After spending the last two years in Seattle and on the island of Fidalgo, Lizzie Weber is thrilled to be releasing a new 3-track EP this summer. “This set of songs are ones that I wrote many years ago, after a traumatic break-up. They were so brutally honest that I couldn’t bring myself to record them for awhile, even though personal lyrical candor has never been difficult for me--I couldn’t face them. But I wanted to record them because I know these feelings to be universal for those of us who have ever felt the pain of lost love.”
In March of this year, Lizzie traveled to Iceland to collaborate on two songs with Marketa Irglova (The Swell Season/Once) who produced and performed on the songs, expected to be out this fall.
Born and raised in St. Louis, MO, now based in the Pacific Northwest, Lizzie began her journey as a songwriter living in Studio City, California, where she moved at twenty years old to pursue a career in acting. Two years after her move to Los Angeles, she found herself back in St. Louis writing, recording and producing her self-titled debut album as she pursued a degree in Journalism from Washington University.
Lizzie’s roots in St. Louis have a lot to do with a woman so grounded. “I feel as though my upbringing in St. Louis allowed me to develop strong values and a strong sense of self, a kind of self-awareness that sort of catapulted me into writing very personal and emotionally charged music.”
Lizzie’s 2014 debut was well-received. A complete unknown to the St. Louis music scene, local magazine Eleven was the first to review the album, dubbing Lizzie “Your Favorite New Artist of 2014.” Huffington Post called her single “Falling Like Fools” “your favorite new song about heartbreak,” while the music video for the song was an official selection at seven International film festivals, winning “Best Music Video of 2016” at the Reel Teel Film Festival. No Depression called her debut, “a confessional record, but one that is very well handled, never straying into the over-dramatic, but instead honing in on a sound which is personal, powerful, and, at times, perfect.”
Following the success of her debut, Lizzie appeared on the cover of the Riverfront Times as one of ‘six artists to watch in 2015.’ From there, Lizzie composed the music for the title track(“Vida Cafeinada”) of the documentary feature film Caffeinated. The song is sung in English and Spanish, and features lyrics written by her father, John Schranck. On their first father-daughter collaboration, they set out to write a song that would stand as a reflection of the agricultural and social underpinnings of that wonderful daily tradition.
In the fall of 2015, Lizzie produced and self-released her rendition of Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box.” It was around that time that she met Grammy-award winning producer Sheldon Gomberg (Ben Harper, Ryan Adams, Rickie Lee Jones) and began work her song “Love Again” which was the product of another familial collaboration, this time with her elder brother, John Schranck Jr., who is responsible for the song’s lush, orchestral arrangements. The two began sending Sheldon iphone demos in November of 2015 with the intention of recording the song at his Carriage House Studios (LA) in January of 2016, a pit stop on her way to her new home in the Pacific Northwest.
In April of that year, “Love Again” became Lizzie’s fourth self-release. “I think we've created something truly unique: a song that defies genre by crossing over into pop, classical, jazz, and indie," Weber said, "After recording it, we realized we had sort of unintentionally written something that evokes the lush, California sound of the '70s, and were thrilled by its picturesque imagery. The song feels acoustic and intimate thanks to Sheldon's touch with production, but epic and worldly with its arrangements — a difficult but really gratifying balance to strike."