Protagonist, the title of the sophomore album by Eliza Spear, is a fitting one: the story may be hers, but anyone can imagine themselves in the role of the hero when they listen. Where other songwriters might settle for easy cliches, she reaches instead for the sorts of vulnerable truths that can bridge the divide between her and the listener. Her melodies have a way of drawing you in: first low and conversational, like a friend offering secrets into your ear, then soaring and triumphant, calling you to follow on the journey she’s started. Her music, at its core, is about seeing yourself in someone else’s struggles and aspirations, turning lived details into anthems to which anyone can relate.
In the case of “Lucky Lucy,” a standout from her 2022 debut full-length Right Now, It’s Like This, that might mean striking up a conversation with a stranger at a bar just because you both have freckles. From that seemingly insignificant similarity, Spear weaves a surprising and richly emotional love story, with a twist ending too poignant to spoil in writing. That first album, set to warm acoustic instrumentation with sleek pop accents, was an ideal introduction to Spear’s work, drawing a wide range of themes and experiences into a coherent but multifaceted whole.
For Protagonist, she took a more deliberately focused approach. All of the lyrics stem from a particularly intense period of her life, and she interweaves them into a song cycle of sorts: an image or idea introduced on one track might surface again on another, given complex new resonance by its shifted surroundings and the passage of time.
She also honed her sound, opting this time for a palette of gleaming synthesizers, body-moving drum machine rhythms, and hooks big enough to shout in a stadium. Where some songwriters might sacrifice subtlety in favor of such big-tent appeal, Spear has retained all the writerly nuance of her earlier work and then some. She combines the intimacy of the singer-songwriter canon with the immediacy of the best pop.
PROTAGONIST. 11.1.
Since moving from her Los Angeles hometown to New York, Spear has been a tireless performer, and won an ASCAP songwriting award. Though she’s played plenty of shows in traditional venues, she is fond of presenting her music in unconventional spaces, where she can forge more powerful connections with listeners than the dichotomy of artist and audience allows. In 2020, when pandemic restrictions made old-fashioned concerts impossible, she went on tour across the backyards of America, giving socially distanced shows for small groups in the outdoor spaces of their homes. She expected to be on the road for two weeks, but word started to spread: one backyard show led to another, and she ended up touring all summer.
Sometimes, she’ll set up a door frame on the sidewalk of her Brooklyn neighborhood and invite passersby to step through and “become the protagonist,” turning the conceptual heart of her work into a literal journey through space. The Protagonist Project, conceived by Spear, encourages curiosity in the lost art of live music discovery by inviting lucky New York passersby into venues for intimate three-minute private concerts.
Such adventures, one gets the sense, are borne of the same inspiration that leads Spear to write songs in the first place: to meet people where they are, and enrich their lives by sharing a piece of her own.
Spear traces her lifelong passion for songwriting to an early experience of connecting with an unexpected audience. As a precocious and sensitive 14-year-old, she’d penned a ballad about a friend’s parents who had recently divorced, feeling the pain of that grown-up separation with unusual depth for a teenager, but not thinking much yet about music’s power to pull universal truths from the particulars of one person’s life. After she performed the song at a voice recital, a different adult, also recently separated, tearfully told her how much it had meant to her.
“I did not understand why she was emotional based on somebody else’s story,” Spear says now. “And then I was like, ‘Oh, this is not about me, or about the divorced parents that I know of, or about the way that I relate to their story. It’s now entirely for the people who listen to it.’ That was the greatest honor I’d ever felt. I realized I don’t ever want to do anything else.”
Spear has her own stories of hope and heartbreak now, but the impulse to tell them hasn’t changed.
Listen to Protagonist, and you might just wonder if she’s singing about you.
