Elle King still has yet to show everything that she can do, even as the buzz is growing as fast as her renown.
Elle King still has yet to show everything that she can do, even as the buzz is growing as fast as her renown. (RCA Records)

Elle King has one of those voices that squeaks when she gets to a certain level of power or volume -- on her breakthrough 2015 single "Ex's and Oh's" and her latest album "Shake the Spirit," she has a way of building to a vocal crescendo that suggests Adele, Sia or Merry Clayton in the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter." But the 29-year-old singer has yet to show everything she can do. "My voice would do this weird thing. My voice would vibrate, and this ball of energy would come up. I'd never experienced this in my life," she says. "My teeth would chatter. "

Those otherworldly moments, on unreleased "banjo spiritual songs," happened just a few times while she was in a Denton, Texas, studio, laying down tracks for "Shake the Spirit." "They're like deep-seated songs from within me," she continues, by phone from Houston. "This transcendental thing happened. I can't explain them. They will be released at some point."


For a brief period, the clever, playing-on-words "Ex's and Oh's" seemed poised to turn King into a one-hit wonder. But "Shake the Spirit" suggests she is just beginning. She wrote the whole album in a rush of what she recently said was "many manic nights of songwriting," and there are moments of both great strength and poignant vulnerability -- on "Baby Outlaw," she turns her tooth into a bullet to inflict damage onto a nemesis, and on "Naturally Pretty Girls," she laments that "nature wasn't kind to me." She croons and broods throughout the album, and she frequently finds a deeper vocal gear, like on the talky gospel finale "Little Bit of Lovin'."

"I've always had a really big voice, but I really learned a lot about myself making this album. I was surrounded by people who didn't put a glass ceiling on me," she says, in a 20-minute interview. "They wanted to help me explore every bit of my spirit and capabilities. They didn't judge me if I went for something. A lot of new sounds came out of me in this recording process."

King wrote "Shake the Spirit" after a tumultuous period, beginning in early 2016, when she married Scotsman Andrew Ferguson, whom she'd encountered in a hotel lobby while on tour. In April 2017, the Los Angeles Police Department had arrested Ferguson for felony domestic abuse, after he reportedly attempted to strangle King in her Los Angeles home. The album, part rock 'n' roll, part R&B and part classic-western-movie soundtrack, has the rocky feel of a messy relationship, sometimes reflective and melancholy, other times disturbingly explosive.

"I wasn't focused at all. I just was going through a hard time. I don't know if you've ever gone through something that controls your whole life -- I couldn't escape from it," she says. "The only thing I had on my mind was this heartbreak I was going through. I couldn't draw from a sunny day. I felt like I was drowning from this time period. I felt like that's all I could really write about."

King conspicuously won't say who the album is about -- "it's open to interpretation and people can assume or think whatever they want" -- but she acknowledges it's based on real events.

After she wrote the songs, she introduced them to her longtime band, The Brethren, and relocated briefly to Denton to record them at the Echo Lab Studio. She has told reporters she was strung out on various drugs and alcohol during that time, and she drove her straighter bandmates crazy, but she eventually found a therapist to help treat what she identified as post-traumatic stress disorder. "Honestly, I can't remember too much of it. It was a very crazy time," she says of the recording process. "It was a very therapeutic thing for me -- I allowed the songs to come through and judged them later, and saw where they fit, or what the boys thought."

King is the daughter of London King, an actress and model, and "Saturday Night Live" and "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo" comedian Rob Schneider. They divorced in 1990, and her mother and maternal grandparents brought her up in Southern Ohio. She briefly attended the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and learned the banjo, one in a series of instruments she has painstakingly taught herself to play, including, most recently, the bass, which helped her write more grooving songs for "Shake the Spirit." Her relationship with her father was distant, and she has criticized him as a "workaholic," but the two have reconciled in recent years.

In interviews, King has fondly discussed her father, recalling his recurring "SNL" character Tiny Elvis. ("My dad does, hands-down, the greatest Elvis impression that anyone has ever done.") But she speaks about him cautiously. "I fought any advice my dad could give me for years and years. Now I do listen to him. Regardless of what I may want to believe, he may know something about performing," she says. "I learned a lot from my dad, but I really do pave my own course."

Steve Knopper is a freelance writer.


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When: 7 p.m. Sunday

Where: Aragon Ballroom, 1106 W. Lawrence Ave.

Tickets: $42; 773-561-9500 or www.livenation.com