Elle Belle to Release New Album 'How Do I Feel?'

On September 1, Los Angeles-based band Elle Belle will release their new album, How Do I Feel? on Little Record Company (pre-order). The album is the follow up to the band's 2020 release Post Everything. 

Today the band is pleased to share "Gone Are The Days," the first track to be released from the forthcoming album. The track debuted today at Rock & Roll Globe and can also be shared at Bandcamp. The song will be on all streaming services on Friday for any playlist shares (pre-save). 

About the song Elle Belle's Christopher Pappas says, "'Gone are the Days,' with its nostalgic lyrics with upbeat backdrop, offers listeners a heartfelt journey through time with humor and infectious energy. The song is about the world we inherited from our parents and how we were set up to fail. It’s about disillusionment, war, and getting older. "

A lot happened to Christopher Pappas, the brainchild behind Elle Belle, when he was making How Do I Feel?, both when he was writing the songs and recording them. To start with, it was towards the beginning of the pandemic, before vaccines and before anybody really knew exactly how it was transmitted. Scary enough for most of us, but even more so when, like Pappas, you have an autoimmune disease.

His has given him arthritis, for which he has to inject himself once a week with Enbrel. But Enbrel can increase the risk of lymphoma and leukemia, and Pappas had a cancer scare while writing these songs after finding a lump on his collarbone. Then, four days into recording, his mother had a heart attack, though she’s thankfully now recovered. If all that wasn’t enough, one of Pappas’ close friends—who graces the cover of Elle Belle’s 2018 album, No Signal—took his own life.

Needless to say, it was all almost too much. During that time, Pappas found himself repeatedly asking himself the question that would become the title of this album. It was less about finding a resolute answer, however, than it was just opening his mind and heart to everything he was experiencing, to know if he could cope with how he felt. After all, feelings fluctuate constantly.

“In a way,” he says, “I was less concerned about the answer, and more concerned about the importance of asking myself the question, trying to grab ahold of this wild ride that I was on and exert some sort of control. Like, I haven’t lost a parent and I brushed up against it—I got a little taste of it and it didn’t feel the way I thought it was going to feel.”

Like every other Elle Belle album so far, How Do I Feel? was recorded at 64 Sound studios in Highland Park, CA, which is owned by Rilo Kiley’s Pierre de Reeder, and the record was co-produced by Pappas and de Reeder. Pappas says How Do I Feel? might be the last album he makes, that from this point on he’ll just release single tracks, because that’s how he writes and he feels that captures the emotions that inspire him more accurately.

The irony is that this is an album that serves as a deeply profound dive into the complexity of human existence and the feelings that come with it, all tied in with a cohesive narrative and thematic arc. If it does happen to be his last one, he’s going out on an absolute high—despite the lows that inspired it. He doesn’t manage to answer the album’s question, but in trying, he realized he didn’t ever need to.

“By making this record,” he says, “what I did was I readjusted the real questions I should be asking myself. It doesn’t matter how I feel. What you need to remember is that people go through s, but you can do this. That became the main takeaway. How do I feel? f if I know. But you know what? I’m going to wake up tomorrow. And there’s power in just being like, no matter what you get up, you make the bed, go get your coffee and you keep going.

Photo credit: Casey Curry
 

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