On imperfect creative conditions

Elanor Moss grew up in a very creative, devoutly Catholic family, and began playing music at church events. Homeschooled through early youth, her parents put a real emphasis on nature, reading and music. Eventually leaving the faith, Moss started writing songs of her own in York as a student of English literature and playing open mics around the city. While at University she also discovered songwriting greats: Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, The Beatles. Shortly after graduation, Moss met producer Oli Deakin, who offered to record her first EP, “Citrus.” Her work with Deakin took her to New York City, where she began forging a sense of community. Between “Citrus” and her second EP, “Cosmic,” Moss toured with Christian Lee Hutson, Benjamin Francis Leftwich, and LYR, played one-off shows with Cassandra Jenkins, CMAT, and Sam Amidon, and performed at Pitchfork London, Green Man Festival, and Mosely Folk, among others. Elanor Moss released her debut album, The Knife, The Needle, on August 21, 2026 via Merge.

You’re trying to gear up for your second album.

Yes.

But we’re only at the dawn of LP #1.

That’s true.

How is that transition feeling for you, when in many ways LP #1 is just emerging in the world?

I think that I am really keen to find a way to not think about it too much. And it’s funny, because I feel like my creative process is so private. I struggle to even play the guitar if I’m working on something—and even my partner, who I love and knows me very well, if he walks into the room, it’s over for me. I’m like, “Okay, I have to stop now.” The things that ended up making up the body of work that is the album happened in such a secluded way. And I really needed the protection of seclusion and solitariness to let certain things emerge, and to be able to hear my own intuition. I really need a lot of silence. I can’t really listen to anything when I’m working on stuff in earnest. I go through periods of really being able to listen to stuff, but if I’m really trying to work through a song, then I can’t.

I feel like privacy and a sense of being completely alone was so important for me being able to make anything for album #1. The thing that is difficult about this part of it—and I’m sure you have your own experience of this, with the various albums you’ve put out—is it’s very safe when everything is just yours and it’s all secret and you’re doing it privately. And now my head is in a very different space. Now I am putting it out and I’m in a phase of talking about it, and presenting it, and being the opposite of private. Being very like, “Here I am. This is what I made. Come get it.” I find that visibility aspect of it really difficult to make work during. So much of the valuable work that went into the album was done at least in a kind of illusion of privacy. So I’m curious, moving into album #2 land, where I’m going to be touring most of the rest of the year and I’ll tour a lot of next year… I’m very much going to be in “being visible” land. I’m curious about how, in my practice, I can create the conditions to be able to keep working, even whilst I’m putting myself in situations that make me more visible—and how to not have that be completely destructive to a creative practice.

I’ve just been doing bits and bobs and nothing is really solidifying yet, which is fine. It’s very early explorations. I’m curious as to what my writing process is going to look like. What was your experience of that like when you did your first proper rounds of touring? Or did it not make a difference the amount of touring you were doing? Is it always a bit of a raw feeling of total exposure, and then feeling like, “Now I have to go and do something again that is vulnerable and private”?

It’s always changing. No period of tour will be the same. It’s easy to think that there’s a specific way that it’s going to go.

In my recent experience, being on tour takes up a lot of energy. But in my last year of touring, I was very pleasantly surprised that one of the advantages of being on tour, in terms of writing, is I’m living and breathing music every single day. My whole life is driven towards and by music. If I’m traveling with a band, they’re playing stuff in the van. And at night when I’m sleeping, even though I’m not sleeping enough, I’m dreaming melodies and I’m living and breathing music in a way that I’m not when I am what my friend Tam calls “a private citizen” again.

Private citizenship has its really beautiful aspects, too. Seeing your neighbors, seeing the everyday… the quotidian is the best for observation. Observation is such a big part of my writing. It helps me shape the way that I see the world. And when I’m on tour, experiencing so much all the time, going from one language to another in a matter of 24 hours, none of which are your own—it’s so much about exposing myself in all senses of the word, all while presenting myself to an audience.

My overall goals in life are to blur all the edges. So it’s really easy for me to assume that when I’m presenting myself, I cannot then have an internal process that is free from self-capture. But I’m trying to imagine a world where I can remember that “presenting” or performing is also an incredibly creative process, and it’s also in real time, and therefore not as threatening to my inner world. It’s a nice goal. But the fact is that when we’re on tour, sometimes we repeat things, including the way that we play a song or even sometimes how we introduce ourselves to an audience—partly because we’re conserving energy because it’s so exhausting. To generate any creative process does require a wellspring of energy. Maybe I need to have more energy when generating a creative process than I might in an average day.

I found that on my last European tour, when I was engaged so constantly with music, I would make sure that I had a way to record when I did have ideas. And one of those ideas is turning into a song on my next album. I remember writing it in a Swedish Airbnb somewhere, when my bandmates were in the other room, playing cards. Over the years I’ve shed some of the feelings of insecurity around being seen or heard in that vulnerable writing state.

Don’t put too much pressure on yourself to have the perfect scenario. That’s a perfectionist trap. I think loosening our grip all around is really important.

It’s easier to be really rigid about process than it is to just engage imperfectly in a flexible but flawed process. Rigidity is unhelpful, and I do think it’s a perfectionist tendency. I’m very wary of it in myself—in particular, the difficulty that I have writing when I feel like other people can perceive me. Moving into album #2, I think a lot of the work that I’m going to be doing is finding ways to make my internal structures more robust in a way that actually provides more flexibility and actually allows me to be like, “You know what? You can just write in the van when there’s five other people with you. You just have your headphones in, and you can listen to the voice note that you made yesterday and write some lyrics to it.” You can do that for 10 minutes, and that’s writing. You don’t need it to be this kind of sanctified space that is “just right” so that you can do the thing.

Yeah. And you can just think of it as, “This is the writing that I’m doing in the van,” versus “This is LP #2.” I will never forget a piece of advice that someone gave me, that David Berman gave them, which was just to write a line every single day.

Love. Love that.

And at the end of the year, you have 365 lines at least, and some of them will go together in ways you never expected. But also allow yourself to stare out the window, because that’s really important… I’ve found tour is often stressful, and I’m finding that writing has been my sanctuary in a way that it’s never been before. If I’m feeling anxious or I’m waiting to hear back from someone, I can ask, “What if I just turn my attention to writing?” I’m quickly lost in writing, in a way that it’s taking the pressure off of whatever I was feeling stressed out about. All of a sudden I have all this energy that needs to be put somewhere.

I also think it’s energizing to do that. It gives back. So if you put in the little input of energy that you need in order to muster the concentration to write when you’re tired, and you’re on tour, and there’s lots of demands on you, and you’ve not slept—actually, it will give you energy back. It’s very difficult to find sources of energy when you’re on tour. The normal resources that you have aren’t there. You can’t stay fit, and it’s much harder to eat well, and you’re definitely not sleeping well, and your body is taking a big hit from being scrunched up in the van for eight or nine hours or more… Finding those things that actually feel replenishing is so important.

The other thing that I’m curious about, for you, is related to something I read when I was younger and just starting to work on my first album. Artists would talk about what it feels like to sing the same songs every day and embody music that you’ve written in the past that might exude a certain feeling. By the end of a tour or a touring cycle, I’m very aware of the kind of spells I’m casting every single night, over and over again. It’s a true example of neurons that fire together, wire together. It’s a really externalized version of that. I think we need to choose wisely when we decide to broadcast our music.

It’s so interesting. It’s such a strange process. I have already toured this album as a support act a bunch of times now. Last year I did two European tours, two UK tours opening for some bands, and I played album songs. The album’s only half an hour long, and I had a half an hour set. Immediately I could tell where the desire was locating itself within me and what it was orienting itself around in the body of work that I was performing every night.

There were certain moments in the set that felt cathartic and energizing. Those were the areas where I was like, “I think there’s maybe more work here that I can go deeper and further into, and push more into this corner,” and where I can do things that I’m not quite doing yet that will be really energizing to play live and to perform live. And then there are definitely moments in the set that I’m like, “I loved that song at the start of this tour and now I find it really heavy.”

I guess you’re describing the somatic impact that performance has on the performer. My partner is an actor, and this is something we talk about quite a lot. In some ways there isn’t much difference between performing as a singer-songwriter and performing as an actor. They’re similar things. In acting they talk about how when someone is pretending to feel an emotion on stage, it fires all the same things in your brain, and physiologically, as if you were actually feeling that feeling. That’s the mechanism behind what makes acting convincing: in the moment, the body doesn’t know the difference between reality and unreality.

As an audience member, it’s interesting to experience that, and as a person on stage, I’m always finding an awkward balance between being very candid and also sometimes needing to protect that precious reserve of creative energy.

There is a big cost to the thing that you do on stage, whether you’re an actor or whether you’re a songwriter performing your own work. You’ve talked about it as spell casting, and I really agree with that. It requires a lot of energy to cast a spell, and you’re also holding everybody in that. For however long you’re on stage, you’re in this kind of social contract where, for that time, it’s your job to hold everyone and to create a kind of container for a collective experience. Regardless of whether your songs are happy, or sad, or something in between, I think that’s a massive endeavor. No matter how much you might lose yourself in the performance, you never lose a relationship with the audience.

If the performer is having a difficult time on stage, everyone else feels it. It’s a nervous system thing. You definitely have to find some way of centering yourself and having things come from there. It works in this kind of opposite way to what you would think. It’s like you were saying, if you start worrying about the audience and whether they’re having a good time, you will have a bad time and then everyone will have a bad time. So you actually have to find a way to overcome that fear of people having a bad time.

That’s something I also learned from touring. I became more comfortable, to the extent that I couldn’t wait to feel the energy of a room full of people. Which was a thing I was really shocked by, because I had very debilitating stage fright as a kid. I think stage fright is really just feeling everyone’s energy through you. It’s a very natural thing.

Yeah, totally.

When I learned how to channel it, it felt like surfing. The first time I stood up on the board, I was like, “Oh my god, I get it. I get why people will be out here all day looking for the next wave.” Which is how it felt when I started to really enjoy performing. I couldn’t wait to do it every night. But it took a long time. And the only way to get better at it is, of course, by doing it.

And working through the awkward phase of it being really horrible. It’s interesting that you used to have stage fright. I used to have stage fright, and I used to shake, and it would mean that I couldn’t play the chords properly, and then my singing would go all funny.

Oh, that sounds so familiar.

It’s really difficult to get through the performance when things are that bad.

Yeah, and your fingers are sweating and the fret board is all…

All slippery.

It’s so weird up there sometimes… Do you want to just do a fun game and then we can decide if we want it to be published or not?

Yeah.

Do you want to do: What’s the last lyric you wrote down in your Notes app?

I knew you were going to say something like that.

Mine are so crazy sometimes, so I ask you this not knowing.

[scrolling] I have a set list here. I have a draft of a message I needed to send someone that I was worried about. Someone’s email, the to do list…

[also scrolling] I found the one that I wrote last, it’s kind of cringe but it’s kind of okay.

Okay. I have a kind of cringe, kind of okay one too that is the most recent lyric.

Do you want to go first?

No.

Okay. I’m writing about a friend. It’s kind of funny because it’s also what we’re talking about: “When I lost my spark, you said this world needed me like a forest needs biodiversity.”

I love that, and it even rhymes.

Of course it does. All of my voice notes rhyme. I can’t help myself. But that’s the last thing I wrote. And someone did say that to me, and it did make me feel good.

That’s really nice. Mine’s really bad. Mine is not very optimistic, either. Mine is called “You Have Not Been Paying Attention.” Oh, I don’t know… Okay, this is the second to last one. This is less un-optimistic. And in the spirit of songs being incantations, I don’t want to send negativity out into everything. I wrote this when I was upstairs trying to write and not writing, and then I was like, I need to write, so I’m going to write what’s happening: “I go upstairs to try and write, but find I cannot. There is no rising image like a mirage in the desert. No lamppost in the snowy woods that draws me to it. Only you, humming and playing downstairs.”

I love that.

It’s a little cringe. It’s a little cringe, but we’re allowed to be a little cringe.

I love it. It has that beautiful feeling to it. Someone recently said to me that most of writing is writer’s block.

So true.

I think we’ve all heard it in one way or another, and we all accept that it’s part of the process. But to reframe it as most of writing is writer’s block is really helpful to stay in the saddle.

Me and my friends say to one another all the time, “Just hold your nerve.” A lot of this is just holding your nerve and not letting the fact that writer’s block may be the largest constant in your practice throw you. It’s all part of it. It’s never going to just be easy.