A phrase saved in her Notes app, a song written backstage at a theatre show, and a desire to make room for all her creative interests. For Philadelphia-born folk-pop singer-songwriter Lizzy McAlpine, inspiration doesn’t always arrive on cue, but following those detours helped shape her fourth studio album, Angel.
After stepping away from touring to perform a critically acclaimed run in Floyd Collins on Broadway, McAlpine found a renewed appetite for songwriting, drawing on everything from the harmonically unexpected music she sang each night, to records she’d only recently discovered. “I have a lot of interests, and I need to be able to do multiple things so that I don’t feel like I’m getting tired of one of those things,” she tells me over an early morning Zoom call. “I feel like being able to fill my other cups has allowed me to like making music again.”
Recorded over nearly two years in and around Los Angeles, Angel sees McAlpine layer the rich vocals of ’70s Laurel Canyon-inflected folk with more contemporary indie-rock textures. It’s a broader sonic palette than the intimate arrangements of Older, giving her delicately confessional songwriting more room to breathe. One such confession, revealed in both her lyrics and ‘The light in the painting’ music video, is that she’s in love. You can hear it in the music, too: the layered harmonies, soft instrumentation and open, expansive arrangements give these songs a warmth that feels distinctly romantic. As a young artist plunged into the spotlight thanks to internet virality, McAlpine has been candid about her relationship with fame. On Angel, what feels clear is that she’s found writing, recording and performing most enjoyable when surrounded by only her closest collaborators and confidants, even if that sometimes means making music all by herself.
From rediscovering Joni Mitchell to swapping a conventional music video for camcorder footage filmed alone at home, we asked McAlpine to take us through the inspirations that helped shape Angel.
An abstract painting
Rather than choosing a single photograph or image to represent Angel, McAlpine knew early on that she wanted the artwork to be abstract. With an album that moves through different relationships, emotions and stages of personal growth, a more literal image didn’t feel quite right. She found Seattle-based artist Gianne, who paints under the name Tidy, and sent her the album to listen to before creating the cover.
“To me, this album is very complex and layered, and it’s not necessarily about one feeling or one relationship. It’s about a lot of things that come together and make up a human life,” she explains. “So I felt like I wanted the cover to be something that reflected that.” The resulting painting captures that multiplicity, giving the album a visual identity that leaves room for its different feelings to coexist.
This album is very complex and layered, and it’s not necessarily about one feeling or one relationship. It’s about a lot of things that come together and make up a human life.
Discovering unexpected connections
McAlpine’s musical reference points for Angel include two folk greats: Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake. She only discovered Mitchell’s music a couple of years ago, beginning with her debut album and working her way chronologically through the discography. “I feel like the main records that I listened to while I was making Angel were Blue, For the Roses, and Hejira,” she says. For McAlpine, discovering an artist at the right moment can make all the difference. “I feel like music finds you when you need it.”
Nick Drake’s influence arrived in a similarly organic way. She had been listening to his album Pink Moon while writing ‘A car wash and a new pair of pants’, but hadn’t yet discovered ‘One of These Things First’, from his album Bryter Layter. When she played her song to a friend, they pointed out the similarity between the chord progressions. “It felt very cosmic,” she recalls. “It was like the chord progression was basically the same, and in the same key. I thought, that’s so cool that we both thought of basically the same thing.”
For McAlpine, it was a particularly satisfying coincidence, given how much she already admired Drake’s music: “It was like we’d received the same download from the universe, which was cool.”
It was like we’d received the same download from the universe, which was cool.
Broadway and the art of doing something different
While making Angel, McAlpine was also performing on Broadway in Floyd Collins. Spending her evenings singing someone else’s music gave her a different kind of creative education, one that she carried back into her own songwriting. The show’s musical complexity encouraged her to experiment with unexpected harmonies and structures. “The music that I got to sing every night was so complex and harmonically crazy, and did things that were so unexpected, and I really loved that,” she says. “I wanted to see if I could recreate that in my own music, in my own way.”
Broadway also gave McAlpine a routine that was missing from the more unpredictable demands of touring. That contrast eventually helped unlock ‘Soldier of the Road’, a song about the toll of life on the road. She had kept the phrase in her Notes app for a long time, after someone she was seeing described themselves as a “soldier of the road” while struggling with touring. The song didn’t come together until she was backstage during a tech rehearsal, reflecting on how much she appreciated having a regular schedule.
I wanted to really capture the feeling of being alone, and the only way I felt like I could do that authentically was to actually be alone.
Keeping the quirks in the production
On her previous album, Older, McAlpine and her collaborators leaned into the feeling of musicians playing together in a room. For Angel, they wanted to expand that approach, building more elaborate sonic worlds around the songs without losing the human details of the recordings. That meant keeping in the little sounds that might otherwise be edited out: the creak of a piano, the noise of a pedal, the evidence of an instrument being played by a person in a particular space. For McAlpine, those details are part of what makes the record come alive.
“We definitely leaned into it a lot on Older. That was very much in the room, and with this one, we wanted to produce it out a little bit more and create like worlds around these songs,” she says. “But obviously, we still love to keep in any… I wouldn’t even really call them mistakes; they’re just little quirks.”
The decision wasn’t necessarily about taking inspiration from another artist’s recording technique. It was about preserving the atmosphere of the places where the music was made, along with the experiences shared by the people in the room. “It was really just that we wanted to capture the rooms that we were making these [records] in and the experiences that we were having, and so we just kept it all in.”
Making a music video that felt real
The visual world of Angel also grew out of McAlpine’s interest in capturing real life. For the video for ‘The light in the painting’, she filmed with her boyfriend, while ‘Over country’ featured her friends hanging out together on a porch. Both videos drew on the intimacy of people simply being themselves.
Her original idea for ‘Ugly things’ took a different direction. McAlpine travelled to Reno, Nevada, to shoot a more conventional narrative music video, but the finished approach didn’t feel emotionally connected to where she was in her own life. The song called for a particular kind of loneliness, and acting out a breakup she wasn’t experiencing didn’t feel like the right way to reach it.
Instead, she filmed herself alone at home with a camcorder, borrowing from the casual vlogs she sometimes makes for YouTube. The looser, first-person approach allowed her to capture the feeling she wanted without having to perform it for a camera crew. “I wanted to really capture the feeling of being alone, and the only way I felt like I could do that authentically was to actually be alone,” she says. It’s a fitting approach for an album that finds meaning in the personal and the everyday. Sometimes, the most effective way to communicate a feeling is to stop trying to stage it and let life unfold in front of the lens.
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