens when life experience, love and participation in everyday life grinds to a halt? EXES was due to headline its first tour and play at the Electric Forest Festival in 2020. Obviously, when the world went into lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, these opportunities fell through. Daily streaming numbers dwindled and eventually EXES was dropped by its label. Like everyone, McDonald became confined to her home this past year. She struggled in the beginning to create music that reflects her life because she found she no longer had one.
The malaise of the pandemic is a familiar concept to many. Days bleed into one another with Groundhog Day-levels of repetition. “I do write a lot based on personal experience,” McDonald said. “Those are the most fulfilling songs for me, when they’re about my life and about something I’ve experienced.” As the diversity of personal experience dwindled, McDonald was forced to reckon with her songwriting process and how to maintain her creativity in isolation. No longer could she sit at a coffeeshop and listen to people talk, writing down interesting words or phrases used and adding them to her ever-growing notes app.
“Halfway through [last year] I was just like, what am I supposed to write about? I’m not living,” she says. McDonald was forced to pivot. She had to look beyond her present self to find the sense of emotion that fueled her creative instincts. What she found was somewhat of a surprise to her. “I became more inspired by books and movies and other artists’ work.”
To create songs from the perspective of fictional characters or inspired by stories around her was new for McDonald. She is a woman very much fueled by her sense of self. Looking outward for inspiration, not inward, was a challenge for the singer but one she was eager to take on. “It’s been more of an escape,” she admitted.
She hesitates when asked how much of herself remains in these pieces. “I don’t know how much of me is in it. I think I am… I’m moved when I watch certain things and it inspires me to write a song but I think it’s because I’m connecting because I relate.” Sometimes it doesn’t feel like the song comes from her but she acknowledges that since it is emotion that incites her writing, there must be personal truth in it somewhere.
These songs have become McDonald’s, “hiding place,” in the pandemic. For the first time in the over two years of supporting herself through her music, she has started working in a different industry, a fact she finds frustrating but not without its upsides: inspiration and cash.
As we are gently (and hopefully) phased out of the COVID-19 pandemic, McDonald is releasing new music to emote to. Her latest release explores the theme of experience. Namely, if you knew how something would end, would you still go through it? The song, titled, “How Will It End” swells with violins, empathy and despair. McDonald has clearly excavated through thoughts and feelings with a hypersensitive poetic edge. She successfully found emotions to write to in isolation through curious inspection. She felt something. And she’s paying her bills with it.
