Elah Hale Is Ready For Us To Catch Up

When Elah Hale sings about love, she sings more specifically about longing. Timing may be everything to finding love, though in her debut full-length Room 206, such conventional wisdom seems like an impossible standard. “It’s been five months, I feel nothing / Is this real love, give me something / You left a voicemail, but I changed my number,” she sings in “Posters,” sounding wistful. Ever since her early days of emulating songs from popular teen sitcoms at age nine, Hale has found writing about that tension irresistible.

“I’m trying to learn how to not write about relationships,” she says. “But it’s just so hard.”

By spring 2020, the possibilities for Hale’s music career seemed vast. But when events forced her and the rest of the world to postpone their preconceived plans, Hale found herself once again thinking about perfect timing, as she prepared her sophomore Interscope release. “I think there were so many opportunities that I lost — that everyone lost,” she says. “But I think it gave me a lot more space to advance and excel, in my personal songwriting.”

Hale had been waiting for a year like 2020 since she was in high school. In 2015, her acoustic ballad “Porsche, Hat, Cloud” received several hundred thousand notes on her online diary. While attending the Willie Mae Rock Camp in Brooklyn, Hale appeared in the music video for pop-punk band Diet Cig’s “Tummy Ache.” We see Hale, her friend Isabella, and other campers get ready for a gig of their own, stopping by a convenience store, making a glitter sign, and spraying silly string on each other. Behind the scenes, Hale asked Diet Cig to check out music she had been working on.

“I met them, they listened to my music and they were like, it’s really good. And I had this moment of, oh my god, I’m going to go on tour with Diet Cig! I was totally ready for it.” But her band at the time wasn’t: “College is a priority,” they said. In 2017, she enrolled in college to study theater.

“I didn’t think I was going to drop out of college until literally the day I dropped out of college,” Hale says. “I didn’t grow up with money. I didn’t grow up with a support system. So dropping out of college meant moving back in with my mom if I didn’t have any money.”

Two years into her college studies though, Hale found her current management and signed to Interscope. By the time Interscope re-released Room 206 in spring 2020, Hale had already moved to Los Angeles for her career, recorded a few music videos and was eyeing her debut solo tour. Then 2020 “kicked me in the teeth, is what I always say,” Hale says.

For Hale, the past two years have made her feel more in touch with a lot of the emotions she sings about. Sometimes, there was cautious optimism. Other times there was restlessness, like being in a constant holding pattern. She postponed her touring plans. Last spring she released “Foolish,” a slice of retro funk that begins, “I know why it always goes bad / ‘cause I want to try it again.” She wrote an album with one producer, then with a heavy heart, decided to scrap it. She then teamed with another producer for a second go at her sophomore Interscope release.

Hale can’t help but write about broken hearts, still. “I’m definitely still doing that,” she says. “But I think it’s gotten a lot more — nuanced isn’t what I mean, but I’ve just written so many songs and gotten so much better.”

Hale was productive enough that, by the time she was finally able to hit the road last fall, she could show the crowds the artistic growth she’s made now that she’s 22. The timing of everything — in her love songs, in her life — may never seem perfect, though she’s confident that her follow-up to Room 206 will show it was all meant to be.

“It gave me such an empowering moment to write a piece of art that represents all of these things that I’ve been through — this phoenix from the ashes, losing a project and then moving across the country,” Hale says. “I’ve just been through so much since Room 206, and I really get to show all of that in the new project.”

Photographer: Kanya Iwana