In honor of Girls’s Historical past Month, Atwood Journal has invited artists to take part in a sequence of essays reflecting on identification, music, tradition, inclusion, and extra.
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As we speak, New England darkish pop artist Eva James shares her essay, ‘From Darkness to the Highlight: How Continual Sickness Reworked My Music & My Life,’ for Atwood Journal’s Girls’s Historical past Month sequence!
A mesmerizing power within the realm of intimate darkish pop, Eva James emerges with a voice that embodies each complexity and energy. Her music conjures a fragile stability of haunting magnificence and uncooked vulnerability, drawing listeners right into a world the place shadows reveal their very own form of gentle. Eva’s siren-like attract displays a fascinating mystique, evoking comparisons to legends like Stevie Nicks and Joni Mitchell whereas channeling the soul-stirring grit of Bonnie Raitt and Grace Potter.
With lyrics that delve into psychological well being, nervousness, and the labyrinth of poisonous relationships, Eva wields her songs as each confession and catharsis. She transforms private ache into common truths, demonstrating an unflinching energy in her vulnerability. Her music is greater than a group of melodies; it’s a darkish, introspective journey that invitations listeners to discover their very own complexities.
In 2023, Eva’s magnetic presence captivated audiences as she received the Gloucester four-hundredth Anniversary Singer-Songwriter Problem, solidifying her place as an artist to look at. That very same 12 months, she traveled to New York to collaborate with Grammy-winning artist Paula Cole, starting the recording of her debut album. Set to launch in 2025, Earth to Eva guarantees to be a surprising exploration of the human situation, weaving collectively themes of resilience and self-discovery with an evocative, intimate soundscape.
As she finishes work on her debut album and continues to play exhibits throughout New England, Eva James stands as a beacon of each thriller and relatability – a contemporary witch of melody casting spells by way of music. Put together to be enchanted. Take heed to “One thing New” wherever you stream music, and prepared Mali Hâf’s Girls’s Historical past Month essay beneath!
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How Continual Sickness Reworked My Music & My Life
by Eva James
I don’t consider in coincidences.
If I did, my complete life up till this level would appear like one lengthy string of repeated happenstance.
I’ve been blessed and cursed in equal measure with an unmatched readability, a perspective formed powerfully by the attention of my very own mortality, that disrupted every part I believed I knew about life, and tuned me in to my goal on this earth: music. And it wasn’t till I received sick that I used to be in a position to rise above my very own self-doubt and deprecation lengthy sufficient to achieve for it.
Within the fall of 2023, the identical 12 months I started pursuing the profession I had all the time dreamed of and recorded my debut album, my well being took a flip for the more severe. I stood in entrance of a mirror in my condominium, bare. At 95 kilos, I used to be a shell of who I as soon as was. I didn’t acknowledge the girl staring again at me with vacant eyes, her physique aching with exhaustion and hanging onto the final shreds of a life power that may simply fizzle out if given the possibility to take action. My persistent sickness diagnoses weren’t new, however I used to be formally the sickest I had ever been, and if I left my physique to its personal units, I’m assured I’d not have survived. It’s a easy but neglected reality that we don’t recognize what we now have till it’s gone. With my well being at all-time low, for the primary time in my life, I used to be separated from music. I laid in mattress, praying to a better energy I used to be unsure even existed, and promised that I’d sacrifice completely every part else I had ever held pricey, for the energy and well being that pursuing a profession in music would require me to have.
It was then, with nothing left to lose and my desires simply out of attain, that I made a decision to battle like hell. As I received extra aggressive with medical remedies, the adjustments I made in different areas of my life had been equally crucial. I discovered a silver lining in the way in which that residing with persistent sickness naturally removes issues — and folks — out of your life that had been by no means meant to be there. On the opposite facet of the grief, I discovered an acceptance and appreciation for this initially stunning strategy of elimination and realized the artwork of letting go — I want I might say I’ve mastered that artwork, nevertheless it’s an ongoing apply.
Once I began dropping my hair — a small value to pay for a drugs that was saving my life — I lastly had the braveness to shave my head and it was extra liberating than I might’ve imagined. My priorities solidified and my gratitude elevated for issues I beforehand had taken as a right. With the fading static of a previous life, my music and my well being intertwined to develop into the only real focus of my existence, every one discovering energy within the different. With each medical victory, I grew stronger and extra decided in my goal. With each music written and gig performed, I felt the therapeutic energy of music coursing by way of my veins, carrying me out of the darkness an into the sunshine of the long run I used to be combating so onerous to have.
Within the fall of 2024, I stepped onto the stage at a social membership in Brookline.
Throughout the bar is a mirror, and in its reflection I noticed not a physique combating desperately for naked minimal survival, however a physique radiating with resilience and energy, carrying its battle scars proudly, rewarded for its persistence and perseverance. I noticed a lady emanating a effectively earned fortitude, each word telling the story of what it took to rise from the ashes of a shattered nervous system and piece by piece, domesticate a life price residing.
I will probably be tending to my well being for the remainder of my life, sustaining the rhythm of remedies and life-style adjustments I’ve crafted over the previous few years, retaining my physique and thoughts in a state of symbiosis that permits me to do what I like most on the planet. However I wouldn’t change any of it, as a result of it was solely once I thought I used to be going to die that I lastly realized the right way to dwell — and that may’t be a coincidence. – Eva James
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Stream: “One thing New” – Eva James
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