EVIE ARCHER Looking back, it might seem like a forgone conclusion that Evie Archer would find herself chasing a career in music: by the age of two, she was asking her parents if she could take piano lessons, and not long after that she began to write original songs. But although she describes songwriting as a compulsion, and used to compose songs instead of essays for English-class assignments, her path has had some obstacles. It was an indirect journey, a series of stops and starts, periods of productivity and encouragement broken up by bouts with self-doubt. But once her goal was clear, everything seemed to fall into place: the music came out stronger than ever, key creative connections were made, and the results are evident in her songs, which combine expert pop craft with raw emotional candor. There's a striking openness to her work, and she doesn't back away from revealing her own flaws: I'm just a sucker for self-destruction, she admits in one song, and in another, she finds herself in a situation where she's hoping God will turn a blind eye to her bad behavior: Is this what you wanted from yourself, empty cages beneath your eyes, empty bottles on the shelf? Of course, some of her songs, like parts of her life, are filled with joy. Close to You, for example, is an upbeat song about what it feels like to be in love and is bound to lift your spirits. Evie's candor harkens back to classic singer-songwriters like Carly Simon and Carole King (Evie says that I Feel The Earth Move and Natural Woman are two songs she wishes she had written), as well as more recent artists such as Alanis Morrisette, Rachel Yamagata, and Fiona Apple. It's pretty confessional stuff, she admits. It just feels a little safer to express it if you rhyme it. When I'm in the midst of tumult, I can't really write about it, but then I take a bit of a step back and have more perspective, and that's when 'Evie' comes through. I can reinterpret what I experience as 'Melissa,' and give myself some distance and creative license. Growing up in New Jersey, Evie (born Melissa Rosenberg) found that music came to her instinctively, not that she was that devoted a fan of what was going on in the pop world. She didn't listen to the radio or buy records, and what music she did hear was on road trips with her family, where her mother would play songs by Carly Simon. Then when I got older, she says, I loved The Beatles. I admire the tight songwriting, and that's what I was inspired to go for in a pop song. As a student at Princeton Day School, she performed in numerous plays and musicals, and took a class with a composer-in-residence who told my parents that I had real potential to do this as a career, and I laughed and thought, 'That's really sweet of him,' but I didn't take it too seriously. Then in college, it just became more a part of who I was. In her freshman year at Princeton University, she heard what she calls an intuitive voice. I was thinking about what I wanted to major in, and what I was going to do with my life, and this voice said 'singer-songwriter.' I kind of scoffed at that. I was skeptical of my inner impulses because they seemed to come out of nowhere. I was continually writing, but it was never with a plan to pursue it professionally. I ran away from it for a long time. She considered other options. For a while, she wanted to be an economist, and then she thought she might want to become a lawyer, like her father, but she kept circling back to music, and her performance of an original song won her a music competition at Princeton. After graduating, she stopped writing for a couple of years. It was kind of a blocked period for me, she admits. I tried a couple of times, and nothing really happened with it. Then, in 2011, her parents talked with a family friend whose daughter wanted to get into music promotion, and Evie's mother gave her a tape of songs from Evie's freshman year at college (one of the songs on the tape, Sweet Destruction, was written even earlier, in high school) This girl told my mother, 'This is
