Name: Izzy Oram Brown
Nationality: American
Occupation: Singer, songwriter, guitarist
Current release: Izzy Oram Brown's new album What I Want is out now.
Hometown Recommendation: I would recommend visiting Mano’s Pizzeria in Ridgewood, Queens. I think this is the best pizza in NYC which is saying something and I am seriously blessed to have it down the street from my apartment. Incredible vibe in there and you must get the Minucci slice with Italian sausage, pepperoni, and hot honey. I am writing this from on tour and now I am dreaming of this pizza …
Things that I am passionate about but rarely get to talk about: I love baseball, specifically the Boston Red Sox from Massachusetts, the state I grew up in. When I was a kid, I used to read the scores and the standings in the newspaper every morning before I went to school. Fenway park is one of the best places one earth in my opinion! The Red Sox are currently having a historic season, in which they started off horribly and have come back to be one of the best teams in baseball. I am eagerly paying attention to see if this hot streak can continue into a legitimate playoff run …

If you enjoyed this Izzy Oram Brown interview and would like to stay up to date with her music, visit her official homepage. She is also on Instagram, and bandcamp.



Do you think that some of your earliest musical experiences planted a seed for your interest in writing lyrics or poetry? How and when did you start writing?

When I first started playing music, I wanted to learn songs that I could sing. In those early years it was a lot of classic 70s folk like Joni Mitchell, Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor and I would learn the guitar parts as well as the words and melodies, so I could play the songs.

Around high school though, I got really into guitar and sort of focused my musical practice around that and was studying jazz and country music and more technical aspects of the instrument. My interest in playing songs took more of a backseat, but I always listened to a lot of music with words and was drawn to artists with lyrics that resonated with me.

It wasn’t until my early 20s, when I was a little lost musically, that I decided to return to my roots with singing and began actually writing my own songs. And suddenly it clicked, in that I didn’t only want to be a proficient guitar player, but also a songwriter. Writing and performing my own music is now an essential part of my musical identity.

Entering new worlds and escapism through music and literature have always exerted a very strong pull on me. What do you think you are drawn to most when it comes to writing?

I think mostly, I’m drawn to the process of writing to express myself. I’m a big thinker and feeler and I use my personal experiences for a lot of my lyrics.

For this last record, I focused on trying to be as pared down as possible, which often ended up feeling quite vulnerable. I intentionally stripped away a lot of descriptors or abstract language and tried to leave very little up to interpretation, challenging myself to find the most obvious way to get at what I wanted to say.

This started with my song “What I Want”. I wrote it relatively quickly and ended up just essentially making a list for the lyrics which I didn’t realize one is “allowed to do”.



Of course, a writer can do whatever they want, but it was a breakthrough moment for me when I realized it was empowering to say exactly what I was thinking and feeling.

What were some of the artists and albums which inspired you early on purely on the strength of their lyrics? What moves you in the lyrics of other artists?

Charlie XCX has inspired me a lot with her lyrics. She has a very direct way of saying things, as if you were inside her brain or her diary.

Her song “forever” off the record how i’'m feeling now was a direct inspiration for my song “Love U the Same”.



I felt it was the first time I’d heard someone convey so obviously the feeling of still loving someone in some way even if they aren’t in your life.

That resonated with me and I wanted to find a way to write about that too.

Have there been song lyrics which actually made you change (aspects of)your life? If so, what do you think, leant them that power?

“I Dream A Highway” by Gillian Welch has lyrics that changed my life for sure. I can remember distinctly when I first heard that song - a guitar teacher I had while living in Nashville showed it to me and I was completely blown away.



The way the words and the melody and her voice and the guitar playing all work together is mesmerizing. It’s such a long song, so simple and full of repetition yet completely compelling. You can just get lost in it, a complete world of its own.

It taught me that things don’t have to be complex to be meaningful and the most ordinary things can become beautiful if you put the right feeling in.

For a while, walking around and listening to this song was my pre-show ritual to remind me that whatever I have to share is enough.

What are areas/themes/topics that you keep returning to in your lyrics?

I write a lot about ambiguity and the in betweens of life. And I write a lot of questions and open-ended songs.

This shows up on my first record Mess. Even the title refers to the messiness that we often find ourselves caught up in.



On the most recent record, I get into this on the closing track “I Believe” which is really about contradiction.



I was thinking about all the different ways that people can make their lives and all the funny twists and turns in how things work out. And how important it is to lean into this and trust in the unknown as you figure things out.

Of course, I also wrote a ton about “what I want”. For this body of work, the idea of wanting became an all encompassing concept that represented me thinking about and navigating how I’d like to be both in the world and towards myself and others.

On the basis of a piece off What I Want , tell me about how the lyrics grew into their final form and what points of consideration were.

“Love U the Same” is one of my favorite lyrical moments of the record. Writing this song was a really moving experience for me actually, more so than others.



It’s a piece that reflects on a relationship with unconditional love and compassion for both people rather than hurt and anger.

There was a time when I couldn’t look back on this specific relationship without bitterness and I was writing songs from that place (“Go On” is an example - a years earlier and much more pissed off take). But with “Love U the Same” I accessed a new sense of acceptance.



I think while I was writing it, I started to think about really simple and obvious things that I wanted to say to the person and used them as the lyrics.

Statements like “I tried my best” and “You didn’t mean to go and hurt me” and “I forgive you” became the bones of the song and by singing them over and over I began to believe them.

Do you tend to start writing with what will be the first line of the finished lyrics? The chorus? At a random point? What are the words that set the process in motion?

On this record, I actually started with the title for a bunch of the songs. I would come up with a phrase or set of words that seemed dramatic enough (I was going for high drama with this album) and that would be a great jumping off point.

This was the case with “If I’m Not Made for a Love” and also “What is Wanting Worth”. Maybe a few others as well. I keep note of words and phrases that catch me in my daily life and sometimes those go on to work themselves into future songs.

Otherwise, my writing process is generally with the guitar first and I’ll sing the melody over and over, trying to find words that fit and flow well. I’m often pretty clear on sort of choosing a subject or something I want to write about for a song and building from there.

I'd love to know how you think the meaning or effect of an individual song is enhanced, clarified or possibly contradicted by the EPs, or albums it is part of. Does the song, for example, need to be consistent with the larger whole?

I definitely don’t think a song needs to be consistent with its larger body of work and there are many records I love that don’t have a clear through line. However, I tend to really lean into fitting songs into a bigger picture.

What I Want is essentially a concept album with all the songs dealing with different aspects of a common theme. It’s also sequenced very intentionally with a beginning, middle and end. It’s meant to be listened to in order and experienced as a whole.

I think this gives the songs more power and impact than they might have on their own. And I also loved crafting the album in this way, because it pushed me to write some new kinds of songs that I might not otherwise have, because I felt they would fit a specific slot on the record.