Over the past few years, Elle King experienced numerous highs and lows after the release of her debut album, Love Stuff in 2015. The album was a breakthrough for King, as the track “Exes and Oh’s” hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Rock Songs Chart, and topped the AAA, Hot AC, and Alternative Radio charts and earned her two Grammy nominations, achieving double platinum sales. Though King’s hard work was paying off professionally, personally, she was falling apart. “I was struggling with mental health issues and exhaustion and literally felt like I was losing my mind,” she says. “I was so lonely and broken and desperate for love that I was reaching out for anything.” The day before the 2016 Grammy Awards show, King secretly eloped with a man she had met in London three weeks before but the marriage unraveled quickly, marked by substance and physical abuse. “It was happening behind closed doors on the back of the tour bus. It was really scary and made me start to keep everything inside because I couldn’t tell anyone we were married.” After the couple separated, King suffered from PTSD, became severely depressed, and took to self-medicating. “I was struggling and I wasn’t really able to talk to anyone because the nature of everything was so dark that people started to pull away from me,” she
says. Music and song-writing became a haven for King as she and her band, who she refers to as her family, began to work on new material that resulted in the new album, Shake The Spirit. King stated, “I decided to call it Shake The Spirit because I was shaken to the core over the last year and half. I was literally talking to ghosts. But making this album not only changed my life, it saved my life. It’s like when you see somebody who is struggling, what do you want to do? You want to shake them! Putting this record out is like shaking myself awake.” Shake The Spirit is out October 19, 2018 on RCA Records.
B-Sides met up with Elle King before her performance at Austin City Limits 2018 to talk about Shake The Spirit, recording in Texas, getting through the difficulties she experienced and more. Check out the interview:
Elle King Tour Dates
Oct. 26-28 New Orleans, LA – Voodoo Fest
Oct. 27 Atlanta, GA – ALT 105-7’s Saints And Sinners Ball, Park Tavern
Oct. 30 Charlotte, NC – The Underground
Nov. 2 Washington, DC – Lincoln Hall
Nov. 3 New Haven, CT – College Street Music Hall
Nov.4 Philadelphia, PA – Theatre of Living Arts
Nov. 5 Brooklyn, NY – Warsaw
Nov. 8 Toronto, ONT – Opera House
Nov. 9 Columbus, OH- Newport Music Hall
Nov. 10 Chicago, IL – The Vic Theatre
Nov. 12 Los Angeles, CA – Belasco Theater