‘Productive Pain’: Greta Isaac on the hard-earned growth of her new EP
Greta Isaac’s new EP began with two voice notes: one from years ago, capturing an idea that was frustratedly abandoned, and one from recently, when some higher power—or whatever force governs creativity—brought it back to life.
“I had these chords for ages. I wrote them when I was really young, but I never had the words to write to it, and so I just parked it and forgot about it completely,” Greta Isaac says about ‘Productive Pain’, the project’s title track. It’s the final piece on the release, serving as a kind of epilogue to its emotional journey, seeming to summarise all the feelings that come before.
“The first three songs are just questions. All of them are just me being like, but what if and why? Why did this happen? What did you mean by that? Like, tell me how this works,” she said, “It’s all questions, questions, questions, and then I noticed the other day that ‘Productive Pain’ has zero questions of it, and it’s just sitting in the uncertain and having to be okay with that.”
But ‘Productive Pain’ only became ‘Productive Pain’ right as Isaac was beginning to accept that themselves. Just like the chords, the phrase had been around for a while, and she didn’t know what to do with it. “It was actually something Dodie [her Fizz bandmate, friend and housemate] had written on her wall in a big love heart a couple of years ago, and I always remember reading it and being like, ‘What the hell does that mean?’”
But after a period of intense personal transformation, born out of personal hardship, there was clarity. “I think now it’s maybe this is productive pain. Maybe there can be this huge growth and transformation that can happen in challenging times. I don’t know, but what I do know is that I always need to remember who I am in it and always put that first,” she said as the hard-earned lesson from that period.
Productive pain is a silver lining, a way to appreciate light in the dark, a comforting reminder that at least something good, or even just necessary or helpful, can and will come from struggle. It’s a reminder of the lesson that the two always kind of have to exist in harmony if you want to exist fully. As Isaac beautifully articulates, “There’s all this stuff happening internally, and it feels painful and distressing and confusing and sad, and I’m angry, and it all feels too much, but all that stuff can also go hand in hand with the knowledge that I’m empathetic, and I’m creative, and I’m imaginative, and I’m kind, and so to silence all the sort of distressing parts of me and my life would be to silence a lot of amazing, good things.”
Productive pain is the experience that gets you to that knowledge and the trust in it.
And it seemed that as Isaac was learning that, she was gifted her song back. “I can’t even tell you how much it was almost like the universe was like, ‘now you can write the lyrics. There you go,'” she said, still somewhat awed at the way it worked, “There was something quite magical about that, planting a seed years ago and then finally, having, like, lived through the experience that the song needed to be written about.”
In the story of the two voice notes, the attempt to write the song at 23 and then the demo that would become the song now, that whole journey seems to be heard. “On the voice note from six years ago, I’m mumbling over it. I can hear myself getting kind of impatient and frustrated about not figuring it out. But then the recenter voice note of it, when I’ve written the lyrics to it, It’s just so nice. There are birds in the background, Dodie is making a boiled egg or something in the background. It’s peaceful; the contrast is really nice.”
But everything about Productive Pain, as a project and the process of making the project, feels beautifully reflective of the period that inspired it. To Isaac, the EP feels like a “time capsule” in so many ways. First, the writing saw her trying to figure out her mind in real-time. “I was not sleeping very well. I was going to bed at 5am. I felt like when the rest of the world kind of shuts up, that’s when I feel like I can really tune in to myself. And I think that’s a really nice encapsulation of the project as a whole,” she explained.
“It’s kind of telling everyone else and everything else outside of myself to just quiet down for a second so that I can really listen to what’s going on internally,” she adds. “So I don’t think it was a surprise, really, that a lot of the lyrics and songs came to me through the nighttime.”
The act of writing it, too, during a period of rediscovering and reconvening with herself, was reflective of the period. “They were songs that I’d written the first time on my own in maybe like ten years,” Isaac said. After years of writing with other people and doing sessions with other artists, admitting “the muscle of writing for myself, just me and not looking to anyone else had weakened” as she somewhat lost trust in herself, this EP was a return to listening, solely, to her own voice.
“Maybe this is productive pain. Maybe there can be this huge growth and transformation that can happen in challenging times.”
Greta Isaac
That doesn’t mean she was alone in it, though. Once again reflective of this period in her life, community was key. Fresh off the back of a tour with Fizz, the band she was part of with her friends and frequent collaborators, Orla Gartland, Dodie and Martin Luke Brown, these key figures in both her musical and personal life converged again; this time to basically force her hand. “Orla and Dodie organised it with Pete Miles, who produced this record. They were just like, she needs to record these songs,” she said as her friends stepped in, not only to help her make the project, with Isaac stating, “I think getting to play music with people who know you so deeply outside of music is both really profound and really useful.” But they also further helped her regain that trust in her own work with a gentle push into the studio.
And then comes the actual sound of the thing: the element that Isaac sees herself in most clearly as she purposefully crafted it to mimic the sonic landscape of her mind. “I knew that I wanted it to sound like what was going on in my brain at that time. I really wanted elements that were really beautiful and felt like a relief of some sort. But I also wanted it to feel somewhat distorted and have some tension,” she said.
Again, returning to this idea of productive pain, of necessary darkness for lightness, or struggle and growth going hand in hand, Isaac put that in the songs. “I think when you’re trying to figure yourself out and come to terms with different things, or you’re kind of trying on different identities or different versions of yourself, it is really messy, and you kind of dig through the dirt a little bit. Musically, I just wanted that information to translate.”
And it does. While Isaac declares the project a “mess of an EP”, I’d declare it an opus. Four songs, only 13 minutes long, it is a project to hit play on and listen to from start to finish. As you’re moved through the song, you’re travelling through the mind, viscerally experiencing this stifling process of uncertainty (‘Stuck On The Ceiling’), the struggle to pick out precisely what it is you’re feeling amongst the mess of it (‘I’m sad and I’m angry and I’m scared that you hate me’), the internal battle it causes in yourself (‘Way Too Much’) and then finally, the clarity of acceptance that mess is OK, that this is, or at least eventually will be, ‘Productive Pain’.
