Ella Jane

For as long as she can remember, Ella Jane has been writing in the

margins. Growing up, annotation was a way of understanding and

processing the culture that surrounded her, a means of collecting

words and stories that would become foundational to the songs she

would write. Conversely, songwriting became a way of marking up the

experiences in her own life, a process she’d often document and share

in real-time with an ever-expanding online community. With an excess

of time at her disposal during the pandemic, she spent much of the

year fine-tuning a batch of songs that she had brought with her from

high school, which would eventually become her debut project, THIS

IS NOT WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE! Spurred by the momentum, she

dropped out of college and moved to Brooklyn to give the music all of

her time. The songs she wrote during this period radiate with the

coming-of-age urgency of that moment, and all the identity-affirming

head rushes that came with it. Teaming up with producer Mike Irish,

they aimed to keep the pop sensibilities of her earlier work as well as

steer them toward a grittier place more akin to the sound of her alt-

rock heroes. They landed at Marginalia; a concise offering of her most

propulsive and assertive material to date that establishes Ella Jane as a

formidable storyteller all while nodding to the process that got her

there