Elizabeth Sullivan has a passion for music. It is eclectic and electric. Her sound is both renaissance rising and nascent new age, and her voice is both tremulous and sweetly tonal. The New York based singer/songwriter pens moving, ethereal numbers that seem lost in time, songs culled from a lifetime marked by emotional hardship and spiritual exploration. “Like a flower upon your chest,” Sullivan’s softly evocative words land quietly but summon much. Comparisons to Tori Amos are frequent and wont, but Sullivan is writing her own fairytale and cutting an emotive style from her own cloth.
Since the age of six, Elizabeth Sullivan has turned to music—first the piano, later guitar, always singing—as “a way to escape into another world.” Singing for Sullivan was from the beginning something “instinctual, like breathing.” Youthful choir experiences and subsequent voice lessons led her eventually to the Ithaca School of Music to study vocal performance. After 2 ½ years in school, however, a tragic revelation that would come to mark the most significant moment in the young songwriter’s life, forced her to leave her schooling behind and to immerse herself deeper into music.
These are songs that are romantic, in the traditional sense. Mysterious, airy, ethereal, remote—belonging in some undeniable way to a bygone era of chivalry and catharsis. Elizabeth Sullivan writes songs as confessionals. The result is an encounter with intimacy, a poetic liaison whose purpose of healing cannot be ignored.
Following her mother’s passing, the songwriter rediscovered the musical escape she had so cherished as a child. She wrote intensely and finally began sharing her music with the world. The resultant offerings filled the spaces of small New York City clubs, transporting audiences as Sullivan herself was transported daily by her songwriting. What followed for the songwriter was a wealth of life experience—“traveling, searching, growing, writing.” Always writing. After landing back in NYC, Sullivan found her passion for using her music to heal and inspire children. Currently finishing her Master’s degree in Music Education at Hunter College, Sullivan hopes to empower young musicians and song writers to cultivate their gifts to better understand themselves and the world around them.
Elizabeth Sullivan’s music is a testament to all of this and more. Her music has the strange tendency to betray both vulnerability and confidence, melancholy and triumph. We might expect the former from a young voice drawing on so somber a life experience. It is a tribute to her poetic buoyancy and sheer songwriting skills that Sullivan invokes the latter as well.
—Doug Wagner