Inspiration can be sourced from just about anywhere for most artists. But for ill peach, it usually arises out of the seemingly mundane. 

A conversation between coworkers. A bartender quietly enduring another rambling customer. The kind of exchanges most people barely register become something else entirely once they pass through front woman Jess Corazza‘s imagination. Rather than writing from an autobiographical lens, EAVESDROPPING, the band’s latest record (out now) turns outward, building songs from fragments of ordinary lives overheard in passing.

One of the best examples is is track, “ALL DAY I DREAM ABOUT SLEEP (A.D.I.D.A.S),” a song that was a result of a listened in musings of a weary waiter.”For that song specifically,” Corazza says of the song,”it’s based on overhearing a really burnt-out waiter. We all used to work in restaurants, so you’d hear people behind the scenes gossiping. ’That table is such a drag,’ whatever. Just hearing someone be really negative about their day or their job, and thinking, ‘Is this really my life?’”

The song began with that small moment but quickly grew beyond it. “It became about anyone working in the service industry,” she says. “You’d go somewhere else and see a bartender having to sit there and listen to a really drunk person go on and on, and you could just see it in their eyes. They’re like, ‘Kill me. I must get out of this eight-hour shift right now.’”

But, that’s not to say that those moments are recreated word for word. Instead, Corazza treats them as prompts, taking what she hears and reshaping it into something larger. “I had to listen, take whatever snippet I was hearing, and find a way to make it lyrically interesting,” she says. “Just casual conversation.”

That instinct runs throughout the record. Sometimes the source material remains subtle. Other times, as member Pat Morrissey points out, the story practically writes itself, like standout track, “CULT DADDY,” a satirical look at toxic masculinity. In those instances, the band isn’t as afraid to take phrases overheard and put them in the songs verbatim. “With a song like ‘CULT DADDY,’ the story is the song,” says Morrissey. Even then, Corazza resisted the obvious approach. “I rewrote that one a lot,” she says. “I didn’t want it to be too on the nose.”

Instead, the song found its shape through an unexpected detour. “I kind of went down this Sweeney Todd path with it,” she says with a laugh. “I do this thing where I’ll mumble melodies, and sometimes you pick up words. One word I mumbled was ‘butcher,’ and it put me in this place where I had to rearrange my thoughts. I was like, ‘How do I tell this story from this angle?’ It made it more interesting instead of just saying, ‘I run a cult.’”

And while the task of writing songs from someone else’s perspective made the songwriting journey more fun for Corazza, it also managed to become something greater than a mere creative exercise. During the making of the album, Corazza was grieving the loss of her father, and inhabiting these imagined characters gave her a way to keep writing without confronting those emotions head-on.

“I was going through a really rough period of time,” she says. “I lost my father, so I was grieving. It allowed me to dissociate and become that character, and that was really helpful during that period of time. Otherwise, I think I would’ve just been writing really sad, miserable songs.”

The challenge, she says, wasn’t simply borrowing someone’s voice but inventing the life around it.”I’d hear one little thing from this person and think, ‘How do I create a whole story out of that in three minutes?’ You have to fill in the holes. Who are they actually? Or I can embellish and make them be anyone I want them to be based on this one statement I heard come out of their mouth.”

For a band whose members have spent years writing and producing for other artists (that includes artists such as SZA, Pharrell, Weezer, and Big Freedia), stepping into fictional characters might seem like another form of collaboration. But creating music for themselves has demanded something far more personal.”When you’re working with other artists, you don’t really have to look inward as much,” Morrissey says. “You’re of service to that other person. You’re trying to support their vision and help curate their taste.”

Making ill peach records requires a different kind of honesty. “When it comes to making your own music, that’s where second-guessing comes in,” he continues. “It’s a whole other set of challenges. You’re not just writing a song, you have to understand who you are. You have to really know what you like and what you don’t like.” 

Fortunately, that process comes with decades of shared history.

Corazza, Morrissey, and Jesse Schuster have known one another since growing up in Mound, Minnesota, where they first crossed paths in school music programs before life eventually scattered them to New York and, later, Los Angeles.”We’ve known each other since middle school, high school,” Schuster says. “We’ve always been friends. They’ve had different iterations of projects together in New York, and eventually we all were in Los Angeles. It’s been a long time coming.”

Oddly enough, the band truly found itself during one of the least social periods in recent memory.”We were kind of each other’s quarantine group during COVID,” Corazza says. Living only a couple of blocks apart, the three spent countless hours making music simply because there wasn’t much else to do.”It was a very creative time for us,” she says. “We could just dial in and be playful. There was no pressure, no expectations. That’s really where ill peach formed. It was like a big playground. There were no rules.”

While many musicians found themselves creatively paralyzed during lockdown, ill peach experienced the opposite.”So many of my artist friends had the opposite experience,” Morrissey says. “They were stifled. They couldn’t be creative. I feel like we were one of the few that just got more creative during that time.”

That sense of freedom carried over into the music itself, even as changing cities reshaped the band in quieter ways. “I was my most depressed version in New York,” Corazza reflects. “Coming to LA kind of peeled back the curtains. I realized I could create music in all these other sonic territories.”Each place, she says, reveals a different version of herself.

“When we go back to New York or Minnesota, you can easily fall into it. I’m just a Midwest gal putting my Uggs and my North Face on. Then I go to New York, and I’m storming around like I have somewhere really important to be all day. Here [in Los Angeles], I’m just chill. It brings out different parts of your personality, and when you apply that to a creative space, that shows.”

As the band looks toward whatever comes next, Corazza expects the emotional center of the music to shift. Life has continued moving forward, bringing both loss and new beginnings, but one lesson from this record will remain.”I’ve always said the next album is where I’ll put a lot of my grief,” she says. “But then I also had a baby, so it’s this thing of life and death.”

Even if future songs reach deeper into those experiences, she doesn’t want to lose the sense of curiosity and play that defined this record.”I’ve learned that you can have these heavy emotions, but maybe the listener also needs a form of escapism sometimes,” she says. “The more playful and weird and quirky we’ve gotten with this album still feels like the goal for future songs. That feels really good.”

EAVESDROPPPING is out now.