Cellar Sessions: EZI - Afraid Of The Dark January 16th, 2018 City Winery New York

EZI sits down for a One On One Session at City Winery New York on January 16th, 2018. Watch the full session here: https://youtu.be/j0JokUYszeA For more info visit: http://eziofficial.com Audio & Video by: Ehud Lazin audio mixing by: Joe Ulmer.

Setlist:

Redemption

Afraid Of The Dark

anxious.

“Damn, I haven’t washed my hair for days,” begins pop songstress EZI on “REDEMPTION,” the first single from her forthcoming debut EP, “Another day I’m feeling lost.” Over a pulsing, synthdriven

beat, the 21-year-old wastes no time getting real with her listeners: “Guess I’m an emotional wreck now,” she sings before the chorus, “Feel another letdown / Sometimes I wish I could escape / I guess it’s just what I got,” she finishes, as an infectious, danceable beat drops. Off to the races. If any song were an ideal introduction to the real EZI “REDEMPTION” would be it. The Long Island, New York native—and the first signee to Steve Madden’s label, 5Towns Records—wrote the song in August 2016, during one of the lowest points in her life. “I’ve always struggled with depression,” EZI says. “I’m a very emotional person. [When I wrote “REDEMPTION”], I was living alone in Hollywood, my schedule was all over the place, I was

going through some stuff personally … but more than that, I don’t even know what triggered it—I was honestly so lost, so detached, so removed from myself. Most people actually think [the song] is about a relationship [with another person], but it’s actually about the relationship I have with myself. You wake up loving yourself, you wake up hating yourself, [or] being upset or disappointed. The whole EP, really, is about me; the most complicated relationship I’ve ever been in is the one I have with myself.”

As EZI says, at the core of her five-song EP (comprised of the dark dance-pop tracks “REDEMPTION,” “Sober with You,” “Anxious,” Dancing in a Room,” and “Afraid of the Dark”) is the singer’s relationship with herself—a relationship she’s cultivated over the years she spent traveling to-and-from auditions in New York City, or studying her various crafts. A firstgeneration American, EZI’s parents both immigrated to the United States from Moscow, Russia; the family ultimately settled in the Great Neck neighborhood of Long Island. Growing up, EZI’s parents both worked full-time—her father as a violin teacher and her mother as a nurse—so she spent much of her time solo. “When kids were outside in the summertime doing kid stuff,” she says, “I’d be looking up what an acting resume looked like. Or I was making Hannah Montana covers on [Apple’s] Garageband, cutting [tracks] up and editing them, sneaking into my sister’s room using her computer.” However, though EZI always loved writing and singing, her drive to

pursue music seriously solidified at age 16, after her first experience collaborating with a producer in New York: “[I discovered], I can’t wait around for someone to show me [how do to do this],” she says of that time. “I realized need to do this for myself. “

Now at age 22, EZI’s debut EP isn’t just vibey and vulnerable; it conveys the major lesson taking center stage in her life right now. “Honestly, I think ‘REDEMPTION’ was the first time I

admitted to myself, like, ‘No, I struggle, and I’m going to write about it because it’s the only thing I can think about right now. Now that i’m starting to peel back [the layers] and not [pretend to be

“okay”] as much, I’m always sort of self-conscious—that I’m like, wait, are [people] going to think I’m crazy? Are they going to think I’m difficult to work with? But I constantly remind myself, ‘No.

You’re going to say what you want and you are going to act how you want because you can.’