“I love having muses in my life,” 27-year-old pianist and singer Eliana Glass told Tone Glow in an April interview about the making of E. “You’re inspired by them, and some element of them is embalmed in the music forever.” Her new album showcases the way simple choices in one person’s artistic practice can shimmer with the light of many past connections. Glass has a distinctive voice—mellow, sinewy, and down to earth, with an excitable undercurrent that demonstrates her enthusiasm for singing as a craft. She uses the methodical and malleable tools of vocal jazz to explore the ways other people’s lives reverberate throughout our own—via their songs, their words, or merely their presences.
The album’s reverence for the various relationships that inspired it is most evident in its constellation of musical reference points, both explicit and tangential. Glass performs works by Carla Bley, Karin Krog (“Sing Me Softly the Blues”), and Annette Peacock (“Dreams”), and on “Song for Emahoy” channels the gentle, chromatic contemplation of the Ethiopian nun and pianist Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru. The haunting austerity of Glass’ arrangements on songs like “All My Life,” and her attention to the emotional contours of each syllable, sometimes position her as a Gen Z Patty Waters of sorts. Glass followed an unconventional path through her musical education, more interested in the rule-breaking freedom of Nina Simone or Elizabeth Fraser than the typical playbook for a vocal jazz student. That curiosity is palpable across E, which avoids any singular mode to instead chase the fun of discovery, adaptation, and homage. Even a more straightforward number like “On the Way Down,” co-written with Eliana’s brother Costa, radiates a generous spirit, like it belongs in an intimate singalong rather than cooped up in a solo album. All kinds of people inhabit these songs.
Glass foregrounds her process on E, making it feel circular, as if a full life is lived within the album’s tracklist; when she finds her way to the same words or chord progressions on multiple songs, it feels like stretching a muscle or relapsing into an old habit. The restraint of the instrumentation (mostly just piano, bass, and drums), despite the album’s formal range, means that any small shift in the spectral atmosphere can suggest something profound. An added layer of field recordings on the eerie "Dreams" recalls those Proustian early mornings when everything about the world seems momentarily novel, indelible, and strange. Glass is a nostalgist, in a sense, but the past she reaches for isn’t locked away. As you familiarize yourself with her tendencies as an improviser, you find yourself achingly waiting for her to resolve each phrase on her piano: feeling, thinking, and remembering alongside her, just as she does in turn alongside her own muses.
E can be gut-wrenching one moment and thought-provoking the next. On “Human Dust,” Glass performs a sing-speak rendition of conceptual artist Agnes Denes’ piece, a lengthy text describing the life, family, and accomplishments of a dead man exhibited alongside his calcified remains. The song is funny and hypnotic—not only because of its odd marriage of form and content, which makes her voice linger on its quirks, but because anyone with a voracious musical upbringing will relate to the compulsion to sing from a museum plaque (or, say, a cereal box) just because you can. “I memorized it, too,” Glass said of Denes’ text, which she set to an improvised melody. “This life [in the text] should be internalized so that the facts are somewhere in me.” She makes interpreting other people’s art and its effects on our souls (an infamously inscrutable ordeal) seem as natural and essential as breathing.
The vicarious, working-through-it angle of Glass’ music gives it a nerdier energy than the self-contained mystique of her older inspirations; magic can look more mundane once you focus on what’s behind the curtain. Mumbly imagist exercises like “Solid Stone,” while thoughtful enough, feel musically unobtrusive, not quite able to fill the vast inner world the album summons. But Glass’ recordings have tactile nuances that a more buttoned-up style couldn’t access. “Good Friends Call Me E” is the album’s narrative center, a quivering rumination on childhood attachments, breakups, and personal growth. The music sounds ageless, but her perspective as a singer-songwriter—the way she scrapes up an identity from vulnerable, discursive details (“good friends call me E like my dad does”), letting the melody drain out of her, meander, and repeat, like she’s venting to someone close—is subtly contemporary. She manages the awkward interval between the title’s consecutive “E” vowel sounds (“me-E”) with a willfulness that shapes her first initial into an emblem.
The song strikes a rich emotional vein for a person in their 20s: an attitude of hard-won maturity from someone still young enough to appreciate seismic changes in their self-concept with each passing year. “I’ve cried too much, and I can’t cry no more,” she sings. A line like this is never strictly true—there’s always more crying to do—but it can feel true, and Glass is skillful at isolating the moments that overwhelm her, noticing right when a dark cloud engulfing her is ready to dissipate into new, surprising clarity. When she reprises “Good Friends Call Me E” as the album’s closer, it’s looser and lighter. You’ll pick up on the different routes she traverses through the lyrics and wonder which friends she might be singing about this time. Her wide-eyed study of her improvised musical tradition makes an ideal conduit for soul-searching. It’s a process of always reinventing the wheel, making unpredictable mistakes until you learn to predict them—just like growing up.
