Ellie Flowers: Music is a constant, active force

When Ellie Flowers agreed to join her music teacher’s choir in fourth grade, she hadn’t realized how much influence that would hold in shaping her life from there out.

Ellie Flowers (right) with her friends, Sydney (left) and Emma (middle) after their final high school choir performance. [Photo courtesy of Ellie Flowers]

Her love of music class at that young age was enough to convince her to join that choir, and it would keep her invested through her senior year of high school at Upper Arlington High School, located just outside Columbus, Ohio. That decision led to her meeting her two best friends in high school, Sydney and Emma. It also allowed her to travel to New York City with those friends and her whole choir to sing in a couple cathedrals there and still do the touristy things and see shows.

That passion also saw her start writing her own songs: “I wrote my first song when I was a junior in high school and I actually ended up recording it for my senior year capstone project,” Flowers said. “So somewhere out there there’s a recording of 18 year old me singing this song that was very much written by a 17 year old at the time. I told my roommate about it and she found it on Soundcloud yesterday and I was just like ‘oh no, oh god.’”

Flowers setting up for a gig her senior year of high school. [Photo courtesy of Ellie Flowers]

Even now in college, Flowers still

continues to sing, even if it’s more of a hobby than it used to be. She also plays guitar and says she pretends to know how to play piano. And she continues to write music every few weeks or so, even if it doesn’t necessarily seem to go anywhere.

Coming to Butler in 2018 as undecided, she told herself that was going to find a major that doesn’t have anything to do with music. “I felt like I needed to do something else and explore other options and not have that be my dominate personality trait anymore,” she said.

What she hadn’t realized, was that in her quest to find a non-music related major, she would actually find the major Butler calls Music Industry Studies. The attraction she felt to the program led her to come to terms with the fact that it didn’t quite matter if it was her dominant personality trait.

“So I guess when I kind of decided that this is what I wanted to do," she recalled, "that was the moment I realized that I was like okay, if I actively came into college thinking I’m going to try something that’s not involved in music then I feel like that’s a sign that I’m doing the right thing.”

Now, in her junior year, Flowers is interning at a small label in Nashville called Brooklyn Basement Records. “The whole thing is virtual,” she noted, “which I guess is one good thing that’s come out of the pandemic is that I have that opportunity now.”

She hopes that somewhere in her future she can be an A&R representative for a label so she can bring new artists to light. She wants to be able to use that position to combat one of her biggest gripes of the industry: the fact that it’s ran by straight white men.

“Not that there’s anything wrong with straight white men by any means,” Flowers laughed. “However, there’s also a lot more people in the industry that don’t necessarily reflect that mold. That’s kind of why I really want to go into A&R, is to try to find artists who bring a different perspective to the table and have a different story to tell. Something a little bit different than the guy with the guitar who got lucky and got discovered in a local bar, you know?”

While being an A&R representative may be her dream job, she still feels she could see herself doing something that doesn’t involve music, like PR or marketing, or even something to do with psychology. Although her future may not be super clear to her at the moment, one thing is certain for Flowers:

“I think even if I wasn’t doing something in music, I think I would still have it in some aspect of my life.”

Music has been there for her since she was little. It was always her favorite class, she spent every year from fourth grade to senior year of high school in choir. Flowers even got into musical theatre in middle and high school. And now in college, she’s studying to make a career out of it. “It’s really cheesy but it’s been the most constant thing in my life,” she said.

And that sort of a constant stems beyond her classes. In her day-to-day, she’s always listening to music. Well, she noted that 'always' may be a bit of an exaggeration: “I know I said I listen to music constantly, but if I’m hanging out with people and am really trying to be present with the conversation or when I’m going homework, I can’t, because it’s something that I get almost distracted by,” Flowers said. “My brain can’t split my attention well between something that I need to use my brain for thinking or talking and stuff and listening to music.”

She tends to be an active listener of music, describing herself as someone who analyzes a lot of the stuff that she listens to while she’s listening to it. She points out that, for her, “it’s just kind of one of those things that’s always on my mind, even if I’m not necessarily realizing it.”

While Flowers is open to listening to any kind of music, with the exception she mentions as probably screamo, she finds herself tending to gravitate towards the pop, alternative, rock and indie genres, most notably gravitating to music that tells a story:

“When I’m writing for myself sometimes, I’m definitely a person who’s like the lyrics come first and so I really like a lot of music where it’s very lyrical and I think that’s the kind of thing I pay a lot more attention to,” Flowers said. “Lorde is still one of my favorite artists and I think her music is one of those things where a lot of the artistry is in the words and I think that’s why I like her and a lot of artists like her.”

Music is also how she finds she processes her emotions. Songwriting, for one, has become a healthy outlet for her to do so. “I was just joking about this to someone the other day, a lot of the music that I’ll write for myself I always joke that no one’s going to hear it because it’s basically that I’m writing diary entries,” she said. “Whenever I do write it’s usually about something that’s a very deep emotional thing. Like, not that breakups are really that deep, but stuff like that.”

To Ellie Flowers, music is more than just background noise. It’s something that’s been constant throughout her life, something she wants to see a future in. Her passion for it, while perhaps she didn’t lose it as her dominant personality trait in college like she may have originally hoped, is constantly driving her.

“It’s sort of one of those things where it’s a very active source in my life in that it’s kind of like so present I almost don’t even process that it’s there,” Flowers laughed. "That doesn’t make any sense.”