Ella Clayton – Weaving A Wonderous Web

Ella: “This record is a journey through longing and self-interrogation, the search for something or someone outside of myself to tell me who I am and what I want. I hope that people recognise themselves in these snapshots from my life and take comfort in the shared experience.”

Along with producer Lester Duval (Pip Millet, Alfa Mist)Ella wanted this record to feel like a warm hug and to sound like musicians playing together in the same room. With George Ezra kindly offering up his Hotel Quebec studio for three days, they were able to track the rhythm section for all songs live. The result is a piece of work that captures the raw immediacy of Ella’s beloved live-stage sound, while making space for lush and cinematic moments throughout. Genre-bending, her unique voice is the thread that weaves throughout. 

It all begins with the soul drenched ‘Please Me’, an anthem for the anxiously avoidant. In its opening verses Ella is guarded but with the chorus comes a small revolution: ‘I could lie again/echo, let go, pretend/but I’m gonna fall for my best friend.’ Not avoidance as it turns out but simply holding out for something real. ‘Dolomites’ offers a kind of escape with its dynamic sound – a feral, synth-laced expression of the desire to be alone, anchored by Ella’s clear vocals and eventually breaking out into powerful drums: ‘I trace the lines of the Dolomites and you curse the day I was born…’

Perhaps the most unflinching moment on the record is single ‘Ripples’, swelling by a fitting string arrangement, it traces emotional territory that is too rarely spoken about without shame. “Now more than ever it’s vital to share these stories through the connecting power of music” Ella says. The album’s earnest title track arrives as a hypnotic, folky knockout – a true story about a first date in Brixton that went comically wrong, and a hymn to every hopeless romantic exhausted by the ritual of looking.

Co-written with Hohnen Ford, ‘Rain All Day’ is the quieter heartbreak, the kind that arrives after the dust settles, when the person you have lost is no longer a villain. Following a lonelier thread, ‘Tell Me Something’ traces the cruelty of turning to the harshest critic in your own head for guidance and being met with malice in return. A beautifully slow medley accompanied by violin and Ella’s grounded falsetto.

Other highlights include ‘Mouth Said Money’, the album’s most musically unexpected track as a teenage grunge-pop tune written after a brief encounter with a manager whose big promises dissolved just as quickly. ‘I Miss Strangers’ was born during lockdown when the small, transformative encounters with people on trains and street corners had been abruptly taken away – a track that coaxes the listener, gently, back out into the world: ‘remember the wonders that wait beyond your door.’

The closer is sunny lead single ‘As You Are’, containing a big crescendo with an extended finale. It is a rare love song about friendship, sparked by a mundane moment of spotting a close friend haggling for jeans at a market stall, unaware she was being watched. A warm nod to how platonic love is worth celebrating just as loudly as the romantic one. By the final track, the album has begun to answer its own question. As Ella puts it: “Nothing is fixed. As these songs unfold, there are moments of revelation, flashes of strength, and the growing realization that no one else holds the answers. It can only be you.”