Back in August, we caught up with Canadian songwriter Elissa Mielke as she was gearing up to release her new EP Mouse. The conversation largely addressed her unique upbringing for a major-label signee within rural Ontario, where her sheltered youth stifled many of her creative impulses. “When I was a teenager, I recorded a song about trees dancing,” she recalled. “And I couldn't put it out because you weren’t supposed to dance, because dancing led to lust.”
Now based in LA, her two recent EPs Mouse and Finally demonstrate the catharsis of shifting to an urban lifestyle more receptive to her ideas. Yet her home in Dundas, Ontario is still a huge part of her life—in fact, for her recent “Neighborhoods” session she took us deep into the woods outside her family home to perform two tracks from her latest EP on keyboard. After tying the lyrics to “Get Well” into the fascination with trees that originated in her childhood, “Woman’s Worth” reminds us just how far she’s come, with that track’s lyrics providing an honest, unfiltered version of herself she’s leaned into in recent years.
Watch her perform both tracks below.
