“I thought I was getting better but I’m back to where I started,” Elizabeth Stokes sings on the title track to the Beths’ latest album, Straight Line Was a Lie. Released in August, the Auckland, New Zealand, indie rockers’ fourth LP is a product of the vocalist’s most difficult but meaningful writing trials. Ahead of the band’s show at Emo’s Tuesday, Stokes shared the projects’ origins, from SSRIs to family alienation, with the Chronicle.
Austin Chronicle: What were your main inspirations behind the new album?
Elizabeth Stokes: The songs were a through line of the last period of my life, which was a period of digging myself out of quite a deep hole – mental and physical health stuff. And then in climbing out of that hole, I was subject to the illusion that just by getting better, my life’s going to be fixed – that progress being a straight line. … [I came] to the understanding that [life’s] going to be up and it’s going to be down, and it’s not going to feel like progress the whole time.
Austin Chronicle: How was being able to reflect on that difficult time through songwriting helpful to you coming to that understanding?
Elizabeth Stokes: It’s cathartic. In the process of doing all of the work that I was doing over the last few years to help myself, there was therapy and a lot of self examination, and I did a lot of writing. I was writing 10 pages a day to just pull stuff out of my brain, so it felt like I was looking deeply – writing about things that are scary and that I don’t like to think about and trying to face some of those aspects of myself. There was a real catharsis through that, and I’m still working through that. The narrative isn’t: ‘I did that, and now I’m better.’ You keep doing that until you die, so I’m still in it.
Austin Chronicle: Was that difficulty you had writing in the last few years just writer’s block, or is that something you typically struggle to get started with in the beginning of making an album?
Elizabeth Stokes: It was a bit of writer’s block, but it might have not been helped by the fact that I had been on this SSRI, which was really, really great for building themes and starting the processes to help myself. And then, a lot of people probably have this experience where it’s a bit of trial and error, and so towards the end, I was feeling quite numb. [With the SSRI,] I could write, but I was having trouble with music. … So, I decided to ween off it slowly.
I had trouble writing music, but when I was doing the 10 pages stuff, I was on it, and it was really helpful for writing about stuff and processing stuff that would normally make me anxious or depressed. So, I might [otherwise] shy away from it because it would make me spiral. But because I had this structure [with the SSRI] around my brain to help me be level, I was able to write about a lot of things I wouldn’t normally.
Austin Chronicle: What were some of those things? “Mother, Pray for Me” was particularly moving.
Elizabeth Stokes: For me, the song [was about] my mom. [She’s Indonesian, and] we moved to New Zealand, where my dad’s from, when I was 4. And I’ve grown up in New Zealand [so] ultimately, I feel very from New Zealand. … You don’t have to have that specific situation to have the feeling that you and your parents have this “gulf of understanding” where even if you love each other, it’s kind of complicated. And you’re looking at each other from these far away places and trying to understand. And then we’ve got the cultural and literal language barrier, where you’re trying to see each other as people [and] wish you were closer. But you can see the reasons why you’re not.
That was me writing about that, and that’s something I don’t think I could have [written about before]. It feels sacred. It’s hard to talk about.
The Beths perform at Emo’s tonight.