BIZZY Turns Patience Into Payoff

Becoming a writer, practicing medicine, traveling into outer space—most childhood dreams are big ones. For Maryland-born Elizabeth Chiaramonte, the grand vision she had for her adult self was to become an Olympic swimmer. But at 17, she injured her back and everything shifted. Luckily, Chiaramonte also played guitar, so she had a backup plan on standby. Still, making the transition from competitive diver to touring musician didn’t come naturally. “I wasn’t the kid that grew up doing all the music things,” she tells me. “I literally only did what my older sisters did. I started playing guitar when I was 12 purely because my older sister played it. It was always an outlet for me, but it was never, in my mind, something that I took seriously.” After the back injury, her perspective changed and, suddenly, she found the idea of becoming a singer to be compelling. Her turn as the alt-pop artist BIZZY was coming into view.

With nowhere to go but forward and a deck stacked against her, BIZZY still gave her career a go. “I remember telling my family that I wanted to go to Nashville and be a singer, and literally the only time I’d ever sang in front of anybody was at this karaoke bar in Delaware when I was 12. It was “Island in the Sun” by Weezer,” she recalls. “At the time, I almost shit my pants trying to sing in front of people. My family was sitting there getting secondhand embarrassment, it was so bad.” Most kids would be put off by such a bad experience, slowly succumbing to the realization that singing is not the path that’s meant for them. But BIZZY was determined to push on. Sure she wasn’t anywhere near the level she wanted to be, but she knew she had what it took to succeed. She just needed to fix one problem in order to reach her full potential.

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“Every single time I got up on stage, I wanted to do it. I just wanted to be an artist. But I would just shit my pants because I was such a people pleaser. I was constantly thinking about what the crowd was thinking about, and then getting up on stage and trying to process what 80 people at this random bar were thinking. It was just too much for my brain to compute,” she says. “It was a very jarring moment for my family to realize that this is what I wanted to do.”

With the way BIZZY crumbled under the spotlight, her family had no idea how she would succeed as a singer. Still, they supported her dream nonetheless. In 2017, she made the trek to Nashville, Tennessee, enrolling in the music program at Belmont University. It wasn’t long before her perspective changed again: “I realized that everyone there is a savant and has been playing piano since they were two.” Instead of being discouraged by the talent surrounding her, BIZZY decided that there was no better time for her to put her head down and learn. “I realized I had to take a step back and try to write for other people and figure out how to be in a writer’s room. That ended up helping me so much.”

While writing music for other artists wasn’t BIZZY’s dream, it became an integral part of her beginnings. “I remember always thinking that I just wanted to be an artist. But I look back and like, I could not have been an artist without doing four years of pure writing. It helped me learn how to be in a writer’s room with other artists. It also let me be a little sister again. I could look at all the people I was writing with and be like, ‘Oh, I love how they did that,’ or, ‘I hate how this turned out.’ It allowed me to shape my own artist project, so I’m really grateful for those years.”

Still, BIZZY frustrations lingered, and she had to find a space for herself to release stress. One of her favorite ways to unplug then, and now, was to pitch in at a nearby farm in Franklin. “It is the best form of therapy,” she affirms. From training colts to grooming fillys, BIZZY cherished the time she had to connect with animals in her downtime. “Music was such an outlet for me, but because it’s also what I did for work, working at the farm was a good way for me to remember that music was a small part of life. There are other things outside of it.”

BIZZY’s time at the farm encouraged her to meet her biggest fear head-on: a tendency to overthink on stage. “That time at Belmont helped me to step into the world of music, especially when I did these things called ‘writer’s rounds,’” she recalls, referring to events in Nashville where four writers sing round-robin-style in pubs across town. “Those events helped me realize that, when I was up on stage, I was thinking about what everybody else was thinking instead of what I was doing. I realized I needed to shift my awareness. Obviously that takes practice, but I did it enough to where I finally started to be in my own body and have fun.”

Almost five years later and there’s no trace of an overthinker left in BIZZY—one of the most vibrant new voices in alt-pop. “I’m an outgoing person, but getting in front of people was horrifying for me,” she says. “I was always trying to compute what other people were thinking before they completely finished their thought. I just wanted to be liked so bad, but I wanted to be an artist, too. I knew we had to get over this people pleasing thing. It was getting in the way.” After graduating from Belmont in 2023, her song “Anybody” went viral on TikTok and gave her the courage to continue chasing relatable, high-spirited ideas. “I always write from a very real place,” she elaborates. “Anything that isn’t real in life doesn’t inspire me, so it’s all very confessional.”

BIZZY’s sisters might have been the ones who (unintentionally) inspired her to get into music in the first place, but her entire family has played a part in shaping the artist she’s become. Her dad even came up with her stage name. “If you couldn’t tell, I’m wildly ADHD, and my dad always used to say, ‘You’re always so busy,’” she remembers. “BIZZY eventually stuck to the point where I didn’t think Elizabeth was my real name.” Her family later nudged her to make short videos, as part of an ongoing project she calls Bizflix. “This is one of my favorite things happening in my life right now. It has been such a passion project, and it’s funny how it came about,” she says. “When I first signed with Big Loud Rock Records, they wanted to put out a music video for every song I made. I thought that was perfect because, when I write music, all I see is a movie in my head. So we started down that path.”

Later, when TikTok became popular enough, Big Loud Rock revisited the idea, saying they wanted to nix the long videos for short content. “I was distraught. I had written out 20 music videos already and thought this was gonna be the best year of my life. I went into my sister’s room like, ‘They’re cutting the music videos. What am I gonna do?’ She said, ‘What if you still did the music videos, but just cut them into smaller episodes? Each verse could be a part of the music video, and we could make it into a show.’ My dad actually came up with the term ‘Bizflix,’ a knockoff of Netflix, so people knew what I was doing.”

The latest episode of Bizflix accompanies BIZZY’s new single “Make Me Cry”—an ironic track inspired by true events. “I was going through a breakup and was walking down the street one day when I crossed paths with my ex. It was one of those things where he was on the other side of the street and I was on the other, and no part of him had to say hi. But this man sprinted across traffic to come to me. I was like, ‘What do we have to say to each other at this point?’” BIZZY recalls. “It was one of those moments where it felt like he was running in slow motion. He comes over like, ‘BIZZY, it’s so good to see you.’ At that point, I wanted to die. But then he leaves and I’m thinking, ‘I still love you.’ That’s how the concept ‘make me cry’ came to mind. If he had just come over and been such an asshole to me, I would’ve been like, ‘Fuck you, I don’t care about you. I’m so glad we broke up.’ But he came over looking smoking hot and being really sweet, and now I’m back in love with him.”

“Make Me Cry” felt real enough for BIZZY that it poured out of her, both lyrically and instrumentally. “I had the title ‘make me cry’ in my notes after I saw him, but I didn’t really do anything with it for a couple months. Later I was in LA, messing around with my guitar in my hotel room at like one in the morning. I had a session later that day, and I wanted to see if I could come up with something to start with. The chorus fell out in like ten minutes. It was just right there,” she says. Layering those words between BIZZY’s signature fusion of sunny synths and organic instrumentation was a natural next step. “As far as the instrumentation, Ian Walsh, who’s an amazing producer, just understands the kind of line I want to tow between pop and real instruments. We call it ‘analog pop.’ I just love that kind of balance.”

BIZZY Turns Patience Into Payoff

Paste spoke with the alt-pop star about deferred dreams, the tranquil life of a farm hand, and the release of her newest single, “Make Me Cry.”