Elizabeth Moen/Photo: Alexa Viscius
Chicago musician Elizabeth Moen had a finished album and what looked like a record deal that would finally push the project into the world—then the funding disappeared. Before the contract became official, the label learned from its parent company that budget cuts were coming, and the deal fell apart. After working as a musician for more than ten years, self-releasing several albums, seeing some streaming success with a song, and then having this record deal offered then retracted, Moen is open about how intense the disappointment felt. “Coming to the realization this year that even though I’m good at this, and I can put on a good show, and I’ve put in the ten thousand hours in songwriting—it’s still not working,” she says. “This dream that I thought I wanted, just making enough money from music to pay my bills, it just wasn’t working.” Thankfully, Moen has no interest in shelving the album. Her new single, “Renaissance Man,” will be released June 16, and she plans to put out the full record, “Fields on Fire,” by the beginning of next year, with or without traditional label support.
Sure, it’s always been hard to make it in music, but as the industry grapples with shifts that are putting intense strain on independent musicians, labels and venues, Moen’s experience is one of many examples of how the landscape is becoming more precarious for local music scenes. In an email exchange with New York Times music business reporter Ben Sisario, I ask him about what was really going on with independent labels today. “There may still be a lot of small labels, but ‘independence’ is vanishing,” Sisario says. “Once upon a time, there was an infrastructure that existed outside the major-label system, or at least was not dependent on it: indie labels, college radio, record stores, magazines, venues, etc. [Musician] Damon Krukowski has written about how it was possible to have a career that was supported largely within this system. That’s pretty much gone now. The majors learned a long time ago that they could juice their market-share positions by building out whole ‘indie distribution’ branches like Virgin (Universal), Orchard (Sony) and ADA (Warner). Universal has expanded this with Downtown, and Sony with AWAL. So even artists who are nominally independent (they own their masters, control their careers) are still part of the major label system and would suffer if they left it.”
The timing of these discussions felt strangely fitting. In the same week I first listened to Moen’s soon-to-be-released single, I had started reading music journalist Erin Osmon’s new book “Won’t Back Down: Heartland Rock and the Fight for America,” which describes the politically and economically anxious landscape that shaped artists like Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty in the 1980s, and the sonic similarities between their music and Moen’s is undeniable. Osmon, who lived and worked in Chicago for many years, writes that “heartland rock’s story is of a distinct place in time when America was in the midst of rapid and unsettling technological, social and political change. In the hands of contemporary musicians, its legacy is also still unfolding.” Moen’s country-tinged indie rock sound and observational songwriting belongs to that lineage aesthetically and emotionally.
Moen has always written lyrics that reflect her personal experience, like growing up in a small town in Iowa and living in Chicago since 2020. In her single, “Renaissance Man,” she steps away from her usual autobiographical voice to put on a persona. When she and I begin to discuss the single, I start to ask, “So this song is from the perspective of—” She jumps in: “a Chicago fuckboy. You know, they’re everywhere,” she laughs. “It’s also not just men,” she adds. “Anyone is susceptible to being a bad person. And sometimes you grow out of it.” In the song, she inhabits the voice of a self-mythologizing guy too absorbed in maintaining his own bad boy image to be a decent partner or friend. “Well if I say I’m bad, baby it’s true / It’s the only time I’ll tell you the truth,” she sings in the chorus. There’s more humor than resentment in this song, which Moen says represents an amalgamation of people she’s known and dated. In a few broad strokes, she brings to life a familiar character and gives us permission to roll our eyes and laugh at this common, absurd experience of dating in one’s twenties and beyond.
Elizabeth Moen/Photo: Alexa Viscius
As the song opens, rich acoustic guitar strums are met with the grittier distortion of electric guitar in a country-meets-rock tone. That sound is in Moen’s vocals, too, which have a full-blooded strength that often tapers into a gentle twang. Her sharp lyrics are a strong reason to draw a connection between her and heartland-rock greats of the past—that and she’s been known to play whole sets covering Springsteen’s songs—but the industry conditions she’s working in are different from the conditions of that era. Though Springsteen, Petty and Mellencamp emerged during a time of radio monoculture and technological advancements that reshaped the music business, today musicians like Moen are navigating an industry fragmented in new ways. Streaming, corporate consolidation and the rapid rise of AI are changing the already fragile economics of being a working musician.
Until recently, Moen had hoped the record deal would provide the support needed to properly master, distribute and promote her new album. Not only did that deal fall through, but other revenue streams she might have relied on have fallen away, too. Moen says sync licensing placements—songs used in television and film—used to occasionally provide the kind of payout that she could use to finish a record or fund a tour. Now those opportunities are fewer and farther between because AI-generated music is increasingly being used to fill those slots cheaply. She has also done voice acting gigs in the past, but that work, too, is less frequently available because AI is being used instead.
She describes the ways that she sees these shifts affecting Chicago’s indie rock scene, with musicians experiencing greater stress and having to work harder to network and find ways to make a living. “With fewer opportunities happening for musicians, especially lower-level, middle-class musicians, there’s this scarcity mindset,” Moen says. But in the fallout of her almost-record deal, she recognized that she did want to keep going, and she wanted to lean further into the local music community. Ahead of a scheduled performance at Do Division Street Fest in Wicker Park, she played a free show at the Empty Bottle. “It was a chance to reset and remember why we do it—because it’s fun and we love music,” Moen says. “And I think a lot of people are in a place of resetting.”
In the dim light of the Empty Bottle and the buzzing crowd at Do Division, Moen is easy to spot on stage, with her strawberry-blonde Botticelli curls and classic red lipstick. Her band for these recent shows—Tristan Huygen on guitar, Augustus Martini on bass, and Wesley Toledo on drums—is made up of some of the many local musicians she has collaborated with in the few years she has lived in Chicago and embedded herself in the music scene here. That sense of community feels increasingly central to how Moen thinks about survival as a musician. Even if the old dream of “making it” feels increasingly unstable, the music itself and the communities built around it still matter.
