SONG PREMIERE: Shaylee Delivers Exuberant Indie Pop on “Ophelia”

As Shaylee, Portland, Oregon’s Elle Archer writes music that is expansive, lush, and heartbreaking. She’s been making music since she was a teenager, but her upcoming release, Short-Sighted Security (Kill Rock Stars), almost feels like her debut. “I’ve had so much time to grow artistically, it feels like a culmination of all the work that I’ve done up until now,” she says of the record. Spanning thirteen songs, the album is the result of a dedicated and deep love of music. It’s also a thematically unified record, one about failing relationships, growing pains, and falling short of your goals of self-improvement.

Elle, who is a queer trans woman, grew up enamored with making music. She cites early experiences as a teen playing guitar on church worship teams as well as in her high school jazz band as heavily formative. She remembers mixing every element she’d hear on stage in her in-ear monitors, and then going home to toy around with what she had learned, in awe of the endless possibilities that come with sitting alone and reimagining sound. Elle also has a history of listening to and loving music, especially turn-of-the-century space rock opuses like Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space by Spiritualized, The Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin, Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and Radiohead’s OK Computer. You could say that Short-Sighted Security is a tribute to indie music, a study of a lifelong obsession with the jangly hooks of indie pop, the grandiosity of post-rock, and the lean toughness of indie rock, all wrapped up with the wide register of feelings associated with those early days of listening to songs that changed Elle’s life.

Short-Sighted Security is also a record that is as DIY as they come. Recorded almost entirely alone in a living room in Portland during the first lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic, Elle did everything on this record, she plays all the guitars (for the heads: she used a Rickenbacker 330 for nearly every track on the record), a prized Roland Juno 60, the drums, and the bass. She also sings, mixes, and engineers. The only other musicians she enlisted are her friend Matt, who is credited with organ, violin, and cello on a couple tracks, and her friend Travis, whom she credits with bongos, and crucially—whispers. This sort of intense precision and dedication is clear from the album’s outset.

Today Glide is excited to premiere the album’s second track “Ophelia,” a clear standout on the new album. With a loping guitar that feels reminiscent of the ‘60s British invasion bands like the Kinks alongside contemporaries like Cloud Nothings, “Ophelia” is a bouncing and exuberant morsel of indie pop. The wall of sound creates a sense of psychedelic swelling that eventually breaks down into a crash cymbals, spectral pianos, and ecstatic vocals. Shaylee pulls the listener in unexpected directions on a continuously soaring course before ultimately bringing them down to earth again.

Elle Archer describes the inspiration behind the song:

“Ophelia” is a song about the kind of romance that burns bright and fizzles out quickly. Sometimes love isn’t meant to last, but that doesn’t make it any less valid or visceral or real. These kinds of short, explosive relationships can provide some of the most memorable experiences life can offer, and my brief relationship with Ophelia during the first covid lockdown was no different. This song is an attempt to capture that lightning in a bottle to show the world what our love was like just as the wave began to crest.

Ophelia herself was a pure chaotic neutral hellbent on having a good time, even in the face of all our lives being put on hold, and that was such a radical departure from the way I’d been living my life up to that point that I couldn’t help but be completely enthralled with her. Our love was punctuated with all kinds of impulsive behavior, and while that was a ton of fun for a while, it eventually ended with me needing to separate from her so I could clean myself up. Still, I remember her fondly and I hope that despite the darkness lingering underneath the surface of the song that the unfiltered excitement of our love comes shining through the cracks. Just because love is fleeting doesn’t mean it’s not worth celebrating.

LISTEN:

Photo credit: Liam French

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