ELLA STEPHEN – READY FOR THE FALL
When Ella Stephen sent me her debut release Ready For The Fall the immediate thing that jumped out at me beyond the crisp clean production was the melody and the guitar riff that forms the base for it. Anyone I would speak to about Ella and her music, would pay significant compliment to how good a guitarist this lady is and this is a big focus in her music with the strong melodic emphasis. Anyone that loves playing guitar is pretty much guaranteed to mention a certain John Mayer as a significant influence and Ella talked about despite learning guitar and writing songs from an early age it took this discovery to fall back in love with music and writing in particular. As wondrous and influential the magic of Mr Mayer may be it is not going to be the path to country music as Ella spent a large part of her later teenage years in rock bands moving on to exploring the “singer-songwriter” style as a performer but despite her love for playing acoustically she was aware it was not quite her.
Her love of country music was ignited through the discovery of Keith Urban, which let’s be honest is a good an introduction to the genre as any where she became inspired by both his lyrics and his melodies. Her listening to Keith and being drawn to ‘Til Summer Comes Around as a track that really resonated with her, became an inspiration for her debut release Ready For The Fall. Ella talked about how she really liked the idea behind the song and how it inspired her to bring about her own take on it. With a well-produced track courtesy of Jack Watson, she delivers a blend of powerful melody along with sweet lyrics to emphasise the idea behind the song. A very natural voice without a forced twang or becoming Americanised that has plenty of range which you will encounter as she releases more music in the coming months. As for Ready For The Fall, Ella had an idea that she really liked and just impulsively picked up her guitar which resulted in this. She talked about the emotion in the track comes from the writing process be raw and unlaboured which is how a song like this should feel. There is a natural tendency to bring Lindsay Ell up as a starting point for describing her style of country due to the creativity in how her sound explores new boundaries in addition to making the most of her amazing talent as a guitarist.
In addition to her love of writing and performing live, Ella has a distinct talent for creativity and producing music videos. She has some really exciting videos on her YouTube channel ranging from some covers to the fantastic music video for Ready For The Fall which you can view here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzNVE8tW8_0 Ella has plenty more new material ready and waiting to be released throughout the rest of the year along with still hoping to bring out some more music with Jack Galloway as the duo Jack & Ella that some people may already be familiar with. However in the meantime Ready For The Fall is available from all the usual places today (21st September) and you can keep up to date with her future releases on her socials.
https://en-gb.facebook.com/ellastephenmusic/
https://www.instagram.com/ohheyimella
