Can You Hear Me Now?

Named after Timothée Chalamet’s character in Call Me by Your Name, ELIO (Canada-via-Swansea pop savant Charlotte Lee) lays her truth bare on record. From her 2020 debut EP u and me, but mostly me to 2021’s Can You Hear Me Now?, her music emerges fully formed—not unlike that of her co-manager, Charli XCX—from bright yet demoralized bedroom pop (“@elio.irl”) to Auto-Tuned alt (“Come Round”) to intimate, self-aware acoustic odes to misery (“Fabric”). “Something that I've learned while making this [is that] I don't have to have an EP with completely sad songs or completely personal songs, and I don't have to make a whole record of club songs,” ELIO tells Apple Music about her sophomore release. “I can have it all on one thing. That's how I make music, and it's a huge reflection on me.” One listen and it’s clear her genre ambivalence works. “There’s a few songs that touch upon learning how to live your life for yourself and doing things that make you happy, but also keeping in mind the responsibility you have as a person, and as a person in other people's lives,” she says. “I really had to learn that. When I started doing music, I was like, ‘Screw this. I'm just going to do my own thing. I don't care about anybody.’ And then you get to a point where you're like, ‘Well, you know what? I have relationships that I would like to maintain, and I have a responsibility as a person living in the world to be a little bit selfless.’” Below, ELIO reviews her EP, track by track.
Jackie Onassis “I learned about Jackie in art school. There was this painting that I had to study, it was of Aristotle Onassis' yacht. I did a bunch of research on Aristotle and then about Jackie, because I'm Canadian, and I was born in the UK, so I didn't really know a lot about her and JFK. I was writing the song and I was like, ‘We could be like Jackie Onassis.’ She's so cool, and she was really an icon of her time. When times are tough, I'm like, ‘Oh, can we just go on vacation and not talk to anybody?’ I feel like you listen to the whole song and you're like, ‘Yeah, let's go. Let's go to Paris. Let's do it. Let's go,’ and then you get to the bridge and you're hit by all the responsibilities that you have as a person, why you can't just pick up and leave, and the consequences that come with doing whatever you want.”
CHARGER “I wrote it with my friends Andy Seltzer and Brett McLaughlin, who's Leland. I've lost my charger at a house, post-party or post-fight, and it's a cheap iPhone accessory, but for some reason it's so essential. I can risk going back and getting it, whether it's going through another whole long goodbye at a party or going back in and being really awkward after having a fight. I'm so fascinated with people's relationships with phones, obviously—I write about it a lot—but this was a lot less personal and it was a lot more like, ‘Everybody relates to this.’”
hurts 2 hate somebody “I'm very pessimistic, naturally. I don't want to say resentful, but I can definitely hold a grudge, and I think this one is me analyzing that and taking into consideration why I feel that way. Is it actually helping me, or is it hindering everything in my life? I have a song that is really me embracing the resentfulness and blaming the world for whatever is happening, but it actually really hurts to keep resenting people and keep pushing people out of your life just because you're holding a grudge.”
Come Round “This song always had a heavy Auto-Tune on it, and it's a super simple song. My boyfriend and I pitched it up, and honestly, I really like it because it sounds like a kid. And the song, instead of it being like, ‘Come round to cry on my shoulders,’ it's almost like, ‘Come round and let's go outside and play.’ I was staying at my grandparents' house in the UK and was thinking about how much time I spend away from my boyfriend and my friends. ‘If you need me, I'm here, you can come around.’”
When U Saw Love “I wrote this song the same day as I wrote ‘Come Round.’ It’s about accepting yourself and accepting others and how you can't truly love somebody without that self-acceptance. But honestly, it's about everything. I sent it to Charli XCX—she’s on my management team—and she was like, ‘We need a better chorus.’ I sat on it for like two weeks, because I wrote this song in 2019, I think—my musician friends, we call it ‘demo-itis’ because we get so stuck on how the demo sounds that when we try to rewrite it or try to reproduce it, nothing sounds right. And then all of a sudden, I sat down and wrote it in 15 minutes.”
@elio.irl “I wrote this at the beginning of 2020. I was away for almost three months, and I was FaceTiming my friends and my family and my boyfriend every day. When I go to LA, I'm either working or I'm sitting at home. In the bridge, I talk about how everything feels so slow, especially this year. It feels like everybody's just standing in one spot, just waiting to go. It's the worst feeling ever, but just accepting it and learning how to love being in the moment is super important: that connection—and your career and learning how to mush it all together into something that you can grow to love and appreciate.”
Fabric “This is the oldest one—I wrote it when I was 21, I'm 23 now. I just quit school. I was working a part-time job, so I was just pretty much working every single day, but not really working on anything that I loved. It was a real low point, where all my friends were applying for their master's and getting jobs in the field that they've always wanted, and I was working this job that I hated. It was definitely a lot of thinking about my life, where I'm at and where I'm going, why I felt so lost and so confused, and how everybody perceives me for dropping out of school and working this job. I wrote '@elio.irl' in pretty much one voice note, just pure rambling.”