Side Stage with Sy is shining a light on artists’ stories through her interviews. We’re revisiting her conversation with indie rock artist Eliza McLamb ahead of her performance at The Mod Club in Toronto on March 23 2026, where she talked all things music, inspirations, TikTok, and how feeling misunderstood informed her latest record.
Good Story, McLamb’s sophomore record, is out now – listen here.
Here’s a snippet from the interview:
SYHANN: You lived in a shed and worked on a farm while writing music. Tell me about that.
ELIZA: It was great. I mean it was the best time of my life and I was just writing across the country, working on farms, and my friend was very generous and let me live in her laundry shed when I was broke and couldn’t pay rent. It all worked out, I mean it’s Los Angeles so it’s temperate. It’s not like I’m freezing in North Dakota or something.
SYHANN: Do you think you needed that level of chaos to become the artist you are now?
ELIZA: Strangely it wasn’t so chaotic, it was pretty simple. I didn’t have any money so there was nothing to do other than work and hang out and try to make my art on the side. I almost feel like it’s become more complicated now. When there’s no career to speak of, there’s nothing to worry about.
SYHANN: A lot of your music plays with the idea of being misunderstood. Do you feel like that’s something you’ve outgrown or is that something you’re still unpacking?
ELIZA: It seems to me like a very teenage, early 20s feeling, but it has started to feel a bit unproductive or self-centered as I got older. My latest record is about what it means to create a mythology of the self in order to insulate yourself from being misunderstood and how there are diminishing returns to that and there’s a bunch of drawbacks as well.
Check out the rest of the interview here: