SIGNED Responsible Friend PLUS Elizabeth And The Catapult Catalog CD Pre-Order Bundles

Bundle includes SIGNED copies of Elizabeth and the Catapult's Responsible Friend CD + sincerely, e and/or Keepsake CD.

Responsible Friend:

Responsible Friend is an album about the ways in which we show up for one another. What does it mean to be a responsible friend — to be there for someone you love without trying to save them? “The first lesson I learned about caregiving,” says Elizabeth, “is that I need to put on my own oxygen mask before I can help anyone else. The next lesson (and the one you won’t find in an airline seat-back) was that no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t take away anyone’s pain. I wasn’t there to fix anyone. I just had to accept them on their own terms.” That philosophy runs throughout the album, with songs about a family member’s passing, a friend living with long COVID, and the shared burden of a society steeped in conflict and injustice. “I realized that everyone I knew, including myself, was being asked to process an enormous amount of grief at an alarming pace,” she says. “Writing these songs became my way to surrender to those experiences and slow down enough to be fully present for the people in my life.”
 
Some of the songs on Responsible Friend are joyful dedications; others feel more like letters Elizabeth wasn’t sure she wanted to send. Taken together, it’s a record about slowing down in a world that keeps accelerating. It’s a commitment to friends, family, and self, at a time when everyone seems to be carrying more than they can reasonably hold. With Responsible Friend, Elizabeth Ziman delivers a record that feels both intimate and expansive, an unflinching reflection on care, grief, and the stuff it takes to keep showing up.

sincerely, e:

sincerely, e was conceived of and recorded in singer-songwriter Elizabeth Ziman's living room as a way to try and reach beyond the isolated bubble of her home to connect with others, during quarantine. It was also a personal reckoning with solitude, helping her explore new layers of herself. This juxtaposition -- the anxiety of loneliness coupled with over stimulation, chaos and the urgency of numerous global crises converging -- is present in so much of her writing as she grappled with connection and existence.

sincerely, e showcases two sides of the same Elizabeth and the Catapult coin: thoughtfully peppered through the album are intimate, live, solo-piano songs that tremble, raw, with the intimacy of their making; the other half, songs that required a larger sound, fully display Ziman’s film scoring and composition background. Producing tracks from her home provided new opportunities to work remotely with a few talented friends and the decision to explore rhythm without percussion, proved to be a constraint that enabled her lyrics to properly breathe. With the desire to connect at the core of this collection of songs, lush background vocals prominently express sincerely, e’s “together, alone” sound - a symptom and product of the time in which she, and we, find ourselves.

Keepsake:

Produced by Dan Molad (Lucius) & featuring collaborations with Richard Swift (The Shins).

Elizabeth Ziman, who performs as Elizabeth and the Catapult, is a critically acclaimed singer/songwriter from New York, living and working in Brooklyn. She’s toured with the likes of Sara Bareilles and Kishi Bashi; collaborated with with Esperanza Spalding, Gillian Welch, Blake Mills and Ben Folds; scored, with Paul Brill, a variety of international award-winning documentaries including Trapped, a Peabody winner; and won the 2015 Independent Music Award for Songwriting, Folk category. Her songs have been featured in national television campaigns for Google, Amazon, Sky TV, and “So You Think You Can Dance”.

Always writing, Elizabeth has narrowed her vast collection of previously unrecorded material down to her fourth full-length studio album Keepsake, produced by Dan Molad (Lucius) and featuring collaborations with Richard Swift (The Shins). Her most personal and cohesive record yet, Keepsake is about nostalgia and transformation, hope tempered with regret—it’s a distillation of her experience with memories over time shaping her perspective on reality.