Alisa Amador w/ Eliza Edens and Sun V Set

at The Camel

Thursday, December 12th, 2024

Doors at 7, Music at 8

$16 ADV, $20 DOS

Alisa Amador

The day Alisa Amador decided to walk away from her career in music was, ironically enough, the day her career truly began.

"I was burned out and dealing with all this personal grief and trauma, and I finally just came to the conclusion that I couldn't go on the way I was anymore," she reflects. "And then as I was walking through the logistics of how I would break the news to everyone in my life, I got a phone call telling me that I'd won the NPR Tiny Desk Contest."

Now, two years later, Amador is an artist reborn, both spiritually and sonically, with a stunning full-length debut to show for it. Recorded with co-producers Tyler Chester and Daniel Radin, Multitudes finds the bilingual singer/songwriter formally introducing herself with a bold, captivating self-portrait, one that serves not only as a testament to how far she's come, but also as a celebration of where she comes from. Slipping effortlessly between Spanish and English and featuring guest appearances from Gaby Moreno, Madison Cunningham, and Quinn Christopherson, the songs here are raw and vulnerable, at once steeped in devastating loss and uncertainty, but also laced with the hope and resilience of young woman learning to find her voice and stand her ground in the midst of a personal and professional maelstrom. Certainly, Multitudes is a beautiful record — the way Amador's crystalline voice cut through the album's lush synthesizers, dreamy guitars, and cinematic string arrangements is nothing short of spellbinding — but more than that, it's a fierce work of discovery and affirmation that reveals new secrets with each repeated listen, a profound, revelatory meditation on triumph and loss, endings and beginnings, identity and belonging, all delivered by a songwriter convinced she would never write again.

"When NPR called, I genuinely considered asking them to give the honor to someone else," Amador recalls. "I felt like a fraud because after the death of a close friend in 2020, I'd completely stopped writing. But in that moment, it felt like something was telling me to surrender to the reality that music is and always would be my purpose."

Amador's passion for music is no coincidence. Born to a pair of Latin folk artists, she began singing with her parents' band, Sol Y Canto, at the age of five, and spent much of her childhood traveling the country on an endless series of tours along with her twin brother, Zia. She spent extended periods with her grandparents in Puerto Rico and New Mexico, as well, before attending college in Maine, which enabled her to study abroad in Buenos Aires for a semester.

"From a young age, I saw exactly how insane and difficult it was to make a life playing music," Amador recalls. "But I also knew I'd be lying to myself if I tried to do anything else."

Fresh out of school, Amador began touring and recording as a solo artist, releasing a pair of well-received independent EPs and crisscrossing the country just as she had during her childhood. But over time, something about her experiences began to feel off, and the purpose and meaning she'd found in music began slipping through her fingers.

"Looking back on it now, I realize that I was just trying to be who I thought other people wanted me to be," Amador explains. "I was saying 'yes' to everything and working so hard to not make other people uncomfortable that I couldn't hear myself think. I lost touch with what I wanted, and suddenly this thing that had been so rewarding and so healing was putting me in situations that made me feel unsafe and disrespected as a Latina woman."

When she got word from NPR that she'd taken top prize in the prestigious Tiny Desk Contest, Amador decided that the only way she could accept the honor and carry on professionally was with a complete and total reset.

"I realized that if this was going to work, I was going to have to really start listening to myself and advocating for myself and making other people uncomfortable," she explains. "I was going to have to start respecting my boundaries and saying 'no' more than 'yes.'"

Standing on the precipice of letting it all go had made Amador fearless. What could they take away from her, after all, that she wasn't already willing to walk away from herself? And so she headed to DC, taping an arresting set for the Tiny Desk Concert series that had NPR's Bob Boilen hailing her as a "powerful voice whose tender performance commands attention and fosters connection" and Cyrena Touros calling her "a pitch-perfect rendition of my wildest dreams." In the year that followed, Amador would go on to land dates with everyone from Hozier and Brandi Carlile to Lake Street Dive and Hiss Golden Messenger, but first, she headed west to Los Angeles, where she cut the foundation of Multitudes live in the studio.

"I wanted the 100% realness that comes with live performances, but I also wanted to take the music to another level," says Amador, who brought the recordings back home to Boston for overdubs and extensive production work. "My roots are in Argentina and Puerto Rico and New Mexico, so magical realism has always been a part of my culture and my writing. I wanted to create a sound that could transport you, that could move you through time and space."

That immersive sense of magical realism is palpable from the outset on Multitudes, which opens with the exquisite "Extraño." Tender and aching, the track (which features a guest appearance by Gaby Moreno) showcases Amador's enthralling vocals atop a spare acoustic guitar as she navigates the liminal space between cultures and reckons with 'the perpetual outsider status she's faced for most of her life.

"In Spanish, the word 'extraño' can mean 'strange,' but it can also mean 'I miss,'" Amador explains. "When you're the daughter of immigrants, it's easy to feel like the strange one, like you're always missing something. I've struggled to hold on to my native language, and sometimes when you feel it slipping away, it triggers this sense of existential loss, like you don't really belong anywhere."

Amador wrestles with the notion of belonging throughout the record, blurring the lines between languages and genres in a reflection of her own personal search for self. The driving indie-rocker "Love Hate Song" grapples with a life full of catch-22s, while the lilting "Nudo de raíces" looks for the beauty in the in between, and the hypnotic "Woke Up Today" offers a heavenly dose of chamber folk as it finally lets its guard down.

"'Woke Up Today' is the song that helped me realize that the things that I'm most afraid to say are the things that are the most important for me to say," Amador explains. "It's the first time I'm openly singing about my experiences with depression, and I just hope it makes people feel less alone or crazy or wrong, that it helps them feel okay exactly as they are."

Learning to hold that kind of compassion is at the core of Multitudes. The soaring "Heartless Author" (written with Amador's brother, Zia, and featuring Madison Cunningham on vocals) makes peace with the unknown in an effort to be kinder to the face in the mirror; the hushed "A Million Ways" revels in the simple joy of truly being seen and loved by another; and the tenacious "I Need To Believe" (featuring past Tiny Desk Contest winner Quinn Chistopherson) refuses to give up, even when hope seems impossible to grasp. But it's perhaps the songs Amador wrote for her late friend — the graceful "Pasajeras," which extends a helping hand in a time of struggle, and the buoyant "Enough," which makes room for grief in everyday life — that are most affecting, not only for the poignancy with which Amador delivers them, but for the fact that she was able to deliver them at all.

"After you lose someone, you can get this sense that nothing will ever be enough," she reflects. "In grieving my friend, I went through a period where I couldn't write or even pick up an instrument at all, but now I sing these songs to her every night. I sing them with a broken heart, but also with a grateful heart, and I hope they hold space for anyone else out there who's lost a loved one, too."

Reconciling such juxtapositions — love and loss, grief and gratitude, pain and purpose — are essential to Amador's songwriting, and ultimately why she decided to call the record Multitudes.

"The word is a cognate, meaning that it's spelled identically and has the same meaning in both Spanish and English," she explains. "It took a long time to find a title because I didn't feel like any one word could contain all the emotions, all the ambiguities, all the searching in this record. When I landed on Multitudes, I knew I'd found what I was looking for."

It's only fitting, then, that the album concludes with "Milonga accidental," a track full of contradictions and the first Spanish language song to ever win the Tiny Desk Contest.

"I originally wrote 'Milonga accidental' as an act of mourning how out of place I felt," she recalls. "Over time, though, it's transformed into a celebration of being out of place."

And now, as Amador stands at the threshold of her most compelling chapter yet, it's the reason she's finally found where she belongs.

Eliza Edens

On Eliza Edens’ sophomore album We’ll Become the Flowers, she seeks to understand what happens after the end. Whether grappling with heartache or a loved one's mortality, the Brooklyn-based songwriter reimagines endings not as finite events but as devotional experiences that give way to new beginnings. Edens takes inspiration from folk luminaries such as Nick Drake, Karen Dalton and Elizabeth Cotten, sowing her compositions with introspection born from her own grief. What emerges is a glowing collection of songs that serve as a map through tumult, toward hope.

Edens sings and writes with an equally tender reverie as in her 2020 debut album Time Away From Time. But where We’ll Become the Flowers diverges, is in its narrative vulnerability. Each song is bursting: with sorrow, with anger, with the miracle of existence. “I wrote this album out of emotional necessity,” Edens says. "I had just gone through a breakup. And around the same time, my mother was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease. I was spending a lot of my time trying to understand what it means to watch the hopeful person who raised me seem to slowly fade away before my eyes.” As the pandemic loomed, Edens turned to music: "This project was a rope I used to pull myself out of misery, to view the despair I was feeling from a different angle. It was also my escape.”

After a successful crowdfunding campaign, Edens recorded We’ll Become the Flowers during a two-week session in July 2021 in a Minneapolis attic. She worked with her trusted friends and collaborators – co-producer and bassist Pat Keen, audio engineer and guitarist Dexter Wolfe, and drummer Shane Leonard. Going into each session, they envisioned an atmosphere of experimentation which led them to reconceptualize many of Edens’ songs. “I Needed You,” for example, changed from “a glum breakup waltz” into “a song that’s feeling good about feeling bad,” Edens says, recalling Leonard’s words after he suggested changing the time signature.

In We’ll Become the Flowers, Edens’ voice rings out sweet yet sorrowful; playful yet certain; hers is a voice capable of embodying emotion in all its complexity. When Edens asks, in the record’s opener, “How do I get there?” she stretches out the last word as if to emphasize its infinite possibilities. Yet Edens never remains in the abstract; instead, she takes us along on her emotional journey, speaking honestly, intimately, and specifically about her process: “I tried to start by weeding through the trauma in my bones,” she sings in the next verse of “How.” “To rearrange the memories / Forgive and not keep score.” In “Tom and Jerry,” Edens’ songwriting becomes more whimsical. “Oh it’s getting so hard to choose / And I’m chewing on all the alternate routes,” Edens sings, using a playful rhyme with alliterative echo.

In “I Needed You,” Edens uses the repetition of her hook to convey how her feelings toward her former lover have shifted over time. The first time she sings, “I needed you,” her voice is steeped in nostalgia, romanticizing the lover’s “flannel shirt and calming words.” But the final time Edens sings, “I needed you,” her tone has shifted: she’s harsher, irreverent even – and as if in response to remembering how much she thought she needed them, she breaks into laughter. But Edens’ conviction as a songwriter comes across most clearly in “For the Song.” “And when the rage comes around,” she sings, “And every critic’s tearing up her ground / The truth becomes power.” In this last phrase, her voice is as direct and unwavering as her words.

Creating We’ll Become the Flowers started as a way for Edens to plant her grief. What took root, however, is a series of offerings. These come in the form of scenes that are both familiar yet deeply personal to Edens: singing loudly on the highway, wandering a graveyard, dancing in the wilderness, watching her mother plant flowers, wishing to create her own shine, reminding herself that the only seed worth planting is hope. Through Edens’ words, we glimpse the possibility of change, of forgiveness, of acceptance and, in numinous spurts, joy. If we see Edens’ album as a conversation—between Edens and herself and between Edens and the listener—then the conversation opens with a question that she poses in the first song, “But how do I get there?” In the album’s denouement, “Julia,” Edens returns to this question, changed, and with a final offering: “The pen is in your hand,” she reminds us. “And the key is in your certainty.”