Lessons in storytelling from Lexie Carroll’s new EP

In her new EP, ​you look lovely when you’re living, Lexie Carroll is at the height of her storytelling powers.

The beginnings of Lexie Carroll’s online presence were not unlike those of many young musical artists who got their starts in the past 15 years or so, rooted in the distinctly DIY charm of indie bedroom-based production. A few years ago, you might’ve found her playing a ukulele or guitar in front of her art-plastered bedroom wall, with sparse production (some doubletracking, maybe a drum beat) layered over footage that evoked a live, improvisational aesthetic. Today, as YouTube has ceased to become the premier home for this sort of content, you can still see these roots through short-form platforms like TikTok, where Carroll continues to perform acoustic bits of songs and demos.

The DIY nature of Carroll’s early music was bolstered by its supporting material, with both her music videos and album art incorporating a zine-like collage style to give a distinctly handmade feel. Upon giving any attention to these materials, it’s easy to believe that, for Carroll, constructing the imagery for her singles and EPs is a cathartic artform just as the music itself is, as she combines sketches, photos, lyrics, and physical objects into something representative enough of the song that it can evoke related feelings. Keeping her starting point within view, she continues this practice even as the production on her music has matured significantly since the bedroom ukulele days and her music videos have undeniably gained polish.

What has also remained present from the start is Carroll’s penchant for vivid storytelling within lyrics that are often quite sparse. This is part of what’s to love about her genre, where cues are taken from novels and poetry to construct something achingly precise in its emotional impact and endlessly fascinating in the world it depicts. Many of her songs are built around both the emotional and physical monuments of distinct moments in a person’s life, the moments of precipice that teens and young adults tend to be plenty familiar with. An early song of hers, “carpark,” immediately establishes the deceptive weightiness of the titular location: “Felt like a movie / sat in the carpark, bad luck / I’m calling you stupid / but I had my guard up too long.” The carpark is a concrete location with inherent complexities associated with it through adolescent memories. Despite the word “carpark” being the only explicit description of setting, the scene quickly constructs itself through implicit references and an assumption of familiarity with the situation. Carroll crafts the tone of this song both through the specificity of this location and through the depictions of a formative moment in one’s life, complete with all of its bittersweetness and uncertainty. In the first line of the chorus, she transforms this physical artifact of adolescence into the vector for a metaphor: “it all looked so damn easy from the passenger seat.”

In “sunflood,” the first song of her new EP, she strikes a similar tone, albeit with even sparser storytelling. She again frontloads the concrete details of the setting and story in the first verse: “Grass stains on my knees / Torpedo down a sunflood Turnham Green / Can she stay over pretty please? / Too tired to talk but can’t fall asleep.” There’s so much specificity in these four lines that they manage to tell a complete story through carefully selected fragments. It’s an inherently nostalgic song, and this is established both through the tactility of childhood and through the reference to Turnham Green which, like the carpark, is a concrete space that becomes more abstract in memory until only the emotions associated with it remain. Even if it still exists, the version of it that exists in memory is a separate entity and cannot be accessed in the physical world. And while “carpark” feels rooted in teenage angst, “sunflood” is tied to the wonder and excitement of childhood. The song’s melancholy is more implicit, arising from the fact that the speaker is an emerging adult reminiscing about something slipping through their fingers. As the lyrics grow more fragmented and abstract, their function as retrospective representations of memory becomes more clear, and there’s a sort of yearning to return to an idealized slice of the past.

The second song on the EP, “it’s been a while,” slots nicely into this spiritual trilogy of songs. If “sunflood” captures nostalgia for the past and “carpark” is tethered to the angst of the present, “it’s been a while” worries about a future where current circumstances extend to their natural conclusion. As a fast-paced and lyrically dense song (at least compared to the aforementioned), “it’s been a while” represents a different side to Carroll’s storytelling. The song imagines meeting someone for the first time in a while, after life has already irreversibly changed. Carroll laments the artificial distance constructed between two people once intimately familiar with each other, and the song appears to pulse with anxieties of missed opportunities and wasted time. Carroll sings, “I’m walking down the aisle / and you’re sat there like I’m / stumbling up to trial.” This is another song centered around a pivotal stage of a person’s life, this time being a hypothetical wedding, an event that carries enough of an air of finality to feel like one’s life trajectory is set in stone.

And while there’s a certain level of “what took you so long” exasperation to the song, in the idea that someone might show up again at the least opportune time, Carroll explores a similar story of reconnection in the song “florist,” which takes an overall more gentle approach where the associated emotions are conveyed less outwardly. In “it’s been a while,” the speaker is glad to be reunited with this person from their past, but their outward expression is of frustration over the ways things have changed, the fact that their conversations are now awkward and stilted despite their familiarity with one another. In “florist,” though, the speaker seems to try not to dwell on what has changed, hoping that what remains the same will be enough: “You look older / but I’d know you anywhere / You look older / and you’re still here.” Of course, the melancholy of lapsed time is still evident here, with a certain sadness coming from the fact that the person has visibly aged. It’s a physical reminder of what has been lost, as you only notice the difference if you’ve been gone for too long. Carroll imbues the song with a quiet optimism, where the lamentation of a long absence is paired with the hope of picking up the pieces after all this time.

The most striking piece of storytelling in the EP may come in the form of the song “if you were a ghost,” which describes a complex relationship between two people through an imagined magical realism scenario. This is another song that focuses on the speaker’s relationship with someone they were once close with but now have distance from, but this time the memory of the person is more malignant, depicted as a ghost haunting the speaker’s home and brain. It’s not without the yearning of the previous songs, but here the speaker knows that it’s a mistake to yearn for something so destructive, leading to a push and pull between their desire to be less alone and their acknowledgement of the damaging nature of this person, both in their physical form and in their ghostly occupancy of the speaker’s mind. “You can haunt me / I’ll make it easy / I just want some company,” the speaker says. Along with the speaker’s desperation to quench their own loneliness, there’s a certain level of empathy they have towards this imagined ghost, perhaps because even someone who has hurt you is reduced to a sad and vulnerable existence when they become a ghost, dwelling on past lives, pointlessly moving furniture. Perhaps the speaker’s life is not much different from that of the ghost. They know, though, that letting themselves be haunted means bringing themselves pain, no matter how much they pretend not to notice the ghost. It’s an achingly mournful and emotionally volatile story, not least because of how well Carroll’s vocals map to the speaker’s journey, where the internal conflict is deeply felt and even anger is given a sort of passivity.

Each of Lexie Carroll’s songs offers such a compelling story that feels like a slice of something greater. Her ability to depict emotional truths of adolescence and young adulthood is incredibly inspiring, and you look lovely when you’re living is as great a demonstration as any of her growth as an artist and her increasingly mature, vivid storytelling. If her music and art are any indication, she is adept at finding beauty in the small details, and I hope the scrappiness of her persona persists even as she inevitably grows beyond her roots and, frankly, grows as any adult would. Considering how many times her musical style has already swung in various directions, I have hope that whatever makes her music special will remain regardless of where she goes as an artist.