The Full Story
Elizabeth Wyld is a Brooklyn-based, queer indie-folk-pop-rock singer and songwriter from Virginia. Her fetching confessionals explore personal and queer identity, lust and love, growing up gay in rural America, and transforming into a consummate global citizen. Borrowing from her background in musical theater, Wyld is a charismatic performer, with a dazzling stage presence that evokes early David Bowie. She oscillates effortlessly between styles, performing on guitar and piano as she sings, to convey otherworldly elegance and assiduous vigor.
Her debut album, Quiet Year, released in May 2021, features seven lushly layered songs showcasing her resolute lyrics and her sublime, euphonic lead vocals. Quiet Year reveals the story of Wyld's harrowing experience with a paralyzed vocal cord that threatened her ability to sing and speak, and therefore, her career as an actress. Confined to her New York City apartment, she wrote and played guitar to cultivate her figurative voice in the sudden absence of her vocal talent. She fully regained her wide-ranging voice, and reemerged with compelling and heart-wrenching lyrics. Unable to perform musical theater, the solitude and silence unleashed a new career as a genre-flexing songwriter and songstress with a larger-than-life stage presence.
“I spent my whole life playing characters and when that was taken away from me, I realized that I didn't really know who I was. So I started writing Quiet Year to figure that out,” Wyld observed. While her music is at times vulnerable and always unfeigned, her captivating stage persona transcends time and space, transporting the audience into her intimate narrative.
Quiet Year has garnered praise in The Deli Magazine, Forbes, Out Front Magazine, V13, Nusound, and more. Wyld is currently working on her sophomore album, Delicate Creatures, at Studio G in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with Zach Jones and Oscar Albis Rodriguez of A Great Big World. Her latest single, Love Comes With a Knife, released in June 2022, departs from Wyld's capricious songwriting, drawing joyful inspiration from one of her favorite television series, British spy thriller Killing Eve, regaling us with a timeless, tender love song. Delicate Creatures explores an array of perspectives from different women protagonists in works of fiction and history. Imbued with sapphic undertones, Wyld surveys lesbian identity and the evolution and verisimilitude of love from healthy to obsessive. I wanted to explore what makes love healthy and at which point does love cross into obsession.
Immersed in the visual art world, Wyld imagines her songs as works on display at a gallery, inviting viewers to analyze and interpret her lyrics, to feel and to indulge in the stories they tell and the secrets they reveal. Her songs are dynamic, both as personal narratives and as open dialogues with the viewers and listeners. Her creative process is a personal voyage into the depths of love, from unconditional and pure to libidinous and all-consuming.