As frustrating as this period of forced stillness was, the grief and setbacks of the past two years also gave Elujay the chance to immerse himself in new sounds. There were other difficulties he doesn't get into in great detail during our interview, including losing his grandmother. 'I lost a shit ton of weight, I was barely eating enough.' 'It felt like a terminal disease,' he recalls with audible unease. He barely even had the stamina to sit up at his desk. Vaccines weren't available yet, and his throat was too sore to even think about singing. During his second bout of illness, in the fall of 2020, he was bedridden for months.

Things got worse when Elujay himself contracted COVID-19, not once, but twice. 'Like just reading all those numbers, it just effed me up.' 'I was just like, 'Why am I making music when there's people just dying in the hospital?' You know?' says the artist, born Ian Jackson, in a recent video interview from his L.A. Not only were his live shows canceled, but witnessing so much suffering paralyzed his creative process. The neo-soul singer and producer, originally from Oakland and now based in Los Angeles, had been on a career upswing when the pandemic swept the United States in 2020. You'd never guess that he's in the process of slowly emerging from two of the darkest years of his life.Ĭircmvnt might be Elujay's most thoughtfully composed project thus far, but the story behind his new album is not so sunny. Dressed in effortlessly cool ensembles of slouchy bellbottoms, silk scarves and crocheted hats, he's hanging out in lush landscapes, spending time with beautiful friends or looking out tranquilly into the Pacific Ocean. In Elujay's latest music videos, he appears through a grainy lens that calls to mind vintage footage of a '70s rock star on his day off.

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