Written by Natalie Ingalls | Photo by Laila Holmes
How do you cope when you’ve watched your family deal with multiple near-death experiences, alcoholism and estrangement? For songwriter Tahlia Amanson of Myra Lee, it’s through assuming a persona “similar to Hannah Montana” and laying bare those life-defining moments in song. Capture The Flag, the debut record of the Brooklyn trio, buries the personal in shoegazey guitar and imagery-laden lyrics, resulting in six intimate but expansive tracks.
Amanson grew up in the artsy, nature-driven community of Bolinas a few miles outside of San Francisco. Her dad was friends with Jefferson Airplane as a child and even rebuilt Jerry Garcia’s house. Amanson started writing music on guitar when things got tense at home, and further honed her voice at the Pratt Institute in New York, finding a love for long haiku poetry. After recording some demos, she enlisted friends to flesh out the songs and reached out to producer Calvin Lauber (boygenius, Paramore) to record them. The finished product was her first record Thanks A Million, released under the name Dino Expedition back in 2024.
During that experience, Amanson decided to leave Pratt. “I would rather go into debt over making records than school,” she said. After a lineup change cemented Aiden Velazquez on bass and McCabe Teems on drums, the trio decided to honor their commitment to each other with a name change, finding inspiration in Cat Power’s 1996 record, Myra Lee. The band recorded Capture The Flag in two days in March of last year with producer Jeremy Harris (Fruit Bats, Allegra Krieger).
The record opens with “Corkscrew Drawers,” which Amanson wrote about her mom’s battle with alcoholism, captured in lines like “Found you at the end of a staircase/Face-down and untorn.” It’s a mournful yet assured song, anchored by steady guitars and undulating viola. Amanson intentionally writes without any filler words, creating vignettes that her subject matter could surely read into. But for Amanson, that’s the point.
“Usually, with addiction, you’re in denial a lot. I’ve just found that songwriting has been the only way I’m able to communicate with my parents, how certain things have messed me up,” she said. “Once I started making this music and sending it to them, things started to change for the better. It’s been life changing for me.”
After “Corkscrew Drawers,” the band settles into a dancier alt-rock sound, but Amanson’s lyrics never lose their edge. Penultimate track “Dean” features wavering shoegaze guitar in the intro, notes bending and releasing like the swell of the ocean tide finally hitting a distant shore. Amanson wrote it about her younger sister, Ondine, who almost drowned before she was two years old after a handoff between her mom and other sister went wrong. “Creature of the oceans water/Swam before she even knew how too,” she sings, reflecting on seconds that felt like an eternity until Ondine, whose name derives from a French word meaning “wave,” was finally found and pulled out.
Amanson touches on more family dynamics across the record, with “Magpie” exploring her dad’s tumultuous relationship with his sister, who became a born-again Christian after a shared childhood of abuse (“He didn’t forget/The baggage you kept/Chose faith instead of facing the past”). But she turns inward for songs like “Trapped” and “Ten,” the latter about her experience coming out. Throughout the record, there’s a sense that Amanson is actively reliving her family’s history, square in the middle of the memories of her loved ones, however painful. In “Ten,” she faces herself, but this time she has good news to share. “I think it’s me putting my 20 year old self with my 10 year old self and just being like, hey, I’m here with you,” she said. “See how much you have grown and changed.”
Capture The Flag is out now on all streaming platforms and for purchase on Bandcamp.
