Ella Red Is Not Okay (In the Best Way) — Inside Her Colorado Springs Tour Stop

The 22-year-old alt-pop it girl pulled up to The Black Sheep for date four of leg two of her IT’S NOT REAL tour, and let us just say — the girlies were NOT ready. We talked healing through heartbreak anthems, writing lyrics on the back of an algebra test (relatable), and why “Aphrodite” turns her into a puddle every single night.

Girl Has Healed (And She Wants You to Know It)

Here’s the thing about IT’S NOT REAL — it’s an album that was clearly written in the depths of a spiral. But now that it’s out and she’s performing it every night, something’s shifted.

“As artists, we’re often writing to cope with ways that we’re currently feeling and trying to understand ourselves,” she explains. “And after writing those, I kind of healed from those things that were going on — like ‘We’re All Going to Die,’ ‘Ball and Chain,’ ‘It’s Not Real.’ These very existential songs. I was very in my head. And now I’m feeling so much more healed from all of that.” A glow-up arc, but make it discography.

And then there’s the song she didn’t see coming. “Also, you know, songs that I didn’t know would impact fans the way that they did — like ‘Aphrodite.’ That one’s become a massive one for my fans to connect with. And that one, I’m so excited to play tonight.”

The “Aphrodite” Cry-Fest, Explained

Ask her what it’s actually like on stage during “Aphrodite” and you can hear her get a little softer, a little more in it.

“It’s such an electric, spiritual feeling,” she says. “I keep my eyes closed a lot of the songs so I could just feel it as much as possible — because the more that I hone in on the feeling, the more that I know they are too. But it brings me to tears whenever I see them in the audience crying, sobbing, just singing these words with me. And there have been multiple times where I’ve gotten offstage to get into the crowd and hug them — because how can I not, whenever they’re sobbing in front of me? How could I not go to them?”

Yeah, she’s cried on stage. Multiple times. “There have been multiple times where everyone in the audience puts their phone light up and starts waving it, and seeing that is different from just a few faces — because whenever you see something like that, you see an entire room of people connecting to this one thing and agreeing to do this one thing. And so that’s brought me to tears multiple times.” A whole room, one song, zero dry eyes. Iconic, genuinely.

The Title That Almost Wasn’t

Plot twist: IT’S NOT REAL almost had a completely different name. “The only other idea I had for it was ‘I’ll Weave the Spider String,’ which is a lyric from my song ‘Spider String,'” she says. But the room wasn’t feeling it. “The other people I was consulting weren’t a huge fan of it. They were like, let’s keep workshopping it, let’s keep thinking about it. And I agreed — I was like, okay, maybe that’s a little long. Maybe I need something a little more, like, slammy.”

Enter the title track. “And I was like, oh, this perfectly encompasses the entire album as a whole. So that’s how we ended up landing on ‘It’s Not Real.'”

She Wrote It in High School. On the Back of an Algebra Test.

We asked which song went through the most glow-ups from first draft to final version, and honestly the answer is unhinged in the best way.

“I’m trying to think through all of the songs on the album now,” she says, working through the options — some songs, like “Predator,” came together in twenty minutes, so those were easy to rule out. But the title track? A whole journey.

“It’s not real — because those verses I actually wrote when I was in high school, on the back of an algebra test,” she says. “I went through so many versions of that song when I was in high school trying to figure out how to make this song work, because it was very spoken word, and I didn’t know what to do with it.”

Years later, digging those verses back up, it finally clicked. “I had never gotten anything that felt right whenever I was trying to write a chorus to it,” she says. “But I thought — wow, like, all these years later, what if it was a conversation between my current self and my high school self? So that’s what ‘It’s Not Real’ became — a conversation between my current self, saying ‘it’s not real,’ the healed version that had gone through all of those ‘We’re All Going to Die,’ ‘Ball and Chain’ thoughts, and saying that to that younger self that was panicking, going, oh my god, none of this matters, everything’s we’re all going to die, everything’s going to end.” A literal decade-long glow up, canon.

Debut Album… or Season Finale?

Debut albums usually get treated like an artist’s whole origin story. Ella’s take is a little more layered. “That’s a great question,” she says. “I feel like it is both. It is both an introduction and also a chapter closing. I was experimenting a lot, still trying to find myself and my sound and what I like with that album.”

Big news: album two is already written and dropping later this year. “That one feels very different, in that I wanted to continue experimenting. So there are a bunch of different types of songs on that. I always say — whenever you’re listening to my music, don’t hit shuffle, listen top to bottom — because otherwise, especially with this next album, you’re gonna get thrown around a lot.” So, PSA: no shuffle. She said what she said.

And the lore-brained among us will love this — she traces it straight back to video games. “I love doing lore with my music, because I thought that was so cool in video games growing up. I would watch so many video games, and whenever they had really intense lore, I thought that was just the coolest thing. So I always wanted to do that with my music.” As for where that leaves this era: “In the sense that that first album, the chapter is closing, it still continues the story with the next album, and I still want to continue telling that story — of this winding road down what is real and what is not real.” So yes, it’s giving cinematic universe. We’re locked in.

How the Songs Actually Get Made

“It really just depends on the song,” she says of her process — and the album backs that up completely.

“He Asked For It” started with one unhinged, iconic lyric. “It started with, I squished his head like a very wood pop between my thumbs,” she says. “And I just kind of, you know, went into a flow state when I finished writing that verse. I didn’t have a melody for it at first, but I decided I needed to add one, and that’s how the melody came to be.”

“I Like You Best” flipped the script completely. “I wrote the baseline for that one first, before I wrote anything. And then the lyrics came second, because we were like — what’s a really punchy, in-your-face line that’s going to make you question whether or not I’m allowed to say it? And that was how ‘I Like You Best’ came to be.”

And “Aphrodite” — the one that makes an entire room cry — came together all at once. “I sat down at the piano and I started playing this one note over and over again, and then — Aphrodite, hear my plea. That was where Aphrodite came from. So it really just depends in the moment.”

If You’re Going Through It Right Now, This One’s for You

We asked what she’d want someone going through their own ending — a breakup, a loss, letting go of an old version of themselves — to take away from her music. She actually paused on this one. “That’s such an important question, and I haven’t asked that one before. What would they take from my music, going through an ending themselves?”

Then: “I would want them to take from my music that they are not alone in this, and that I have written songs specifically for them, to encapsulate exactly how they feel in that moment. I write so that the feelings that they don’t know how to put words to will end up in these songs. Because what happens whenever I play a show like this is that these songs become more than just what someone is listening to in the background — it becomes something tangible and something real, and they can connect to all of these people in this room who all have felt the exact same thing, whether it’s grief, whether it’s a breakup. Especially with ‘We’re All Going to Die’ — just grieving their own deaths that are going to happen one day. We all get to scream those lyrics together and have those real moments, which is why live shows are so important to me — it really creates something tangible for them to hang on to.” Cathartic screaming as a communal activity. We fully support this.

Playing these songs every night has changed things for her, too. “Even since I wrote them, I knew what specific feelings they would create. But as I’m promoting them, they kind of lose some of that feeling for me, because I’m just talking about them over and over and over again. But whenever I do these at shows, it’s their first time hearing it live. It’s my, you know, thousandth time performing it, but it’s their first time. And so they still have all the light in their eyes and the energy, and I just absorb that from them — I’m like, oh, we’re having this moment together.”

Some songs still surprise her live. “There were a few songs that I didn’t know how would be taken. Like, I didn’t realize ‘Funeral’ would be such a song that everyone would want to dance to and scream. And then I performed it live and I was like, wow, people are really getting into this. So that became one too. But songs like ‘Aphrodite’ and ‘We’re All Going to Die,’ I knew what kind of feelings those would have in a live performance.” A song called “Funeral” turning into a full-on dance moment is genuinely such an Ella Red thing to happen.

The Beginnings-and-Endings Thing, Explained

IT’S NOT REAL is basically obsessed with beginnings and endings from front to back — and it turns out that wasn’t fully a plan. “I think a little of both,” she says. “It was both something that I noticed was a pattern, but at the same time, that was how I was feeling so much — with ‘Parasite,’ ‘Ball and Chain,’ ‘We’re All Going to Die,’ ‘It’s Not Real.’ Just all of them. I felt such intense, intense emotions and swirling feelings in my head and not knowing what to do with them. And I knew that other people would feel that too.”

That realization ended up reframing the entire project for her. “Whenever I was writing these, it really just became a question of — who am I really writing for? Is it so much for me, or is it for them? Is it this big, encompassing thing of humanity as a whole? And that was where, like, ‘Ball and Chain’ leans into the idea of humanity repeating the same mistakes over and over again. So it really started to become something bigger than I initially thought it was. I initially started creating very selfishly, just for me. But as I wrote more, it was — I’m creating something for humanity as a whole.” From “just venting in my room” to “accidentally writing humanity’s group therapy session.” Truly an arc.

Ella Red performed at The Black Sheep in Colorado Springs, the fourth date of part two of her debut headlining tour behind IT’S NOT REAL. Her second album is expected to begin releasing later this year — no shuffle allowed.