Portland-based musician 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.

Her debut album 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.”