Ebba Rose Will Perform at Porchfest this Sunday at 4PM  

Erin Mitchell has been having a big year. Her project Ebba Rose released their debut album Ebbs & Flows to a packed house at Reverb Lounge this past June. Then the band went on to perform back-to-back festivals, opening the second day of Maha at Stinson Park and then at GRRRL Camp at Falconwood Park. The album features nine songs that represent different eras of Mitchell’s life and singing career. The album has had two singles released from it, the piano-based “All I Wanted” and “Hummingbird,” with its epic build to a full band send-off.

Mitchell began her music career playing in Omaha Blues Society Blues Ed bands before moving on to projects such as Domestic Blend, Magu, and Urn. Ebba Rose started out as a solo project before expanding into a full-fledged band. During a phone conversation, Erin talked about her beginnings, recording Ebbs & Flows, and what is next for her. This interview was done before Maha and Grrrlcamp. Ebbs & Flows is available to stream on Spotify and other streaming platforms.

When asked when she got started in music, Mitchell said, “I got a karaoke machine when I was five, but I started really taking it seriously in school. Concert choir, show choir, any choir you could get into, I started doing Blues Ed and I was in a band called Blues Dilemma for four or five years, then the last year we had a tragedy with our bandmate passing away, and we decided to do an album in her honor as she always wanted to do original music whereas Blues Ed was blues covers. She continues, “I kind of started my first original band, Daisy Distraction, and from there we played all over Omaha wherever we could whenever we could. Then I started singing for Domestic Blend and started playing keys and singing in Magu, and the rest is history.”

Mitchell decided to work on her own music as a solo artist, but not under her own name. She explains, “I started this Urn project that is now Ebba Rose, it was a solo project, but I didn’t resonate with the name as much as I used to.  I did release an EP under that name in an attempt to quiet the noise in 2021 and also managed to snag the Singer-Songwriter Showcase award at the Holland Performing Arts Center, which was super sweet. From there, I wanted to reinvent myself musically and kind of start anew so I started Ebba Rose. It started as a solo project but turned into a full eight-piece band. I guess I just love to be in bands, because I missed the whole band aspect.”

When asked about the origin of the name Ebba Rose, Mitchell stated, “It is from an old story that I heard when I was younger. It’s not the exact name; I kind of morphed it a bit, but I always loved that name when I was young. It just came to me one day randomly when I was wanting to reinvent my sound, really reinvent myself as an artist, and symbolize that with a kind of name change. I have always loved including flowers and names, so that was fitting.”

The recording of the album evolved out of another project she was contributing to, as she explains, “It was recorded with Cody Rathman; it was in his home studio. We didn’t really get started with mine; I was just tracking vocals for his band, Infinite Video, album, but once I heard his production and went through a whole recording session with him, I was like, ‘Wow, can you please record my songs?’ and from there we started recording my songs. She continues, “It was just me and piano and me and guitar, and then he started adding onto it and slowly but surely started forming a whole full band project. It was a super awesome recording with him; we put hours and hours into the album, and it really turned out wonderfully. It was beyond what I could have hoped to imagine.”

There seems to be a theme to Ebbs & Flows, and Mitchell confirmed, “The overall theme is just the ebbs and flows of my life personally, but the listeners’ lives as well. Obviously, I wrote these songs based on my own life and my own personal experiences, I would say that “All I Wanted”, was one of the more tearjerker ones for me; when I practiced it, it was hard not to choke up at certain parts. I took the lessons I was learning and the things I was healing through and experiencing and just put it on paper and let the songs write themselves. I really wanted them to have a theme about my life story so far. With “Beggin”, I included a snippet of one of my old covers that I recorded in my bedroom when I was ten years old; it was a Justin Beiber cover, but we spliced it up to have that little sample and to have Erin’s intro, and then I included “Urns Interlude” to honor that part of my journey and releasing that EP and all of those things, and I thought it was fitting to end on “Ebba’s Outro”. It is really cool to orchestrate an album like that, and I do feel very emotionally attached to all of the songs.”

The album release party took place in June. Mitchell describes the night: “We released Ebbs and Flows on a Thursday at Reverb Lounge. I am glad I chose a Thursday as a lot of my musician friends had things going on with their weekend. We sold out of CDs and merchandise, and releasing “All I Wanted” and “Hummingbird” as singles allowed the crowd to already be familiar with those. There were people singing along, and lighters were out waiving back and forth, and it was a cinematic experience like something out of a movie. It was phenomenal to have that kind of support after dedicating the last year or so of my life to it. It still gets to me without words.

When asked what is next for Ebba Rose and Mitchell, she said, “I mainly want to focus on playing Maha and then Girrrlcamp. I was hoping to get some sort of tour set up in the next year, but being an indie artist, I am definitely looking to outreach with that because I put out the budget for that myself as I am a wedding photographer here in town. I am looking to perform locally and tour and perform the album; we put a lot of work into it.”