Surrendering to self-love: Isabel Pless soaks in the quiet comfort of being allowed to validate yourself on her latest track ‘Isabel’.

“I’ll never be a machine” Isabel sings the line like it’s woven into her psyche. 

It’s so easy to arrive at a red light when we try to authenticate ourselves, simply due to the fear of what that reality could look like. Isabel dives into the gentleness of trusting yourself for once. Her new self-titled single extends this perspective and hits like direct sunlight, overexposing the need to be intrinsically sympathetic. What would change if we could assign compassion to our failures?

Growing up in Vermont, Isabel Pless originally wanted to study for her Speech-Language Pathology licence. Through a twist of fate, she found herself on a different path as an artist, but Pless remained an expert in communication, demonstrating the power to build communities through her songwriting abilities. Notably, she has this incredible use of lyrics and vivid imagery to bring her most sentimental thoughts to life, which pour over beautiful Lizzy McAlpine-esque melodies. She is the big sister you didn’t know you needed.

Turning to the internet during lockdown, Isabel started releasing her own demos to an attentive audience. With over 116k+ followers, she has struck a chord with her vulnerable and sometimes disconcerting lyrics. ‘At the park the other day, I saw vultures circling a dead thing. Got home, appetite gone, like I tasted what they were tasting’. Pless is able to confront tough human emotion with eccentricity and draws out the most sentiment by connecting this way with the listener.

‘Anxiety is the most confusing thing for me because I definitely have anxiety, but sometimes it's like, it’s not linked to anything. So that's the most confusing part. You wake up and you’re waiting for some impending doom. I read a lot about that feeling specifically - that is what ‘Dead Thing’ is about’.

‘Isabel’, her upcoming release, is what can be described as a self-love song, seemingly a lullaby to her adult self. Isabel sent me the track ahead of its release, and upon first listen I felt myself subconsciously unclenching my jaw and rolling my shoulders back. It was as if a huge weight had been taken off me. As a self-titled track, Isabel explores the relationship you have with yourself, and in allowing yourself to turn down the dial on the self-critical voice in your head. Isabel had returned from a Thanksgiving trip back in November 2022, nothing specific had triggered her thoughts, but she felt the need to write the lyrics down almost immediately.

‘I got back home and I was sitting with everything. I thought, I’m the only one that can say these things - no one else is going to say it. It was coming back from that trip, I wrote it as soon as I got back from the airport’.

In a world where we are conditioned to be constantly judging and comparing ourselves, and striving to live up to expectations, Isabel manages to overcome the discomfort that sometimes comes with being kind to yourself. For a theme that could maybe be perceived as self-obsessive, the positive spin she puts on self-belief is so refreshing. In ‘Isabel’, the song dismisses any space for pressure, cancelling out the noise line by line. ‘You don’t have to be good all the time, you don’t have to have the answer, you don’t have to be right’.

‘I had moved to Nashville maybe two or three months before I wrote it, and I had just started to make friends - it's hard to pick up everything all over again, it’s scary. I was feeling very alone, and I just wrote the song for myself. I wanted to hear all these things about myself - all these manifestations or what I’m allowed to do or feel, but no one’s gonna say those to me because I’m alone. In a positive way - I wrote the song for myself that I needed to hear in the moment.’

Describing people hearing and connecting to her music as an honour, Isabel flags the overwhelming feeling that comes with releasing music into the world - it’s only natural that putting out this new single (her favourite so far), feels daunting.

‘It’s very overwhelming and I think because I am also someone that everytime I feel something I'm like ‘I’m the only person who's ever felt this way’. Always when songs are out it’s like they’re not mine anymore so it's a little bit scary, but it's a way to establish a community which is so cool’.

Turning back to the song every now and then for a slight ego boost, Isabel also describes how the song would have been validating for her younger self, and how she would have needed to hear all of these same things. When asked how she hopes other people will receive the song, Isabel turns to that same realm of self-compassion.

‘I hope that it gives people the same people the feeling it gives me - obviously it’s my name in the song - but I hope its an opportunity for people to reflect on being allowed to validate yourself rather than wait for other people to do it, I hope that's what people take away from it because that’s what I take away from it’.

Recording the song in only five takes, it seems the vulnerability in the recording came easily. As a listener, you can hear that stylistic choice to not keep the record too clean, and to keep the imperfections that make it interesting, and that frame the snapshot of where she was at emotionally whilst recording. Small but calculated production decisions like panning her vocals at the end, and keeping in certain muffled room noises also help to make the track just that little bit more comforting.

This song will resonate with so many people - we’ve all had pressure build up and boil over at certain times, and ‘Isabel’ is the counterbalance to those spiralling thoughts. It says ‘It’s ok, I’m allowed to feel like this’. It’s a delicate song that speaks volumes, and like Isabel, we are very excited about this release.

‘Isabel’ is out tomorrow, on 7th June.