Today, Portland-based musician Mary Eliza announces her debut album, Spider, with the surprising, devastating single “Porcelain.” In collaboration with Preston Cochran (Lucy Dacus, Illuminati Hotties) and Jake Finch (boygenius, Ashe, Suki Waterhouse) at Trace Horse Studios in Nashville, she turns inward to explore the realities of her chronic illnesses. Listen to “Porcelain” here and preseave Spider, out on Jan 17, 2025, here.

While writing the record, Mary Eliza listened to a lot of Mali Velasquez’s new record I’m Green, Big Thief’s Masterpiece, Mitski’s The Land is Inhospitable and so are we, and Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot; you can hear each bit and piece that resonated from within the ever-unpredictable turns throughout Spider – a record intended to surprise. That is, in part, because life for Mary Eliza must be taken moment by moment, given the struggle with a mystery illness she’s contended with since she was 4 years old. She only got the full diagnosis this year: a heart disorder called POTS, a connective tissue disorder called hEDS, 4 tick-borne illnesses, Lyme Disease, and a rare blood disorder.

Needing to spend several hours per week in the hospital, every day is drastically different for her; “It has ended many relationships in my life and I’m sure it will continue to weed out fake friends. My anger and processing around this illness and the medical system as a whole has come out a lot in the making of this record, and it has felt like such a cathartic experience being able to create the soul scratching feeling that I experience in sound.”

You feel that catharsis immediately upon the opening of today’s single “Porcelain,” which rips into it with a cacophony of electric guitars and manic cymbal crashes, before dissipating into a bare acoustic strum and the gentle pulse of a snare.

Of “Porcelain,” Mary says, “Porcelain has surprised me from start to finish. I initially wrote it in the snowy, dark days when a relationship of mine was seeming to crumble right in front of me. It started out slow, and timid, as I hadn’t said any of it out loud yet. As the tenderness of the initial seed of song wore off and grew into strength, resilience, and frustration, it began to take new shape. This was a song that I felt really exploded in the studio. Preston really saw my vision and was able to help me execute it. This song encompasses a lot of growth for me, and I hold it close to my heart.”

Mary Eliza grew up building up a thick skin busking in the streets of San Francisco with her family band. Taking the train from Oakland, unpacking her fiddle after weekly traditional bluegrass jam sessions, Mary Eliza learned how to overcome a gravitation towards quietness at the age of six, and to insert her own melody, to tune into a group, and to find the shapes she could live in (musically and metaphorically).

These days she makes her keep teaching music (fiddle, ukulele, guitar, piano, singing, songwriting) to kids aged 5-12. She also recently put on a string of house shows, with proceeds going to to UNFPA, specifically to support pregnant women in Palestine with access to clean products and supplies for birth and hygiene; has spent a lot of time birding, writing “a couple of books” (casual), bike touring, skateboarding, and sniffing trees.

Spider is acutely observant, thoughtful, mindful, curious… a testament to the person Mary Eliza is. It is about love and quiet strength. It is about brokenness. It is about loudness in devotion to self and unabashed healing. Mary harvested each of these songs from a root that sits deep inside herself, a place that she has lived her whole life to nourish. In a tiny house in central Oregon, quieted by snow up to the window panes, the songs on this record came alive. Mary knew that she needed to sit with the overwhelming emotions of grief, acceptance, anger, and love, and let them warm in front of the fireplace and thaw. So she did just that. Spider is not only a demonstration of honesty, but it is also a movement towards slowness and unapologetic love. One of the last lines on the record sums it up when she sings, “I am a slow mover, dear, I’m gonna move slowly, I’m gonna be happy.”