It appears to be a trophy at first. Look closer, and you’ll see the cover of Good Story features Eliza McLamb holding a makeshift award, hot-glued together from scraps she and her mother salvaged. It is, of course, silver — a self-deprecating wink introducing the timbre of McLamb’s sophomore album. These last few years, McLamb’s been parsing her upbringing, the songs she wrote about it, and the whole endeavor of the stories we tell about ourselves. “If you get really good at telling the story of who you are, you become the story you told instead of the ever-dynamic, ever-changing person you have to be,” McLamb says. “I did really well telling the story of who I am, but I began asking: What’s the point of it?”
At only 23, McLamb has already lived multiple lives. In her late teens, McLamb found success via co-hosting the podcast Binchtopia and sharing songs on TikTok. She soon pulled back from the platform, feeling it didn’t represent her actual ethos as a songwriter. Instead, she signed to Royal Mountain and released her 2024 debut Going Through It, a document of a complex, traumatic childhood that led to searching phases — dropping out of college during the pandemic in favor of working on Midwest farms, eventually leaving her North Carolina hometown behind for Los Angeles. It all gave her plenty of stories to tell on Going Through It. And now on Good Story, she wonders how that process affected her. Yet the homemade trophy of Good Story’s cover is far from a jocular consolation prize alone. It’s a symbol of the layered, accomplished writing McLamb arrived at as she interrogated everything she thought she was about as an artist.
After touring Going Through It in the spring of 2024, McLamb began writing new material and found herself encountering an age-old trope. “I felt like I had spent my whole life writing the first record,” she says. She could’ve mined her experience for a whole catalog of music, but she wanted to step back and reassess her impulses as a writer. Good Story directly reflects upon the process of making not only Going Through It, but the process of making art derived from our personal lives altogether. “I carved out room and brought in new songs that felt fresher, able to pick up on ideas outside of this compulsion to build a personal narrative,” McLamb explains. Then, she laughs: “But then I wrote all these songs about the compulsion to make a personal narrative.”
Though Los Angeles had served her well for a time, McLamb had begun to feel suffocated by her life there. “I was on a personal mission to stop being so solipsistic,” she cracks. It led to another cross-country move to New York City. She found herself reinvigorated by being in a dense city colliding with so many different people. She fell into new scenes — music circles, but also literary crowds. Inspired by her new surroundings, McLamb’s writing process changed too. Songs arrived to her while on the subway, or on walks near her apartment.
Once she had enough material, McLamb reconvened in upstate New York with guitarist Jacob Blizard and illuminati hotties’ Sarah Tudzin, who had produced Going Through It. A greater sense of confidence allowed McLamb to open herself up to co-writing. Before Going Through It, McLamb had never played with a band.
