Em Beihold: Pop's Most Honest Shapeshifter
Dark, funny and heartbreakingly good
Tales of a Failed Shape Shifter is the debut album from Em Beihold, and it arrives as something genuinely rare in contemporary pop, a record that sounds exactly like the person who made it. After the breakout success of "Numb Little Bug," Em spent years writing approximately 400 songs, slowly rebuilding her instincts and learning to trust her own voice again.
The result is a 13-track journey through depression, identity, and the particular exhaustion of trying to be everything for everyone. It is bouncy and dark, funny and heartbreaking, and entirely her own.
Creatures, Instincts, and the Language of Being Human
Em has a habit of reaching for creatures when she needs to describe herself. Numb Little Bug. Hot Goblin. Unicorn. She doesn't plan it that way, it's a knee-jerk reaction, a peek into the way her brain reaches for small, unassuming things to carry large feelings. It's also, quietly, the key to understanding why her songwriting connects the way it does. There's no performance of profundity in how she works. Just an honest, almost involuntary reach toward the image that fits.
That instinct extends to how she processes the harder material. Em describes herself as someone with no filter at the piano, levity and humor arrive naturally when she's sitting with something difficult, and she lets them. But she knows when a song needs gentleness instead. "Won't Let Go," written about her grandmother's struggles, goes somewhere quieter and slower. The distinction isn't a creative strategy so much as an emotional one.
The song tells her what it needs, and she listens.
The Album That Took 400 Songs to Find
The story of Tales of a Failed Shape Shifter begins with a block. After "Numb Little Bug" moved fast and far, Em found herself unsure of who she was as an artist. She said yes to too many sessions, too many collaborators, and slowly found she couldn't hear her own voice underneath all of it. So she started saying no, shouldn't we all honestly? A lot of nos, over a long stretch of time, until her instincts came back online.
She wrote around 400 songs in the years that followed. What made the final cut wasn't a question of polish or commercial viability, it was stickiness. The songs that stayed with her, that kept demanding to be finished, that represented the clearest lyrical journey. Some of them, like "Scared of the Dark" and "Lottery," took years to assemble piece by piece. Others came in ten minutes. The tracklist that emerged follows an energy arc that mirrors a mental health journey itself, the highs, the lows, the moments of unexpected lightness.
The North Star of the whole project turned out to be "Lottery." Once that song unlocked, the rest of the album followed.
Bouncy Piano Music and the Artists She Grew Up On
The reference points are specific and worn with affection: Regina Spektor, Fiona Apple, Sara Bareilles, Feist, Kate Nash, Lily Allen, Lene Marlin. The early 2000s world of female singer-songwriters who led with piano and didn't apologize for being strange or funny or too much. She grew up on that music and, for a long time, didn't quite let herself make it. Tales of a Failed Shape Shifter is where she finally did.
"Unicorn" is the track she believes would most surprise her seven-year-old self, not because it's unexpected, but because it's exactly the kind of music she always loved and took this long to actually write. "Van Gogh," meanwhile, is the one she thinks her younger self might not have believed she was capable of. The Van Gogh metaphor runs deeper than the song title: she sees in that story the particular tragedy of someone extraordinarily talented who could never recognize their own worth. It's a feeling she understands.
The "bouncy piano music" she once felt insecure about is now the thing she's leaning into hardest. It's the differentiator she was hiding, and the decision to stop hiding it is what makes this album feel like a arrival.
What Comes Next
Em is heading into a May tour and, by her own description, she's done cosplaying as a pop girl she isn't. She'll be at the piano. She'll be herself. She's been handmaking merch, unicorn necklaces among them and preparing visual content that captures what she calls the "whimsy" of the songs. A fairy tale quality that emerged without her forcing it, once she stopped trying to impose a concept on the project.
Outside of music, she lives near her parents, loves her cat, and describes her hobbies as "grandma crafts." She has stepped away from chasing industrial importance and is focused, plainly, on being happy. For those feeling burnt out, creatively, professionally, personally, her advice is just to step back from everything. A conversation with Chappell Roan about the book Essentialism helped her re-evaluate what actually matters.
Tales of a Failed Shape Shifter is many things: a document of understanding and overcoming depression, a home to a sound she always loved, a conversation with herself that reads like a journal entry.
But more than anything, it's the sound of someone who finally stopped shapeshifting and bloomed, learning to love what was underneath.
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