Elle King has learned a lot about life and love amid the coronavirus pandemic.
While speaking with 360aproko via Zoom this week, the 31-year-old singer (and daughter of Rob Schneider) explained how staying at home the past few months has impacted everything from her relationship with boyfriend Dan Tooker to her new EP, Elle King: In Isolation.
“For the first half of quarantine, I was pretty alone, and then my boyfriend joined me,” King told Denny Directo. “And we were totally, like, on top of each other. So for me, my escape was I would come into my music room and I would just make music for like, 11 hours.”
“Honestly, it’s amazing that we’re still in a relationship,” she joked. “My dad, on Father’s Day, brought up a really great point. He was like, ‘Elle, you were married [to Andrew Ferguson] and you never spent this much time with him.'”
View this post on Instagram
9 whole months with this wonderful man. Year of the Dragon, beast of love, darling Dan ❤️???❤️ @tattooker
A post shared by Elle King (@elleking) on Jun 9, 2020 at 3:35pm PDT
King confirmed that this has been “the most time” she’s ever spent with a partner, admitting that there’s been “a lot of testing moments” during quarantine. “It can 100 percent break a relationship,” she shared, “but for us, it just made us stronger.”
King told ET that Tooker’s Riverside Tattoo shop recently re-opened, so he’s currently back in Boston for the time being.
“I know that he’s so, so happy to be working again, and doing his craft. Don’t tell him, but I’m not minding,” she confessed. “I used to hate having to FaceTime with him, because I missed him so much. Now I’m like, ‘Great! This is our scheduled time, I’ll talk to you now.'”
View this post on Instagram
Who knew a phone call would have changed my life. Coincidences are for a reason. I’ve realized this with my never ending love I grow for you. Happy 9 months to the love of my life. Ecstatic for a million more! @elleking ❤️
A post shared by Dan Tooker (@tattooker) on Jun 9, 2020 at 4:23pm PDT
Meanwhile, King has been keeping busy with her own work, pulling together a three-track EP that she says was inspired by this unique time in our world. “I didn’t really know what else to do, and a lot of different times in my life when things were hard, I was like, ‘Well, OK, I guess I’ll have to make a record,” she explained. “Or I have to make a collection of songs.”
“My [usual] routine and my schedule is, you know, I wake up on a tour bus. There’s a van waiting to take me to the hotel to shower. I go to the gym. I get an hour to myself. Do a meet and greet, eat some dinner, play a show. Do it all again,” she continued. “And I got super, super accustomed to that. So now I’m home and I’m like, ‘OK, dishes are piling up, and umm, how do you do laundry?'”
King said that quarantine has certainly “changed” her in a million different ways.
“I had to really dig deep and I had to push through a lot of my fears, which is an important thing for anyone to do,” she shared. “And I came out on the other side a much freer, a much more grounded person. I started taking guitar lessons. I was like, OK, if I have all this free time, like, why don’t I come out of this not only the best version of myself, but a better musician? A better person, a better songwriter, a better friend.”
As for new music, King admitted she had some hesitations about putting out an EP that was made from the comfort of her home.
“I was scared about putting this stuff out because I was like, I am not a vocal engineer. I am not a tech. I have a $300 mic here,” she said. “I’m [also] not a great piano player and I’m not going to fly out my keyboardist. They’re like, ‘Elle you have to play.'”
“I will look back, hopefully, on these collections of songs … and it’s going to be just another beautiful reminder of the time that I spent in this home,” she added.
