Elizabeth Boland — professionally known by her middle name, Lowell — is sitting in a tiny Toronto studio. The wood-panelled room may be small, but it’s where she’s crafted many of her hits, and it shows.
In front of her sit both a Juno and a framed gold record for The Beaches’ Blame My Ex, the album she co-produced and the hit track, Blame Brett, which she co-wrote. To her right is a Wurlitzer electric piano, which, she remarks, is just like the one she brought on tour for one of her three critically acclaimed albums.
To her left is a PR person, bashfully telling the story about the time her five-year-old asked Lowell what Beyoncé smells like (the answer was rather unsurprising: she smells great).
And in her lap is a guitar, currently being used to play the track that captured that kid’s attention, no less the rest of the world: Texas Hold ‘Em. The genre-melding soul/R&B/folk/country song helped launch country back into the pop culture stratosphere, Beyoncé finally onto the Grammys’ stage for album of the year, and a number of Canadians onto Canada’s relatively equivalent stage this March.
“I did joke that, you know, if they didn’t make this category this year, I was going to be mad,” Lowell says of the new non-performing songwriter category at the Junos.
She’s up for it this year for co-writing both Cowboy Carter‘s Texas Hold ‘Em and Bodyguard (as well as for co-writing The Beaches song Takes One to Know One). That nomination came shortly after she shared two Grammy nominations with Beyoncé for best song and best country song.
“Because if I got a Grammy [nomination] ahead of getting a Juno, that would be pretty bad. You know?”
In her ‘big sister era’
The half-serious barb showcases the typical temperament of Lowell, a woman whose feminist, self-possessed lyrics mixed with occasionally heartrending, mournful arrangements have come to colour some of the biggest songs in pop music. Those qualities are likely drawn from life experiences: a driven confidence paired with natural sensitivities (she has both perfect pitch and synesthesia, a neurological condition that is not uncommon among artists) pushed her toward music in a family of non-musicians.
Then dropping out of a stuffy classical music program, years of intermittent, unreliable and unrewarding work outside of the industry — and a critically lauded but commercially-stunted debut album — left her somewhat jaded.
Her experiences with these hardships have found their way into her music, guiding her to what she calls her current “big sister era.” It’s pushed her to protect and guide the songs and careers of musicians like Hailee Steinfeld and Madison Beer — Lowell wrote much of Steinfeld’s EP Half Written Story and helped write nearly all of Beer’s album Life Support. And she’s also developing the up and coming Nova Scotia artist Baby Nova.
When you’re in a room with her, you can’t help but notice that she has a bit of an iron-fist-in-a-velvet-glove sensibility. She’s kind and funny, but not the type to be sensitive about touchy issues.
When a side-conversation around a particularly prickly subject for music nerds comes up — whether learning music theory is all that important to crafting great songs — she doesn’t have to think hard for an answer.
While she’s more inclined to follow more contemporary, pop-oriented schools of thought than classical techniques when crafting songs, she still always has theory in mind. It means that while creators who have no knowledge of theory might need to rely on fleeting inspiration when they have off days, Lowell can fall back on her training to crank out something good enough to get to the next opportunity.
When it’s pointed out that some musicians feel that academic, theory-guided thinking gets in the way of an organic connection to the music, she finds it funny. People with that opinion on music, she says, probably don’t find themselves in working studios as often as she does.
“I’m a fighter. I love to just stir the pot a little bit,” she says later, laughing. “I always joke, like, ‘I’m not necessarily liked, but sometimes respected.’ ”
Bittersweet victories
It’s been a hard-fought-for respect. And though she presents her lack of Junos as a joke, there is a sad bit of truth there; it’s not bitterness, she’s quick to note, but something close. Because while she’s spent her decade-plus in the industry writing songs for big names like the Backstreet Boys, Charlie XCX, JoJo and Demi Lovato, Lowell’s own name has been slower to take hold.
When it comes to established performers, especially American ones, that’s more or less to be expected. But what was harder was seeing the Canadian artists she wrote for — Tate McRae, Bülow and yes, The Beaches — earning accolades and awards from their shared home country.
Bülow’s win at the 2019 Junos for the EP Damaged and its double-platinum single Not a Love Song is a particularly difficult memory for Lowell.
“It was bittersweet … being there, meant to celebrate about it, but not really being allowed to be celebrated for it,” Lowell says. Because, even while stressing the joy she felt for her collaborator, that moment highlighted the intractably tough ceiling Canadian songwriters often crash into.
“I co-wrote that whole EP with her and I did feel like, you know, all of the creators behind it needed to be rewarded, not just a couple of select people,” she says.
“So that was when I really started thinking about this category, and whether it needed to change.”
Songwriter Elizabeth Lowell Boland received two Grammy nominations for her contributions to the Beyoncé’s song “Texas Hold ‘Em”. The track has been nominated for song of the year and best country song.
Changing the game
That thinking translated first into a common strategy for Canadian songwriters — moving to L.A., where it seemed necessary to go to find work and recognition.
But after the move and steady success, her strategy changed. Instead of accepting the bleak prospects currently on offer for songwriters in Canada, she thought, why not work to change them?
“The way that Canada doesn’t embrace their own talent can be a little bit of a deterrent to sticking around,” she explains. “I went down there, but I think that it’s in coming back I’ve realized you can make more change. You can’t just run away from things all the time.”
Now, the category she’s championed for years finally exists. And its existence means that as fellow Canadians Shawn Everett and Jack Rochon compete for their work as producers on Cowboy Carter, she and her Canadian Texas Hold ‘Em co-writer Nathan Ferraro also get to head to Canada’s biggest night of music for their chance at a Juno.
To be fair, she already picked up Billboard Canada’s inaugural non-performing songwriter award last year. And if she wins at the Junos, she already has her (fingers crossed) speech planned out. Like this year’s Grammy-winner Amy Allen, who lamented that it’s only the third year of their non-performing songwriter award, she would acknowledge and thank all the songwriters who came before her.
But more than that, Lowell wants to keep fighting for songwriters who don’t want to flee south.
“My hope is for people to be able to stay here,” she says, while admitting that the competitive nature she learned in L.A. helped her back home. “I’m hoping I can bring that nature here, bring up talent here … so that people, at least, don’t have to go so early to find their way, you know?”
