Welcome To West Feldwood: Ellie Bleach introduces the world of her EP
‘Action!’ you can almost hear Ellie Bleach start as her latest music project begins. Or maybe that introductory sound should be train tracks or car breaks, pulling you up and dropping you in the middle of nowhere by a big sign that reads, “Welcome to West Feldwood”. Like a tour guide taking you from house to house, dive bar to disaster shelter, the town’s stories are revealed as Bleach transforms. She’s no longer a singer. Instead, she’s a failed rockstar, a doomsday prepper, a bored housewife, and a disillusioned lover. She’s a whole village.
“The idea came when I was about three or four songs into writing it. I think if you try to come up with the grand concept first, it’s too easy to get intimidated by it,” Bleach tells me of her upcoming EP, Now Leaving West Feldwood. “Instead, ideas tend to kind of lay dormant for years while I’m doing other things. I’ll come up with sounds and toplines, but it won’t be until a while later, when I’ve gathered some new micro obsession, like doomsday preppers in the case of ‘Pamela’, that the pieces will come together with a lyrical concept.”
In this way, Bleach’s writing feels more akin to scriptwriting or storyboarding rather than a lightning strike of inspiration or a big emotional outpouring like so many songs are born out of. “Ideas come to me and really flourish when I’m treating it like a piece of fiction,” she explains as she leans into character work and quite literally creates a world, or a town, in which they live. Her process feels more like a process of research, tone crafting, vibe checking and development of the roles she’ll play. It doesn’t feel like Bleach is the type of artist who sits down at her piano and lets her heart pour out. Instead, she feels like a director.
“I think my strengths lie in storytelling and I decided to go full throttle into that and let go of the expectation to write more confessional stuff,” she says. That shift came relatively early for Bleach who is still really an artist in her infancy. By the time her first EP, No Elegant Way To Sell Out, came out in 2022, her artistic world was already set with a clear sound and feel. From the red tones of the artwork to her dramatic yet provincial stories, there was something distinctly Lynchian about the release as she weaves a web of all her top influences into a kind of map.
“I imagine all my songs are set in the same universe, the Ellie Bleach universe, which I govern with certain rules like it’s always vague about what decade it is and it’s vague about whether it’s the UK or a kind of Americana setting,” she lays down the law. But when it came to this sophomore release, she wanted to zoom in further, ordering the cameras to get a closer crop. “I thought, why not really codify this universe and have it to be a specific place, a specific town? That’s where the idea of this story of a town and its residents came from. If it’s all in the same universe, I thought I’d really commit to it – commit to the bit!”
The town is West Feldwood, a place that Bleach imagines as “a more desolate version of commuter towns in Essex, the kind of places you pass and think ‘I can’t believe people live there’. But then imagine Essex in a kind of Americana desert where the suburbs feel like isolated pockets that are trapped in some older decade.” It’s a distinct image but a wholly imaginable one: Basildon by way of Nevada.
And what of the cast? “I think local celebrities are fascinating. It’s dying out more and more with the internet and the general growing lack of community, but every small town has these characters that everyone knows or families that own businesses that everyone gossips about,” she says.
Across the six songs, she introduces six distinct figures, adopting their voices for a spotlighting moment. ‘Pamela’ tells the story of a doomsday prepper who becomes the town laughing stock. ‘Lakehouse’ gives voice to “a privileged heiress”, while ‘Hottest Man Alive 1995’ Bleach imagines as “a middle-aged woman in an unhappy marriage so has this obsession with someone else”. ‘Whole Lotta Nothing’ feels like the audio equivalent of the town’s classified dating ads in the paper. ‘That’ll Show ‘Em’ is the sound of one man’s relatable disappointment as his dreams of stardom are burnt out in suburbia. The finale, ‘Now Leaving West Feldwood’, brings them together. “I’m just the narrator,” she says of her role.
In this way, she’s paying homage to one of the EP’s biggest inspirations. “It’s like a bleaker take on True Stories,” she laughs, referencing David Byrne’s own town anthology project. Another cinematic source of inspiration comes from Todd Solondz’s Happiness. Cinema, in fact, plays such an important role for Bleach that she’s compiled a handy list to study: “I am that person with a Letterboxd list with essential watches for the Ellie Bleach universe.” Other additions to the list ‘Ellie Bleach-Core’ include Welcome To The Dollhouse, Nashville, Serial Mom and a bunch of other small-town strange tales.
As for the music, she wanted the instrumentals to reflect that scene, too. Referencing Janis Ian’s Stars, as well as her love for other artists with a clear aesthetic like Lana Del Rey or Father John Misty, she has a clear vision for her sound, too. “You know, in Twin Peaks: The Return, when they had musical guests kind of play them out at the end of the episode, I sort of imagined the Ellie Bleach live bands to be that,” she says, “I wanted it to sound like we’re playing in a bar within this world too.”
She has a reading list too, as she cites Don DeLillo’s White Noise as an inspiration for ‘Pamela’, while Miranda July’s The First Bad Man directly influences ‘Hottest Man Alive 1995’ as she reads me the opening line: “I drove to the doctor’s office as if I was starring in a movie”. Weaving together post-modern texts of psychopaths, fear of death and a distinct interest in small lives and stories that usually fall down the couch cushions of history, it’s a project zooming in on the weirdness in seeming normality.
Now Leaving West Feldwood feels less like an EP and more like a thorough cinematic production. With a setting, cast, soundtrack and vision, Ellie Bleach is the director, writer and star of her own fiction.