Globelamp

Olympia-based, Southern California-born musician Elizabeth le Fey (aka Globelamp) loves The Beatles.

“They have a lot of different parts in the music, like ‘A Day in the Life,’” le Fey tells EW. “I love that about The Beatles. It’s like you’re on a roller coaster.”

Le Fey says The Beatles’ willingness to expand the traditional pop song formula is an influence on her sound, which she calls psychedelic folk.

“A lot of the songs are stories, in the sense of old folk stories,” Le Fey says, adding that she calls her music psychedelic “because instead of just being a singer-songwriter, there’s a lot of key changes and ‘vocal characters,’ meaning it’s not just sung one way throughout the song.”

“There’s a lot of high and lows,” she continues. “It’s sort of simple folk, but there are elements to it that are sort of psychedelic — like Syd Barrett is psychedelic folk to me.”

Le Fey’s Globelamp project recently opened for Against Me’s Laura Jane Grace. “I have been a fan for over 10 years,” she says of Grace. “Her music really changed the way I view the world.”

Last year, le Fey released Stardust, a collection of haunting tunes that blend her childlike, elfin voice with melodies recalling Kimya Dawson, fragmented musical ideas and production reminiscent of a woozy opium dream — or nightmare.

“You’re smoking in bed,” le Fey sings on track “Sunflower,” like an ethereal flower girl gone witchy, “and the walls are red.”

Le Fey says Eugene audiences should expect a “mystical vibe” this time through town. “Some lights, some candles, some petals,” she adds. “Some self-empowerment to make the other people get out and play their music.”

Globelamp plays with Eugene’s Entresol and Dr. Rocket 8 pm Monday, June 22, at Wandering Goat; $3-$5 suggested cover, all-ages. - Eugene Weekly

Who’s in the band and how did you come together?
I am Elizabeth le Fey, the songwriter of the band. The members have been inconsistent and only recently has the band started to have a sold formation. Colin Pleasants is in the band playing violin. He played violin on the last album Star Dust and will be on the next full length album too. Patrick Semple is playing the bass.

You’ve also picked out and shot the rest of the bands for this feature on Olympia, Washington. Tell me about who you shot.
I shot Oh, Rose, Nobody, and Stephen Smith. No body is a trio that consists of Issac Scott, Kevin Loughlin, and Josh Wolfe. They are a young band that sort of reflects the progressive political currents this town embodies. No gender, no hierarchy, no body. They play complex, winding music led by complicated, dueling guitars.
Oh, Rose consists of band members Olivia Rose, Kevin Christopher, Sarah Redden, and Liam Hindahl. The band was started by Olivia Rose, who used to play solo shows until Oh, Rose was formed. Olivia has a powerful, haunting voice that will stop you in your tracks no matter what you are doing. They self-released a tape this year called That Do Now See.
Stephen Smith is a songwriter who has been playing shows with his band Camp Wisdom since I moved here in 2011. He also has a recording project with River Nason called Sawtooth. I have always admired Stephen’s prolific song writing skills. He is always working on new material and is great at crafting folk songs that feel like they are from the distant past.

What is it like being a relatively new musician in Olympia, Washington right now?
Well, I’ve lived here for three years. It’s inspiring to be in such a beautiful supportive community and surrounded by nature.

Olympia has a rich musical heritage. Do you feel pressure to feel a part of it?
In my own way. There are many different scenes happening here within a small community. Sometimes it can feel exclusive, which is a bummer, but that’s only one part of the music scene. In general it’s a really supportive community full of creativity, which helps fuel more creativity, you know?

What’s it like to play a show here?
Le Voyeur is a bar downtown that has been having shows for years that are sometimes hit or miss (meaning you never know how many people will show up or if you will just be playing for the other bands). They have good food and it’s a place people gather regardless if there is a show or not. My favorite places to play in Olympia are at house shows like The Guest House and The Track House. The Guest House is a house venue that hosts a lot of cool touring and local bands. Stephen Smith of Camp Wisdom/Saw Tooth lives there and helps run the house. The house show scene here is really thriving and where you will see the best shows. It feels electric. Northern is an all-ages venue in town that isn’t my favorite place to play. I only like playing there if it is with bands I really like. There’s a new venue in town called Obsidian started by the band Wolves in the Throne Room that I’m interested to see grow into a space for the community.

The house show scene here is really thriving and where you will see the best shows. It feels electric.
If that’s where we’d find you at night, where would you be in the day?
It rains here a lot so, during the winter, probably indoors or at coffee shops like Cafe Vita and Burial Grounds. During the summer, people go to the lakes and rivers to swim. People really like to take advantage of the warm weather when it’s here because it’s cold most of the time.

What kind of experiences do you reference when you’re writing songs?
Universal feelings like betrayal, love and grief. I reference anything that catches my eye and forms itself to poetry. Some songs have references to books and mythology. I write about what I know and what I have felt. In Casino Song I sing about the casinos that are on Native American land in California where I am from. Gambling addiction runs in my family and I have seen people succumb to gambling as well as other addictions. At the time when a family member of mine was gambling all of the time I happened to be in a Native American anthropology class and I started to get mad thinking about how the Native Americans had all of their land taken from them and were just given a place to have a casino – as though that makes up for genocide during the Trail of Tears.

Do you believe in magic?
Yes I do. Magic to me is seeing the interconnectivity of everything and how your mind can create reality based off of certain actions. Magic can be setting those intentions for your own reality through rituals and spells. I think this inherently influences my writing and my song writing or at least what I am trying to communicate with my listeners.

If you met an actual witch and she could do one thing for you, what would it be?
It would be cool to have a time turner or an invisibility cloak. - BEAT Magazine

The last few years have taken Mission Viejo native Elizabeth Le Fey on a wild ride of creation, collaboration and drama. Yet, while maintaining her solo project Globelamp amid a troublesome tour with indie rock band Foxygen, Le Fey has kept positive through a whirlwind of events.

“It’s overwhelming to have a lot of stuff happen quickly,” she says. “It’s a trip. I’m still recovering from going through something really fast.”

Le Fey, 24, started writing poetry at 15, inspired by books like the “Harry Potter” series and old mythological legends. She didn’t start putting music to those poems, however, until years after she learned guitar.

Now her sound is saturated by folk, Gypsy wanderlust and witchcraft. Each song sounds like a ’60s recording from Greenwich Village laced with mystic echoes – the perfect soundtrack for a walk through dark forests.

Le Fey’s impetus to perform came after experiencing seeing Bright Eyes lead vocalist Conor Oberst with the Felice Brothers at the Pioneertown club Pappy & Harriett’s in 2010.

“I was really blown away by him,” she says. “I couldn’t believe that one person could be that powerful. I felt like I was seeing Bob Dylan, somebody who is a legend. … When I was watching, it was all songs I didn’t know, and I was completely mesmerized. It was just him and no band.”

That minimalism inspired Le Fey to perform in small coffee shops alone on acoustic guitar, under the name Globelamp. But her musical journey kicked into high gear when she landed an internship at K Records in Olympia, Wash. After the move north, she started playing more shows at small college music festivals as well as countless house parties.

“No one knew me and I could just go up there and experiment with my idea,” she explains.

It was at such a house show that Le Fey met Foxygen lead vocalist (and later boyfriend) Sam France. An email exchange between the two sparked her to travel from Olympia to Los Angeles to make an appearance in the Foxygen video for “San Francisco,” shortly before the band started getting nationwide attention.

“He had already known my Globelamp songs when I met him,” she says, “and he would sing them around me. It’s just weird that he really believed in my music.”

France encouraged Le Fey to go on tour with Foxygen, singing backup and playing tambourine and guitar. It was a eye-opening experience: She became a better musician by working with others but didn’t understand how a band could work with such dysfunction, as France and fellow songwriter Jonathan Rado often made their partnership a competitive one.

She also encountered a similarly bumpy situation as part of the garage rock group Meowtain, which broke up in September. Otherwise, “The bands that I’ve played in, in Olympia, are all about harmony and brotherhood,” she says. “I was assuming that they were going to be my friends.”

After traveling the world with Foxygen, Le Fey expressed her feelings about the group’s work ethic in a blog post, which got noticed by music sites like Pitchfork and Stereogum. Rumors about a Foxygen split soon spread.

“I had that Tumblr for three years. I never thought: ‘Oh, I’m going to post this on Pitchfork,’” Le Fey insists. “They were always going to be a band, but I was just calling out what I thought their character was like. I never said they were going to break up on my blog. I think things within the band were always OK, because they are dysfunctional, but I didn’t realize. I entered thinking everyone was crazy.”

Soon after the blog post, Le Fey received anonymous hate messages on her blog.

“I’ve had people tell me that I’m fat, toothless, gypsy, dumb, groupie – all types of stuff. That my music sucks, that I only play one chord. It doesn’t even bother me. Maybe someone I cared about said that, but if you don’t have a name you are just making me inspired more to keep doing what I do.”

Given the Foxygen turmoil, a breakup with France and the death of a close friend, Le Fey had hit personal lows. Despite that, she and her former beau worked together on Globelamp recordings this past summer, capturing her lo-fi spirit on an eight-track recorder.

“We are both not that technical of people,” she admits. “We are more creative. (Recording) was a little frustrating at times. He also wanted a lot of control over the songs. That’s cool, but they were my songs, so I wanted to be involved in mixing. We had a lot of good intents, but it was hard because we had no one helping us.”

In the end, the process made them both stronger as musicians and led to a four-tune EP, Stardust, available on her website. Back in Orange County now, Le Fey plans to take those recordings, remix them and put out a full-length album on vinyl. She also hopes to put a band together in the procss.

“I like the simplicity of stuff in the ’60s. It’s not Auto-Tuned. It’s not all these noises. The feelings remind me of California. Globelamp is the connectivity of everything, the merging of 21st century technology with the earth connected to it. A lot of the songs are about being strong in a world that wants you to be fake, and to be honest and a warrior.” - OC Register

Elizabeth Le Fey, aka Globelamp, was a touring member of Foxygen last year when she took to Tumblr to expose the turmoil that existed between her then-boyfriend Sam France and bandmate Jonathan Rado. Considering that act's near-demise, she's been called their "Yoko."

But for the moment, that's all history. Last night Globelamp played The Echo, celebrating the re-release of Star Dust, her full-length album produced by France (originally a five-track EP), which now includes six additional tracks. France removed his name off Star Dust - it was a bad breakup.

Le Fey, a Mission Viejo-native who now lives in Culver City, wore for her performance a goth-inspired burial dress.

The stage was illuminated by tiny star-lights and two actual globe lamps.

The lack of a band just added to the beautiful loneliness of her words and spellbinding voice - which has a manic quality that shifts between a shivering falsetto and the forcefulness of Grace Slick.

She opened the set with "Warrior," a magical trip that sounds a bit like Cassie Ramone gone solo.

Unfortunately, her reverb-heavy guitar seemed to flood her vocals - just too much echo.

Still, Le Fey managed to mesmerize the local crowd, which included her mom and local producer Joel Jerome (Babies on Acid/Cherry Glazerr), who was absolutely giddy when she played "Washington Moon."

It's a song that never made it onto Star Dust, but has the serene-yet-restless nature of her sound, which blends '60s folk with Syd Barret-tinged psychedelia. "Washington Moon" touches on Le Fey's dual love-affair with California and Olympia, WA, where she interned at K Records in 2010 and began her musical journey.

The fourth song and perhaps the highlight was "Daddy's Gone," the hardest rocker of the set. It included a guitar-riff that sounded like a gypsy-folk reinterpretation of Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky." The song itself, however, is quite the opposite of Greenbaum's inspirational anthem; it seems to unleash Le Fey's sinister side. She seems most comfortable on the stage when she sings, "Daddy's gone / here I come / like a freight train or a loaded gun / it doesn't matter if you lock your doors / it doesn't matter if you don't want more / you shouldn't have let me in."


To close the show, Le Fey performed a stripped-down version of "Witch House," again highlighting her surprising vocal range. "Witch house is your house," she repeated, "witch house is my house." The song - and the evening - had everything you'd expect from a Globelamp show, sans actual witchcraft, which she saves for her personal life.

Le Fey currently lives with a friend who breeds black window spiders and chickens. True story. - LA Weekly

istening to Globelamp aka Olympia-based songwriter Elizabeth le Fey is akin to viewing the world through a kaleidoscope from every side: all senses and synapses firing at once, every color comprehended, every pattern considered. It’s like being on drugs all the time.

And yet underlying her free-flowing folky psychedelia is treachery and pain, seething anger and a righteous commitment to speaking the truth. She may sport a flower crown and pose coquettishly in heart-shaped sunnies, but woe betide those who’d dismiss le Fey as a harmless hippie chick—Globelamp is a full on Fairy Queen, the kind that spits out swarms of wasps and turns men to trees.

Globelamp’s last tape, the psych-folk inflected Stardust, was a meandering, gossamer-thin collection of tunes recorded over several months that showcased Le Fey’s quirky song structure (rife with abrupt changes in tone and tempo, as if traditional chord progressions are too provincial to contain the enormity of le Fey’s interior life,) knock-out lyrical talents, and distinctive vocals. “Master of Lonely,” a new track from her upcoming record The Orange Glow, isn’t radically different from anything else you’ll find in Globelamp’s oeuvre: the song is sad, the guitar tone crystalline, and the vocals turned right up so you don’t miss a syllable of le Fey’s wordy, meaningful lyrics. Yet le Fey has grown more focused, more controlled. Her arrows are now laced with venom, and her aim is true. The highlight is le Fey’s Stevie-Nicks-Meets-Donovan voice, which zips up and down the musical scale, from gutter to stars and back again, without losing any of its porcelain delicacy. During the chorus le Fey almost duets with herself, growling the first half of a line and then finishing up in a higher register, a fallen angel whispering a curse in your ear: “I know what you’ve done, it doesn’t matter what you tell anyone.” - Lo-Pie

In the above photo, taken by Californian eccentric Hobbes Ginsberg, Elizabeth le Fey may look not unlike a demented maiden from some ergolinic nightmare, although the music she produces under the Globelamp moniker is positively dreamy regardless. She released her début full-length Star Dust, recorded in cahoots with Foxygen’s Sam France, last summer, and has since issued a number of stand-alone songs, as well as a ‘Covers Album’ that heard her idiosyncratically recreate tracks originally recorded by the rather disparate, if commensurately iconic likes of Elliott Smith and Vashti Bunyan (to whom she may be compared musically), and Lana Del Rey (with whom she perhaps has more in common with phenotypically). However, evocative of an Olympia, Washingtonian analogue of Serafina Steer above all (albeit by way of something considerably more intoxicating than bloody moth balls), it’s Washington Moon that we’re wanting to shed light on this evening. Because sweet, if never sickly, this is irreproachably kooky stuff; the sort of stuff that rendered Joanna Newsom’s The Milk-Eyed Mender so totally arresting to begin with. “I want a California sun and a Washington moon/ In the same room, at the same time” le Fey so longingly, if a little indelicately sings, in turn lamenting: “I can’t be in two different places/ Although I’ve tried.” And while her ineluctable humanness may belie, or rather belittle her bewitching exterior, Washington Moon proves truly hexing all the same… - Dots and Dashes

Elizabeth Le Fey is the folky fairy angel of your dreams. She’s toured as a member of Foxygen, opened for one of her musical idols, Laura Jane Grace, is in the middle of getting a college degree, and now, while fronting Globelamp, Le Fey is ready to take the industry by storm. 2014’s Stardust has been receiving rave reviews and is available through Bandcamp. If you’re lucky enough, you can catch this lo-fi indie goddess in a city near you soon. We had the opportunity to chat with the rising songstress about her influences, touring and who her ideal duet would be with; take a look. - Music Fest News

Foxygen's rise over the past year has been accompanied by some speedbumps along the way. Today, former touring member Elizabeth Fey shared a revealing post on Tumblr giving her take on drama the group has dealt with since she began performing with them in September 2012.
Fey's post details her move from the Olympia, Wa., house show scene to life on the road with Foxygen, and ultimately focuses on a divide in the band, specifically between core members Sam France (who is Fey's boyfriend) and Jonathan Rado. "It was strange meeting [Rado] and knowing they were supposed to be a 'duo' but there was no friendship at all," she writes, "just contracts that needed to be fulfilled."
Fey writes:
At the end of the UMO tour Rado and Shaun blamed all the problems in Foxygen on me, I was the perfect scape goat: the only girl, a new member, a loud opinionated female. Rado said things like I was “unprofessional" which is just a joke. I am unprofessional while Shaun Fleming was/is hitting on teenage girls all the time online, Joe just got jailed on the last tour for being drunk, and Rado couldn’t even tell me any of his problems himself.
According to Fey, Rado made France remove his 2012 solo album Star Power from the internet, but then surprised the rest of the band by announcing his own solo LP.
Fey ultimately says that she and France are starting a new band:
[Rado] was threatened by Sam and I, saying it was, “The Sam and Lizzie show". Well we are going to start our own band. It sickens to me to see how Sam has been walked all over. He isn’t the type of person to plot out things or think about business, he is just a real musician who is an amazing songwriter. I don’t think he was ready for all the craziness that being a popular band gives you...
Hopefully Sam and Rado can learn how to compromise and be good friends again. I’d even try to be Rado’s friend again if he genuinely cared or was sorry, but he isn’t. Despite everything, I love Sam a lot. He is an amazing song writer who will continue to make inspiring music. I really like Foxygen the music, just have some problems with the members. I really do wonder if anyone other than Sam and Justin believe in things like peace & magic.

Despite this, the band's publicist confirms that Foxygen is not breaking up, and are currently recording a follow-up to We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic in Bloomington, Ind. They play New York City tonight and have shows scheduled through the fall. Fey is not currently on tour with them. The band just Tweeted, "ALWAYS, DEFINITELY, BELIEVE THE INTERNET." UPDATE: Foxygen's recording activity was misstated by their rep. Although they're not working on a new record yet, Rado is currently working on his next solo album, the followup to his forthcoming Woodsist LP.
Read our interview with France and Rado from earlier this year here. Watch Foxygen play "Shuggie" and "Make It Known" at Pitchfork Music Festival last weekend: - Pitchfork