How Eli Went Viral on TikTok and Found Fans in Doechii and Meghan Trainor (Exclusive)

If you’ve been perusing TikTok over the past few months, perhaps you needed to immediately stop your scroll when snippets of songs like “Marianne” and “Girl of Your Dreams” from Eli hit your feed. With her Myspace-era-like recordings, wind-swept waves and a pop star headset, the 24-year-old singer-songwriter has not been shy about her ambitions to be pop’s next “it girl” — or the next “Stage Girl” — on the social media platform.

Between her affinity for a tilted fedora a la Imogen Heap in the album artwork for Frou Frou’s Details and Britney Spears’ Blackout to her soulful synth-pop a la Dream and Christina Milian and The X-Factor and American Idol-inspired visuals, Eli’s vision is crystallized as a throwback to the heyday of Y2K-era pop, with her own singular twist.

“It’s what I fell in love with as a kid,” Eli giggles over Zoom from her apartment in Los Angeles. “Maybe I didn’t realize it subconsciously, but it’s scratching that itch for me, too. It’s inner child-y. It just feels so good.”

While Eli’s TikTok takeover may be her first introduction to many fans, her pop star dreams have been long in the works. Eli, who is transgender, grew up in Norfolk. Mass. with supportive parents where she attended church every Sunday. But worship music wasn’t what captivated her — instead, it was the Boston radio station Kiss 108.

“I was very much a kid who just locked themself in their bedroom and then was obviously forced to leave at some times, go to school, and go to church and soccer. But I was a musical… weirdo, kind of bedroom kid,” she recalls.

From an early age, Eli yearned to entertain. At family cookouts, she would stand on the table and sing songs from The Wiggles. “My dad would be like, ‘Shut the f— up,'” she quips.

But Eli reveled in the idea of commanding a room and giving people a show. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is exactly what I want to do.’ So, it’s definitely cliché. I’ve always wanted to be a rock star,” she recalls.

Along the way, Eli’s grandpa became responsible for helping her build her music gadget collection with a yearly Walmart jaunt. “Once a year, we could go to Walmart and pick something out. The first time, I picked out a First Act guitar, like the little tiny baby guitar, So, thanks, Grandpa. Rest in peace,” she recalls. That also included her boombox, where she would listen to her Katy Perry and Avril Lavigne CDs.

When she wasn’t in school, Eli spent her time viewing music videos from her biggest influence —Mariah Carey — and Spears, learning that making a living from music was possible. She was also enthralled by Ariana Grande and her connection to her fans amid the rollout of her earliest singles, including 2011’s “The Way.” “She was doing a thing when the song came out and was liking everyone’s posts, and I was one of the likes,” Eli exclaims. “I have that screenshot on an iPad somewhere.”

As a vocalist, she’s an admirer of Jazmine Sullivan, and she went through “a huge Tori Kelly phase.” But it’s Rihanna’s 2008 album Good Girl Gone Bad: Reloaded, which featured the hit “Disturbia,” that “shifted my brain.” “I was terrified of [the “Disturbia”] music video, but I couldn’t look away,” she laughs. “She’s a goblin or something. Her eyes are rolling back. I was 8 years old, believing in the Illuminati and looking up Illuminati takes.”

In her early teens, Eli found fame on Vine singing covers, and by 16, she began songwriting. The following year, Eli wrote a song that was pitched to AJ Mitchell, who was signed to Epic Records. “That was the first moment where I was like, ‘Oh wow, you can do this,'” she recalls. Soon, Eli went on to study Recorded Music at NYU before dropping out in 2023 and relocating to Los Angeles in pursuit of her dreams.

“I said, ‘I’m going to get a record deal,’ and I actually did, somehow. I don’t know what I did,” she laughs. It just so happened that a song she wrote in college while studying abroad in Berlin — “Casper” — ended up landing Spotify’s New Music Friday treatment. “I think that [placement] made the industry see it,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s working.'”

In L.A., Eli spent her time in songwriting sessions, partying, hiding in her bedroom and scouring the internet. But the same year she left college and switched coasts, she signed to Mark Ronson’s Zelig Records in partnership with RCA Records.

A self-proclaimed “stan of pop music making pop music,” Eli crafts colorful ditties from her purest love of the genre. It’s what’s not only driven her songwriting so far, but also the entirety of her forthcoming Stage Girl album. “A lot of it is about exploring what’s in between your dream and who you are in the moment,” she explains. “We say a lot of the time ‘pop ambition’ around this project, because you can feel that I made it in my bedroom.”

In May, Eli debuted her first single, “Marianne,” which to her felt “timeless.” “It had that classic ambition to feel like a contemporary song that you could hear 30 years ago or you could hear 20 years from now,” recalls Eli. To her, it captured the sweeping sounds of Prince and Michael Jackson — and it was exactly what she had been chasing.

The following month, she released “Girl of Your Dreams,” which went viral on TikTok and “the millennials were eating up.” Eli had taken the pressure off of herself in terms of reaching the most people; she just wanted to find one new person who might add the song to their playlist. But it was affirming for her to have so many people latch onto the track. “It was like, ‘Okay, wait, maybe I tapped into something,'” she explains.

And she seemingly has. Eli has earned social support from countless musicians, including Doechii (“It meant a lot when she saw ‘Marianne'”), Meghan Trainor (“She’s such a songwriter and such a pop writer, so that felt amazing”) and Zara Larsson (“I’m a really big fan of ‘Midnight Sun.’ Crazy that she found me on her feed, too”).

Eli has continued immersing herself in the glittery glamour of pop, leaning into the aspirational aspect of songwriting. Her latest single, the empowering, breathy number “Like a Girl,” which was crafted on her bedroom laptop, is emblematic of that. “It feels like there’s this desire for it to take me to the top, stand on stage with Britney Spears and go to the MTV Video Music Awards,” she says of the song.

The track, penned after “Girl of Your Dreams,” is unsurprisingly inspired by early ’00s Carey-meets-’90s Janet Jackson, and sounds like it could be “a 2020 COVID hit.” On “Like a Girl,” Eli wanted to lean into “this sassy, sexy persona” that she had been embracing as she was getting over a phase of wanting “straight male validation.”

“It’s kind of like what I love about Blackout or what I love about some of those eras where it’s just diva down,” says Eli.

Beyond the music, Eli has drawn in listeners by creating a conceptual world that pays homage to the heyday of reality music competition shows. Earlier this summer, she shared a “tringle” — or trio of singles — that featured “Girl of Your Dreams,” as well as “Fortunately 4 U” and “God Bless the BFA,” which she turned into a trio of music videos that chronicled her journey of self-taping to auditions on the faux competition show, “Stage Girl.”

“The first time I ever sang [publicly] was in my Norfolk, Mass. talent show in the auditorium, and it was terrifying, and I wore the ugliest khakis ever. That’s when I saw the route of music, or the route of being discovered…you go on a talent show,” she says.

For Eli, being a spectator of shows like American Idol and The X Factor was heart-wrenching, but they were “so integral” to her passion for the art of music.

“I always had the idea of either I was going to end up on one of them, or I was going to make my own…so I made my own,” she explains, adding with a wink: “I haven’t heard back yet since ‘Girl of Your Dreams,’ but I’m hoping that I get on the show.'”

On a personal level, Eli’s pursuit of pop stardom has also been key to helping her connect to her authentic self.

“It’s been the epitome of presence in my body and presence in my identity and owning the little joyful things, like loving a fedora or loving a little sequined scarf…these little things that brought me so much joy as a kid,” she explains. “And now I’m taking it into a time where I’m scared to exist sometimes and scared of what the future means for my community. It’s been this way to be like, ‘I’m going to be radically joyful, let that be my super power and let me channel my fear into making a joyful song.'”

Now, Eli just wants to own her “freak” as a pop star. “I’m just going to make it feel so obnoxious in all the exciting ways that I love and make insane graphics and colorful crazy things and let it be tacky or let it be seen as camp,” she says of her music.

That includes a one-woman musical this fall in Los Angeles and New York City that will be paired with her forthcoming debut album called Stage Girl. “It’s been really cathartic, joyful, interesting, and weird to write a musical script around an album that was meant to be a pop album,” she explains. “I’m really excited to play that out and get to tell the story of Stage Girl live and in concert, and live and in a one-woman show. It’s giving very when Victorious did Chicago.”

Eli’s grand ambitions don’t end there — she also knows exactly who she’d love to work with in the future. “I want to do a song with Addison [Rae],” she says, adding she’d love to collaborate with Sullivan and Grande. But working with Heap would be a real dream — though it gives Eli pause because of her admiration for her.

“I actually feel like it’s one of those things where it’s too important,” she laughs. “That might go too far. I might wake up from this dream or something.”