SPOTLIGHT: Ellis on Letting Her Guard Down on New Album ‘no place that feels like’
WHAT MAKES YOU FEEL ROOTED SOMEWHERE? — Ellis, also known as Linnea Siggelkow, who just released her new album, no place that feels like today, spent her youth moving around Canada. She was born in the Canadian Prairies where she was born (“Our equivalent of the Midwest, sort of,” she tells me), but she's lived in four different provinces. She finally landed in Ontario after high school — Toronto first, and now a mid-sized town called Hamilton.
“My partner has lived in the same house and has so much attachment to the place that he grew up,” she shares. “I don’t have that same attachment to any place, and I kind of wish I did. To be honest, that’s a lot of what this record is about: never really feeling settled or feeling like you belong to a place.”
No place that feels like starts where it ends. Although most songs were three years in the making, one of the last songs Siggelkow wrote, “home,” is the album’s thesis statement. Siggelkow wades through different memories, each one she remembers well, though none of them come from a place she considers a home. The tracks each recall a person, a place, or a feeling as Siggelkow muses how — and if — she belongs.
On our call, Siggelkow and I speak about our own homes, her multiple city affairs, and my childhood house that I lived in until I became a legal adult. We brainstorm places to move to (“Definitely California,” I tell her). But does she feel a connection to the city she lives in now?
“I think because of moving so much growing up, there’s this five to seven-year cycle where I start to feel restless,” she says. “I wonder if I’ll always feel like that or if I’ll find a place that I feel like I can finally be forever.”
Siggelkow wears her emotions inside-out both in our conversation and in her music. Her debut EP, The Fuzz (2018), garnered a critical lust for the fuzzy and contemplative songwriting of an indie prodigy. Two years later, Siggelkow confessed leaving the capital-C church and the consequences of it on debut album Born Again. She’s just as honest on her new record, qualifying each synth-pop beat with her own coming of age.
For this record, she took a chance with collaboration in the studio, which was “quite scary” but “really special and rewarding.” Previous collaborations drove her to enough frustration that she learned how to engineer her own vocals, something that can be heard on no place that feels like. Her vocals shine through loud and clear, a development that listeners clocked in the transition from The Fuzz to Born Again, none of which Siggelkow intentionally planned. Her lyrics, “the core of every song,” are pushed straight into the ear, a technical way of saying, “Listen to me!” When Siggelkow sings, she makes the monotonous cinematic, her daydreams bone-real.
Her songs are dreamy yet visceral. Siggelkow’s lead single, “obliterate me,” is about everything that could happen to your soul after you die. “Mouth full of goo” explains the pain of trying to scream when nothing comes out. Standout track “what i know now” is a bold and reflective angry letter: “I set out to make something honest / You laughed at me when I said it out loud … I wish I knew what I know now / I know just what I’d do.”
Yet many of the songs are sweet — “forever,” with its driving beat and crescendos, laughs at how the concept of forever changes with age. “Taurine” testifies the ecstasy of hanging out with your best friend, blood full of Redbull. Forming relationships and keeping them is a theme central to the album, as in real life.
“I think I make really fast friends because I always had to, but friendships have historically come and gone,” Siggelkow shares. “I don’t have a lot of people that have been really solid-steady in my life. I think as I’ve gotten older, that’s become much more important to me, to be a bit more selective about the people I have very close to me. To really nurture and cherish those relationships and hold on to them.”
I ask her what makes her feel rooted somewhere: what makes a place feel like home?
“That’s a very good question, something that I’m still trying to answer,” she says. “I think it definitely has a lot to do with people. I also know there are places where I feel more myself, [where] I feel more creative or peaceful. I think I’m looking for those feelings in a place. It’s something I haven’t felt in a while where I live. I think I’m looking for that again.”
