With her debut album “Tales of a Failed Shapeshifter” out today, Em Beihold sounds completely focused on creative clarity. During a recent press conference with Juice Box Press and 1824, Beihold spoke candidly about writer’s block, mental health, and the long road back to trusting her instincts after the breakout success of “Numb Little Bug.”
If there is a theme to this new era, it’s a straightforward one: Beihold has finally found her identity.
“I feel like I’m finally making the music I’ve really wanted to make,” she said. After the sudden attention that followed her viral hit, Beihold found herself navigating an industry that was moving faster than her sense of identity. The result was a period of creative disorientation that forced her to slow down and recalibrate.
Writing Without the Filter
Beihold’s songwriting process remains rooted in instinct. Many of her signature quirks, including her habit of comparing herself to animals and strange creatures, are not carefully engineered motifs. They just happen.
“It’s not an intentional choice,” she explained. “I’ve learned I have this strange knee-jerk reaction to write songs with unassuming adjectives and creatures. It’s just a little peek into my brain.”
That unfiltered approach extends to the piano, which remains her creative home base. Beihold described the moment she sits down to write as one where any censorship disappears. Humor often becomes her way into heavier material, though she allows certain subjects to be handled more gently. She pointed to the album track “Won’t Let Go,” which addresses her grandmother’s dementia with a softer touch.
Music, she added, often expresses emotions more accurately than language alone. “Words can hit so much harder with the right tension under them musically.”
The Song That Lit the Fuse
While the album took shape over several years and hundreds of partial ideas, one song served as the crux.
“‘Lottery’ was a North Star on this album for a long time,” Beihold told us. Completed as early as 2022, the track helped her understand the emotional and sonic world she wanted to build around it. Many other songs were written and discarded along the way as she searched for the right cohesion.
The process was anything but linear. Some songs came together in minutes, while others evolved over multiple years. The chorus of “Scared of the Dark,” for instance, dates back to when she was just 13.
Escaping the Noise
A major turning point came when Beihold began saying ‘no’ more often. Following the success of “Numb Little Bug,” she found herself in a whirlwind of writing sessions with countless collaborators. While many of those experiences were positive, the volume of outside feedback began to drown out her own voice and identity.
“When you have so many different voices in your ear, it’s hard to hear yourself,” she said.
Rebuilding that internal trust required stepping back from the pressure cycle and writing alone again. Even in collaborative rooms, she learned to hold her ground. If a lyric felt right to her, it stayed.
“I’ll be in a session where four people say a line is stupid,” she said with a laugh. “And I’m like, I like it. It’s my song.”
Humor as Survival
One of Beihold’s strengths is her ability to pair heavy emotional themes with sharp wit. That balance was very intentional on “Tales of a Failed Shapeshifter,” especially after a stretch where her writing leaned too heavily into straightforward sadness.
“I realized when I was really depressed, I was writing a lot of just sad stuff, and I didn’t like any of it,” she said. “It wasn’t a little bit fun.”
Her dark sense of humor functions less as deflection and more as survival. Onstage, she wants audiences to feel the weight of the emotions while still recognizing the absurdity of being human.
“We feel this too,” she said of her listeners. “But we’re just little humans, and it’s all so silly sometimes.”
Mental Health at the Core
Mental health remains central to the album’s narrative. Beihold spoke openly about experiencing a severe depressive period that ultimately inspired the song “Exorcism.” The track grew out of a moment when she physically could not sit still, describing the sensation as feeling like there was a demon inside her body.
While the experience itself was frightening, transforming it into music felt purposeful. If her songs can make listeners feel less alone, she believes she is doing what she is meant to do.
“I don’t feel embarrassed at all by mental health and saying how I feel,” she said.
Returning to Her Roots
Sonically, the album leans more heavily into the piano-driven singer-songwriter lineage that first inspired Beihold. She cited early-2000s artists such as Regina Spektor, Fiona Apple, Sara Bareilles, Kate Nash, and Lily Allen as key influences.
That shift also reflects in her upcoming live shows. Beihold is eager to spend more time at the piano and less time trying to fit into a conventional pop mold.
“It wasn’t trying to cosplay as this pop girl that I know I’m not,” she said, reflecting on a recent stripped-back piano tour that proved especially fulfilling.
Letting the Theme Find Her
Interestingly, the album’s whimsical, fairy tale-adjacent aesthetic was not preplanned. During her writer’s block phase, Beihold admits she tried to force conceptual frameworks that never quite stuck. The shape-shifter motif only emerged after she loosened her grip on the process.
“When I let go, a theme kind of naturally emerged,” she said.
That organic cohesion may be the clearest sign of artistic alignment. After years of noise, pressure, and second-guessing, “Tales of a Failed Shapeshifter” sounds like the work of an artist who has stopped trying to become someone else.
Or, in Beihold’s own words, someone who no longer needs the superpower of shape-shifting at all.
With the album arriving February 27 and a tour on the horizon, Beihold is stepping into this next chapter with something she did not always have during her breakout moment: certainty.
And this time, it sounds like she plans to keep it.
Nathan Smith is a Providence-based music photographer and journalist focusing on capturing the special moments and unfiltered magic of live performances. Whether he’s shooting established artists at sold-out TD Garden shows or documenting the rise of emerging local bands, his goal is the same: to pull viewers directly into the heart of the moment.
His writing spotlights rising artists and local scenes, with a focus on telling the stories that often get overlooked. A lifelong music fan and musician himself, Nathan approaches interviews and portraits as conversations rather than transactions, building trust with artists so their genuine personalities can shine through. Whether he’s backstage, in the photo pit, or at home in front of the keyboard, he brings the same curiosity and care to every assignment.
Outside of his press work with Juice Box Press, Nathan works regularly as a photographer with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, as well as numerous bands in the Boston and Providence area. Nathan also plays violin with a local orchestra, follows Celtics basketball almost religiously, and is an avid fantasy reader.