Multidisciplinary artist and producer Ellie Dixon shares her sprawling and personal new EP, “Tales of a Knight”, and dissects the work in a Wonderland exclusive.
After building a discography full of richness and heart across the past few years, the new EP from Ellie Dixon sees the multifaceted talent take her artistry to soaring heights. “Tales of a Knight” tackles a rainbow of resonance, a whole web of emotion; from her inner most turmoil and the blinding light of anxiety to the promise of new beginnings and self acceptance.
Musically seamless in its variety, the work positions Dixon as a fluid and chameleonic musician as well as a potent and personal narrator. To celebrate the work, she stops by Wonderland to delve into the work, track-by-track.
Listen to the EP…
Read the track-by-track…
“Renaissance”
“Renaissance” establishes the world of the EP. It’s an over the top fanfare shouting WELCOME TRAVELLER explaining the story of the project.
I was dropped by my label with no warning a year ago after a very difficult period of mental health and I’d been writing a lot of angry songs. But I wanted a song that felt victorious, not feeling sorry for myself. At 2am after coming back from a Doja Cat show (one of the best shows I’ve ever seen) I sat at my desk and Renaissance started pouring out of me. I felt so inspired by the way she blends magical soundscapes with really meaty drums. I’ve been getting more embedded in the London drum and bass scene (shout out to Piri & Tommy and charlieeeee) so I played with these harder breakbeat sounds as my equivalent of her meaty drums.
I wrote the floaty magical synth arpeggios you hear at the start of the song and started telling the tale as if I was a fallen knight. I was thinking about when I first got the call and how much like a Renaissance painting it felt – I was sat on my bed, doubled over in shock, as if I’d been stabbed. That fantastical image set the tone for this to feel like a story book. I really leaned into that with the ridiculous “hear ye hear ye” narration at the end and the dramatic choir – because these things DO feel this dramatic! It can feel like the deepest Shakespearean betrayal. I feel my emotions very strongly and if I can’t use that to make art then what’s the point.
“Miscalculations”
“Miscalculations” is actually quite an old song – I started writing it over 3 years ago now. The first verse I actually wrote as a tik tok duet with a pianist (which you can still find if you scroll back far enough..!) but it just sat for a while, as a lot of demos do. Then one day during a panic attack I finished it. I never write during panic attacks because I’m normally very much unable to do anything, but I just felt the need to creatively get it out of my body. I’ve never written during one since, so this song is very special to me.
I recreated the feel of the original piano I had duetted by layering up different pretty synths and then had this shuddering chunky bass synth come in underneath to give that feeling of the blood rushing and ringing in your ears. I wanted this to musically feel how panic does. This big imposing trembling bassline that drowns everything else out. It’s got this softness and hardness to it that I think fear really has. You feel very small while experiencing very harsh and overwhelming feelings. It also really comes and goes, so the dynamics in the song really mirror that – expanding and contracting like the waves of panic and relief.
“Guts”
“Guts” is the point at which I’ve bloody had enough. We’ve had this deep dive into anxiety in Miscalculations, then Guts is a cathartic scream of release. It was inspired by a conversation I was having with a group of friends where they were giving all these crazy stories from their teenage years. I had nothing to contribute as I wasn’t a risk taking teenager in the slightest. As someone with a lot of anxiety, just the normal parts of life were intense enough. I found myself leaving that conversation feeling angry at all the stories I’d missed out on. I never realised how much fun I’d missed and I needed to process that anger. In comes “Guts”.
I wrote the verse on my ukulele first – this sweet and timid melody telling the story of not being conventionally ‘brave’ or ‘strong’. Then I went hard on the chorus. Plugged my bass in, turned it up, and made as much noise as I could. I played in a riff with a Polyphia-inspired edge. I put more breakbeat in and played with samba percussion over the top. I used to play in a samba band in secondary school so I’m always drawn towards syncopated rhythms, and wanted to play with how that sounded in a more DnB context. This resulted in a very cathartic high energy scream into the void.
Normally upbeat songs are all about dramatic life events, so I always felt like rocking out wasn’t for me if I’m not doing the things that rockstars are singing about. But I realised that maybe I’m more rock and roll just for doing the things that terrify me. And showing up when it took a lot just to get out of bed is actually the most badass thing. I think anxious folks deserve songs they can scream and dance AND relate to. That birthed ‘I’m brave for just being here’ through the chorus. That we are, in fact, not brave for what we do but for how much those things challenge us.
“Knight Shift”
It’s time for some silliness. I was in the middle of the “Guts” campaign and was feeling some creative fatigue. I was writing very seriously and decided to take a break and write something with no intention of putting it out. I’d been obsessively listening to Alligator Bites Never Heal by Doechii and fell in love with her sense of humour and groove. It reminded me a lot of Doja Cat, so those two have become such pillars of inspiration for me.
I found a hip hop beat that felt so wonky and groovy and immediately started playing my bass. I had been thinking about queer nights out with my friends, and how fantastical and magical they felt, and started telling it through this comedic lens of a night out at the tavern. Puns are my lifeblood, and it was so much fun to just do a bunch of ridiculous wordplay without any voice in my head asking whether it was good enough for the project.
I called my flatmate Sophie in to listen and she immediately had an idea for the Lady Gwendolyn line and we were cackling. She loved the song so much it pushed me to send it to more friends and the reaction was overwhelming. It ended up being pushed to being the next single when I sent it to my management. Sometimes a song is just right, and it feels very reassuring to know that it came from a place of pure fun.
“Loose Change”
“Loose Change” is the closest thing I’ve ever got to explaining my brain. In the winter of 2023 I could barely get out of bed. I hit a type of burnout I’d never experienced before – I’d been running from a lot of things I wasn’t facing and just focusing everything on music. The chickens came home to roost and so I started therapy. I began to uncover a lot about myself and started the journey of learning to work WITH my brain, not against it (something I’m still very much learning to do, I’ll let you know if I figure it out).
One day it had taken me 7 hours to drag myself into the studio and I was completely out of ideas. I turned on some TV to try and trick my brain into thinking it didn’t actually have to do anything. Then I grabbed a bass off the wall and plugged it into a pedalboard. I was using a friend’s studio at the time and they had a pedalboard in there that I couldn’t mess with, so I thought I’d just plug it in and see what sound came out. I turned the pedals off and on and suddenly this HUGE sound came out. Distorted to hell and back, almost electronic, and absolutely buzzing. I found myself playing the main chorus bassline instantly. I laid it over a driving beat and wrote this chorus about how my brain was feeling. Like a bunch of loose change just rolling around.
The first few notes of the bassline have a dotted rhythm that I realised I could actually morph into a different time signature. After consulting my calculator I found the right bpm. I knew that the two time signatures *could* merge nicely into each other in theory, but that I would need to write the first verse with the new time signature completely separately. If I was going to fool the listener, I had to fool myself first. I grabbed a classical guitar off the wall and wrote this floating soundscape of plucked nylon. I recorded everything with an SM7B mic with the speakers on full blast so there was loads of noise bleed, but it all added to this weird beautiful confusing world.
“Loose Change” was an absolute dream to write and one of the proudest things I’ve made.
“Thirteen”
I wrote “Thirteen” about 4 years ago and it’s been through many iterations to get here. It feels like the perfect conclusion to the project. A sweet, sincere bookend to a rollercoaster of emotions. Through pain, panic, joy, anger, the only thing we can do is love ourselves.
I’d been reproducing it for years and it never quite felt right – I was trying to make it an upbeat alt-pop bop but that just wasn’t what it was. Then one day when I was brainstorming the EP and deciding what songs to put on, I said that I’d love to have an acoustic song at the end. Then the lightbulb moment. Thirteen needed to be acoustic.
I ran to my desk and made it in about 4 hours. Sometimes when things are right they just work. A lot of the sound world is actually vocals. There’s a great big synth sound that is actually my voice running through a LOT of processing. And I think you can tell. There’s this feeling of a voice crying out in the background.
The message of thirteen is simple – we have to love every iteration of ourselves. Each version lives inside us and honestly in a world that preaches self improvement, sometimes the hardest thing to do is stay the same and accept who we are. That is thirteen. And I still listen to it now when I need it. And I still cry every damn time.
