Eliza Noxon – “What Else”: Living Alone in Your Brother’s Apartment

“I always think about my neighbors when I play / can they hear me now” opens with performance anxiety that immediately reveals itself as something deeper—the kind of self-consciousness that comes from occupying space that doesn’t feel like yours. Eliza Noxon wrote “What Else” alone in a New York apartment filled with her brother’s things during the early pandemic, processing his 2019 death through one of two ukulele songs on Good Monsters with Bad Habits (out February 27, produced by Rilo Kiley’s Pierre de Reeder). The song captures what she describes as “struggling with where I fit in a world where I still felt like he took up so much space,” which explains why the refrain—”I’ll never be you / but I don’t know what else I can be”—reads less like comparison and more like existential vacancy.

Understanding “What Else”

The city becomes haunted geography: restaurants where they shared dumplings, theaters where they snuck into double features, parks where they drank coffee. Noxon literalizes this in the chorus: “When I dream it’s you I see / and I can’t stop / you’re the subways and the trees.” Her brother isn’t just remembered—he’s infrastructure, the underlying architecture that makes the city legible. The problem isn’t grief exactly; it’s that identity itself was constructed through proximity. “I thought I’d never have to know who I was / as long as I knew you / in coffee shops or on the bus / I lived my life through you.”

Noxon added the final section over a year after writing the rest, searching for what she calls “the big, gut-punch emotional clarity moment.” That clarity arrives dark: “I think that the city’s aware that there’s something not there and it wants me dead.” For someone who debuted at twelve with “Hummingbird” on Orange is the New Black, spent a year teaching sea shanties on a Caribbean schooner, and designed her own Brown University major blending performance and sonic exploration, “What Else” documents the collapse of all that accumulated experience into a single question with no answer. The open tunings and Big Thief-influenced arrangements create space, but space is exactly what she can’t fill.

For another track exploring childhood and siblings, check out Ryley Mullins – “Another You”

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