CABUS
Audio By Carbonatix
When we first met Elyse Jewel, she had just wrapped up a performance at The Pop Up 2. At the showcase, which took place last December at the NS Event Center, Jewel shared the bill with other local musicians, including Ashton Edminster and CABUS, formerly known as Larry g(EE). Her set consisted of some of her original songs, including “Fine By Me” and “Thinking About You,” of which she just released a live version this January. She also performed a few covers, including one of “Lover” by her idol Taylor Swift.
Over a month after the showcase, we catch up with the 17-year-old singer-songwriter on the release day of the alternate version of “Thinking About You.” Jewel is still riding the high of The Pop Up 2 showcase, her first performance in a while. The singer has taken the stage at venues House of Blues Dallas and Lava Cantina, but she prefers smaller venues, like those local types of showcases or the stage at Ascension Coffee.
“I’m able to connect with the people more,” she says.
On “Thinking About You,” Jewel reels over a guy she met when she was 14 during a modeling gig in Austin. She imagines being called “baby in about a week” and how this guy “won’t put nobody above” her.
“This was [a modeling job] for Dell computers,” Jewel says. “”He lived four hours away from me, but he and I really hit it off. We would call, FaceTime and stuff, and he was really the first guy that I genuinely liked.”
Jewel later linked up with songwriter Shane Stevens, who has helped co-write songs for Ariana Grande, Little Big Town and Walker Hayes, to help set Jewel’s cinematic lyrics over snappy pop beats. In 2019, Jewel’s mother submitted “Thinking About You” to the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, where it won Pop Song of the Year that summer.
Winning the John Lennon songwriting contest was meaningful for Jewel, who’d grown up listening to Lennon and The Beatles. She also took well to show tunes, which she learned by way of her aunt, an off-Broadway performer.
Jewel began taking singing lessons at 8 years old and started writing songs at 13. Between that time, she was diagnosed with anxiety, but has since surrounded herself with a support system of friends and family.
“It took me so long to actually ask for help,” Jewel says. “I think it helps mostly whenever you realize that you have a support system, and just give yourself self-care days. And saying ‘Hey, this isn’t perfect, but it’s your best.’ I feel like ‘perfect’ is so subjective. It’s such a loaded word.”
Jewel embraces her imperfections on “Fine by Me.” The video for the synth-pop ballad opens with her sitting on a kitchen counter and smashing a cake with her bare hands. “I’ll do what I want, why is that so wrong?” she sings, as she dances in a loft apartment with a group of her friends, snapping Polaroids throughout.
“I really wanted to just have expressed that we should be more lenient,” Jewel says. “We should relax more; you shouldn’t have to care about what others do with their lives. It’s definitely taken me a while to kind of get into that mindset. I’m a huge mental health advocate on my page and on my social media, so I definitely wanted to kind of bring that subject to light.”
Jewel says she also has a “safe space” in Pinterest. When she has a concept for a song, she’ll create a Pinterest board based on her ideas. From there, she will visualize the song’s aesthetic and imagine a music video drawn from the Pinterest board.
“We should relax more; you shouldn’t have to care about what others do with their lives. It’s definitely taken me a while to kind of get into that mindset.” – Elyse Jewel
On her song “Arms,” Jewel is still infatuated with the guy from “Thinking About You,” still loving him from a distance and looking forward to seeing him soon. “I count down the days ’till your love is here in my arms,” she sings over a synth track laced with a groovy kick drum. Though she wrote the song before COVID, its accompanying visual was released last year, making the song timely.
In the video, Jewel freeform-dances in a park and near a lake, creating the feeling of anticipation while separated from her love interest. Though she’s taken lessons in the past, Jewel doesn’t consider herself a dancer.
“That was all just me moving around and having fun with the song,” Jewel says. “I think I had just begun to get more confident and learn to love myself. I’ve been getting more comfortable with my body and my movement.”
Jewel, who is a junior in high school, looks forward to studying music and vocal performance out-of-state in the future. For the time being, she’s recording and finishing up an EP and plans to release a debut single in spring.
She’s maintaining a certain secrecy about the project, but Jewel says the EP will contain six new “coming of age” songs, all of which were written within the past year.
“It’s a little bit of a different sound,” Jewel says. “But I think it makes sense [alongside] my other stuff. I can’t give away too much, but it’s definitely gonna tell a story.”
