In honor of Ladies’s Historical past Month, Atwood Journal has invited artists to take part in a collection of essays reflecting on identification, music, tradition, inclusion, and extra.
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In the present day, New England darkish pop artist Eva James shares her essay, ‘From Darkness to the Highlight: How Persistent Sickness Remodeled My Music & My Life,’ for Atwood Journal’s Ladies’s Historical past Month collection!
A mesmerizing pressure within the realm of intimate darkish pop, Eva James emerges with a voice that embodies each complexity and energy. Her music conjures a fragile steadiness of haunting magnificence and uncooked vulnerability, drawing listeners right into a world the place shadows reveal their very own sort of gentle. Eva’s siren-like attract displays a charming 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 observe. That very same yr, 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 means of music. Put together to be enchanted. Take heed to “One thing New” wherever you stream music, and prepared Mali Hâf’s Ladies’s Historical past Month essay under!
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How Persistent Sickness Remodeled My Music & My Life
by Eva James
I don’t imagine 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 thing I assumed I knew about life, and tuned me in to my objective on this earth: music. And it wasn’t till I received sick that I used to be capable of rise above my very own self-doubt and deprecation lengthy sufficient to achieve for it.
Within the fall of 2023, the identical yr 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 serious. I stood in entrance of a mirror in my residence, bare. At 95 kilos, I used to be a shell of who I as soon as was. I didn’t acknowledge the lady staring again at me with vacant eyes, her physique aching with exhaustion and hanging onto the final shreds of a life pressure that will simply fizzle out if given the prospect to take action. My power 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 ignored reality that we don’t admire what we’ve 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 the next energy I used to be undecided even existed, and promised that I’d sacrifice completely every thing 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 goals simply out of attain, that I made a decision to struggle like hell. As I received extra aggressive with medical therapies, the adjustments I made in different areas of my life have been equally essential. I discovered a silver lining in the best way that residing with power sickness naturally removes issues — and folks — out of your life that have been by no means meant to be there. On the opposite aspect of the grief, I discovered an acceptance and appreciation for this initially stunning technique of elimination and discovered the artwork of letting go — I want I might say I’ve mastered that artwork, however it’s an ongoing follow.
After I began dropping my hair — a small worth 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 without any consideration. With the fading static of a previous life, my music and my well being intertwined to turn out to be the only real focus of my existence, each discovering energy within the different. With each medical victory, I grew stronger and extra decided in my objective. With each track written and gig performed, I felt the therapeutic energy of music coursing by means of my veins, carrying me out of the darkness an into the sunshine of the longer term I used to be preventing 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 preventing 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 nicely earned fortitude, each notice 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 might be tending to my well being for the remainder of my life, sustaining the rhythm of therapies and life-style adjustments I’ve crafted over the previous few years, maintaining my physique and thoughts in a state of symbiosis that enables 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 after I thought I used to be going to die that I lastly discovered the right way to stay — and that may’t be a coincidence. – Eva James
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Stream: “One thing New” – Eva James
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