At the start of 2021, singer-songwriter chlothegod threw a farewell party for her musical career. She had been writing songs since high school, but hadn’t yet garnered the financial stability or level of recognition she wanted and decided it was time to move on. But, despite her best efforts, she couldn’t stop making music. “I was still setting up my microphone and laptop in my kitchen every day and recording,” she says. “When I talked about quitting, I was not being honest with myself about how expressing myself through music is necessary for my health and my development as a person. It makes me feel complete.” Not long after that party, EQT Recordings, the label she’s now signed to, reached out, and within a week chlothegod was on a flight to Los Angeles. “This has been the story of my life so far,” she says. “I'm always very committed to my decisions, but then something fairly miraculous will happen and I'm on a new path.”
The move proved to be an extremely emotionally and creatively fruitful one. As she began to support herself with her music, chlothegod gained a sense of confidence in her storytelling. She also met a new producer and a community of artists whose work she admires and who support her. “The move has really given me a lot of stability,” she says. “I've been feeling like, if I fall, somebody will catch me. In that external stability, I’ve finally allowed myself to revisit things that happened earlier in my life and let them out for the first time.”
That newfound emotional safety, paired with the validation of seeing that her introspective songs resonated with listeners, enabled a sense of artistic freedom while she worked on her latest EP, I Feel Different Every Day. She was able to explore her rage, her messiness, and her exhaustion to new degrees. “It's the first time that I've ever been able to scream that loud, both metaphorically and literally” she says. “While working on the new project, I was able to experiment with my own voice, along with the words I said — the things that I meant when I said them. Even just the literal volume in which I sing on my new project feels symbolic to me.”
The songs on the EP are startling and affecting in their candor, self-awareness, and in the effort chlo puts into uncovering and examining her own flaws. On “I Know What Everyone Says About Me,” a searing acoustic ballad turned rock anthem that serves as the project’s opening statement, she addresses the world’s perceptions of her. A song that grapples with a negative reputation could easily slip into defensiveness, but chlo focuses: “I’ve been moving mountains trying to change my ways/ I find it so sad how low I can get/ I get so mad, I seem to forget/ I gave up so much but not the regret.”
As much as self-reflection can be painful, it is also freeing. On skittering pop-punk track “Digging Around,” chlo crafts a joyous, playful spectacle out of her attempts at transformation. “I’m like 6 am construction out your window/ Work in progress, just moving too slow” she croons across drums and guitar that surge like a heartbeat. She also counteracts the heaviness of all of this soul searching with a winking sense of humor: “Promise this is the last time/ Promise, that I tell you lies” she adds, insinuating that the path towards change might be more circuitous than it seems. Similarly, on “I Swear,” she sings, “I’m over it, I swear” with the kind of fervor that only someone who is very much not over it could muster. She takes the work of self-improvement seriously while still maintaining an ability to laugh along the way.
I Feel Different Every Day is a document of a woman in her 20s understanding who she is and who she has yet to become. But this sense of personal exploration, chlothegod’s willingness to be honest with herself, is also rooted in her community. “The change that allowed this project to come into fruition happened before I started making the music,” chlo says. “My community helps me manage my expectations of handling my mental health and forgetting the idea of ‘solving myself.’ They challenge the idea that my self worth has to be tied into how many days in a row I’m ‘on track’ within myself. I was finally comfortable enough to say, ‘There are some areas of my life that I need help in, and there are some things that I'd like to change and I need help to do so.’ I had to be able to rely on other people in moments where I couldn't really rely on myself. Doing so built up a sense of confidence in myself to be able to say those things out loud in public.”
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I Feel Different Every Day, the sophomore EP from Fayetteville, North Carolina, singer-songwriter chlothegod, is a document of a woman in her 20s, understanding who she is and who she has yet to become. She was able to explore her rage, her messiness, and her exhaustion to new degrees, and the songs on the EP are startling and affecting in their candor, self-awareness, and in the effort chlo puts into uncovering and examining her own flaws. “While working on the new project, I was able to experiment with my own voice, along with the words I said — the things that I meant when I said them. Even just the literal volume in which I sing on my new project feels symbolic to me.” That newfound emotional safety, paired with the validation of seeing her introspective songs resonate while performing on two North America tours in support of her debut, Nearly Straight, enabled a sense of artistic freedom while she worked on her latest EP. “I’ve finally allowed myself to revisit things that happened earlier in my life and let them out for the first time.”
As much as self-reflection can be painful, it’s also freeing, and I Feel Different Every Day takes the work of self-improvement seriously while still maintaining an ability to laugh along the way, with a winking sense of humor across project singles like “Why Would I” and “Digging Around,” and a nod, ultimately to the community that she’s found and which has supported her and allowed her the confidence to share this personal exploration. “My community helps me manage my expectations of handling my mental health and forgetting the idea of ‘solving myself’,” she says. “I had to be able to rely on other people in moments where I couldn't really rely on myself. Doing so built up a sense of confidence in myself to be able to say those things out loud in public.”