Maine singer/songwriter Oh Louise confronts betrayal, self-doubt, and the frightening desire to be truly known on “Do You Lie To Everyone,” a hauntingly beautiful debut single whose melodic grace and bruising emotional honesty introduce 19-year-old Olive Siegel as a songwriter already fluent in the language of intimate self-reckoning. Her debut album ‘Everything On High’ gathers four years of journal-born writing into a richly intimate record shaped by dreams, heartbreak, faith, and the difficult work of knowing yourself.

Stream: “Do You Lie To Everyone” – Oh Louise

Being lied to can scramble your sense of truth until you begin questioning your own honesty, too.

The damage spreads beyond the lie itself, making your own instincts harder to trust and your inner life harder to name. Love becomes a hall of mirrors, accusation reflecting back as self-doubt until even sincerity starts to blur.

Singer/songwriter Oh Louise inhabits that disorienting space on her hauntingly beautiful debut single “Do You Lie To Everyone,” tracing the collapse of trust inward as betrayal gives way to self-doubt and the desperate desire to be known. Warm and emotive music wraps around a devastating contradiction: How do you ask another person to see you clearly when you’re still struggling to recognize yourself?

Do you lie to everyone
Desperate to love you
I lie to everyone
I don’t know why

Do you ever feel afraid
Nothing’s above you
I’m scared of everything
Although I try

Atwood Magazine is proud to be premiering “Do You Lie to Everyone,” the spellbinding lead single from Oh Louise’s debut album, Everything On High, independently out August 21. Oh Louise is the new musical identity of 19-year-old Maine-based artist Olive Siegel, who grew up in Silverlake, Los Angeles before moving to a small town in Maine midway through high school. Siegel has been making and releasing music since her teens, first as Ollielou – the name under which she released 2024’s In My Room EP and two singles in 2025. Everything On High opens a new chapter shaped by years of writing, experimentation, and growing into herself as an artist. The record was made in Round Pond, Maine with producer Charles Van Kirk, cellist Nat Smith, and Wilco bassist John Stirratt, whose encouragement and mentorship helped Siegel bring her first full-length project into the world.

As the introduction to both her project and her forthcoming album, “Do You Lie To Everyone” makes a striking first impression precisely because Siegel refuses to simplify its emotional mess. Hurt and culpability sit side by side; the person being deceived is also examining the ways she has obscured herself. The question in the title lands outward and inward at the same time.

“At its core, the song is both an admission and an accusation,” she tells Atwood Magazine. “It’s about being lied to and struggling with your own authenticity as a result. Knowing the person you want to love isn’t being emotionally faithful, but feeling like you deserve it because you don’t know who you are either.”

The opening lyric lays that conflict bare: “Do you lie to everyone / desperate to love you / I lie to everyone / I don’t know why.” There is accusation in the first question, but Siegel barely lets it leave her mouth before directing the same scrutiny back at herself. What begins as a lover’s betrayal becomes a crisis of identity – a relationship in which truth has grown unstable enough that she can no longer separate another person’s dishonesty from her own uncertainty.

I want to let go
I just don’t want to know
What made me feel so bad

Siegel wrote the song in the midst of what she describes as a “tumultuous and heartwrenching break up,” caught between a partner who accused her of dishonesty and her realization that she had been withholding parts of herself to keep their relationship intact. His lies left her shocked and disoriented; her own compromises made anger harder to claim. “Who am I to point fingers and call someone else a liar when everything about me feels dishonest?” she reflects.

That emotional complexity is matched by music of striking restraint. “Do You Lie To Everyone” draws from the timeless language of singer/songwriter music, with gentle piano and lightly played guitar opening a spacious foundation beneath Siegel’s voice. Lush keyboard backing drifts around the edges, adding an atmospheric haze without obscuring the song’s intimacy. There are traces of Joni Mitchell and Carole King in the clarity of its emotional writing and graceful melodic movement, carried into the present through a production palette that lets the arrangement hover between closeness and unease.

The result is beautiful without smoothing over the discomfort at its center. Melodies rise and bend with an almost weightless elegance while the lyrics keep pressing at a far heavier question: Who am I inside this relationship, and how much of myself have I hidden just to remain in it? When Siegel sings, “I want to be known / I just can’t seem to show what’s inside of me,” the line reaches beyond romantic betrayal. Wanting to be understood becomes inseparable from the harder work of understanding oneself.

Do you feel the same dreams
I try to tell you
I don’t know what they mean
Know it’s not right

Do you see a different space
Does it compel you
In spite of everything
I won’t try to fight

Thi tension between exposure and concealment runs directly into the larger world of Everything On High. Its lyrics were drawn from Siegel’s journals between 2021 and 2025, spanning several formative years and preserving different versions of the person writing them. She often writes late at night with an acoustic guitar in open tunings or at the Civil War-era piano in her family home, and the album gathers that private practice into her most substantial artistic statement yet.

Recorded through late fall and early winter in Round Pond, Everything On High carries the atmosphere of the place where it was made: Icy drives, early darkness, and long stretches spent tucked inside Van Kirk’s home studio. Smith contributed cello arrangements remotely from Nashville, while Stirratt joined Siegel in the room to build out the record’s bass parts. Siegel’s inspirations stretch from Elliott Smith and Judee Sill to Weyes Blood, Thom Yorke, Nick Drake, Paul Simon, and Enya, but the intimacy here already belongs to her – especially in the breaths, imperfections, melodic detours, and exposed spaces she deliberately leaves intact.

For Siegel, “Do You Lie To Everyone” became the natural doorway into that larger body of work. She describes it as the album’s equivalent of a book blurb: A song capable of standing on its own while containing the musical and lyrical questions waiting beyond it. Those questions stretch across Everything On High toward dreams, faith, heartbreak, truth, and the instability of identity itself – subjects big enough to remain unresolved and personal enough to demand honesty.

And honesty, for Oh Louise, doesn’t arrive as certainty. It arrives in the willingness to look directly at contradiction: to accuse and confess in the same breath, to want another person’s love while wondering whether you know yourself well enough to receive it, to admit that being seen can be every bit as frightening as being misunderstood.

“Do You Lie To Everyone” leaves those contradictions beautifully exposed. As the first glimpse of Everything On High, it introduces a 19-year-old songwriter with an unusually assured instinct for emotional complexity, melodic grace, and the power of leaving difficult questions open. The album arrives August 21; for now, enter through this eerie, exquisite first doorway, and meet Oh Louise in our full conversation below.

I want to be known
I just can’t seem to show
What’s inside of me

I’m gone
And something’s wrong

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Stream: “Do You Lie To Everyone” – Oh Louise

A CONVERSATION WITH OH LOUISE

Oh Louise (Olive Siegel): Hi! Thank you for such meaningful questions. For people just discovering me, I hope they find something in this music that resonates with them. I struggle to define myself, which is sort of the point of this entire album. I want to give away Everything On High to anyone who wants it.

About me personally, I grew up in Silverlake, Los Angeles and moved to a small town in Maine halfway through my freshman year of high school. I take a lot of inspiration from the beauty and simplicity around me. I love to read, draw and swim. My favorite book is The Grapes Of Wrath. The love of my life is probably Elliott Smith. I don’t really think I have a ton of interesting facts about myself. I hope my work is complex enough to be left up to interpretation.

Oh Louise: I have SO many. Elliott Smith, Judee Sill, Weyes Blood, Thom Yorke, Paul Simon, Nick Drake, and Enya are a couple that come to mind. I try to pay homage to them, but to not take too much from any one person. I think it’s cool that when I’ve played these songs for people, they tell me that they’re hearing these guys as influences without me having to tell them. I’m excited by the lyrical poetry in this batch of songs, and working with such talented people has given these songs a completely new depth. I’m very excited to keep writing, and I already have pretty much another full album in the works.

Oh Louise: I released my first EP in junior year under the name “ollielou” which was a nickname my parents gave me when I was little. While that name seemed right at the time, I feel now like I’ve outgrown it, and I felt that Oh Louise (really just a play on O. Louise, which I was also considering) fit this album better. It’s always been important for me to include some form of my middle name (Louise) in my artist name because it feels like a way I can be referred to personally while also allowing me a musical identity separate from my “real” name. I also wanted to show people that I’ve grown up a little since my last project, and changing my name felt like an important step in demonstrating that growth. To be fully honest I also wanted a name I could visualize on a t-shirt. I would rather wear a cool t-shirt that says “oh louise” than one that says “ollie lou.” I can kind of picture it in cool red writing or something like that.

Oh Louise: This song sort of encapsulates what the rest of the album is about. I was imagining that if the album was a book, “Do You Lie To Everyone” would kind of be the blurb. I think this song is beautifully arranged (thanks John and Nat) and it feels like if people were only going to listen to one song on the album, I’d want it to be this one. I feel like it stands alone well, but also fits into the larger sonic and textual themes of the album.

Oh Louise: “Do You Lie To Everyone” comes from a very emotional place. I wrote it during a tumultuous and heartwrenching break up, and it’s sort of about feeling like the person you love, or really badly want to love, isn’t letting you love them. I was dating this guy for a while who would always accuse me of being unfaithful or lying to him. While I wasn’t necessarily being unfaithful in the traditional sense, I felt like he had a point, because I was being unfaithful to myself about my feelings and emotions in order to make it somehow easier for us to be together. This song explores the frustration that came from someone not understanding who I was, but not being able to articulate that or even feel justified in my anger because to some extent I didn’t know who I was either.

He also blatantly lied to me about things I knew to be true, which felt shocking and disorienting, especially because I felt like I was trying too hard to remain truthful and open even after having my vulnerability sort of thrown back in my face constantly. The first line in the song can kind of be read both as a genuine question and as an accusation.

Oh Louise: That is such an interesting question. I think that when you are lying to yourself, telling yourself things are working the way they are, trying to convince yourself you’re someone you’re not, etc., it becomes easier for other people to lie to you, and for you to lie to other people because nothing feels true. Like I mentioned before, it’s not just lying about black and white things, but withholding truths from another person because it feels scary, trying to create an alternative reality for yourself where everything is okay, things like that. I also think that when someone else is creating an alternative reality for you where the truth holds no value and the only thing that matters is how they perceive a certain situation, you start to believe the things that they’re saying. It’s interesting to think about it as a mirror, because it really is. Like who am I to point fingers and call someone else a liar when everything about me feels dishonest?

Oh Louise: That is sort of just the story of my life. It is such an infuriating issue that sort of rears its head in a lot of different situations. It applies not only to my relationships, but also to my art. There’s nothing worse than the feeling of writing a song and feeling like it doesn’t really say anything. I think that honesty and vulnerability are the among the most valuable traits a person can possess, and it’s something I’m always striving for, but often I feel like I come up short because I’m scared of being seen. I think it’s a pretty universal feeling.

Oh Louise: I hope I can answer this question, this might not be what you’re looking for: I am comfortable with emotional uncertainty in my music partly because I’m so uncomfortable with it in the rest of my life. I think there is duality to every emotion and state of being– intimacy can’t exist without fear, beauty can’t exist without ugliness, etc. I hope that my songs capture that duality, because to me, that’s the most interesting part of being alive. I think the melodic shifts in this song sort of capture that uncertainty.

Oh Louise: Round Pond is a sacred place to me. I grew up going to sailing camp there, and it’s where I met my lifelong best friends. It is also physically beautiful, simple, and serene. I recorded this album through the late fall and early winter, when Round Pond is quiet and all the tourists are gone. Being in nature, in the cold, driving down the winding icy roads by myself without listening to music, hunkering down in Charlie’s studio and letting the early darkness sort of just take over the room definitely put me in a very intense headspace. The quiet darkness of the winter in Maine created, to use your words, an eerie and intimate atmosphere that I think really comes through in the sound of this record. I like when you can hear little imperfections in songs, shifts, breaths, etc. It feels like you’re in the room with the person listening to them perform for you. That’s something I tried to capture in these songs.

Nat’s in Nashville, so I worked with him over zoom, which I’d never done before and was definitely a challenge. It would have been absolutely incredible to see him come up with his cello arrangements live, but that also may have yielded totally different results. I was happy to let Nat have mostly free reign over the cello arrangements, and in a way it was probably good that I wasn’t immediately in the room with him giving all my feedback. I think it allowed us to come up with some really beautiful things that were different from my original instincts, but now are some of my favorite parts of the music.

Working with John was amazing. His daughter Tallulah is my best friend, so I already have a pretty familiar relationship with him, but I’d never worked with him in a professional sense. The whole recording situation was very no-frills, and he just sort of pulled up a chair in the middle of the room, tested out a couple amps, and did his thing. I laid on the couch and gave my feedback when it was necessary, but Wilco is already a huge musical inspiration, so our sensibilities were pretty similar. Hearing the different things he was trying out each take was so fun.

Laying on the couch was a big part of the making of this record. I write most of my songs lying down in bed, and it somehow feels like my most vulnerable, honest form. Charlie’s studio setup is very homey and comfortable, and it was really easy for me to move around the space and experiment with where I could get cozy.

Oh Louise: John’s support has been essential to me personally and to the making of this album. He’s a very down to earth, kind, humble person, but at the same, he isn’t effusive or overly complimentary, so when he has something good to say, you can really trust it. I remember after I had performed at a small little festival called Sonic Sleepover that John and his wife Crissy hosted at their camp in Bremen, I was expressing to John that I was kind of on the fence about even making a record in the first place, and he told me that it would be “a sin” if I didn’t share my music with the world. I don’t know if I would even go that far, but hearing that from someone who I admired so much was genuinely life changing. Getting to form a working relationship with him, being introduced to people I respect as an actual artist in my own right, and being taken so seriously in my creative pursuits has been a humbling blessing. Needless to say, his performance on these songs is amazing, per usual, and his musical knowledge and talent was integral to bringing the songs to life. I think John and Nat also have a cool virtual collaboration vibe on this record, as John took some inspiration from the cello lines that Nat had tracked before we tracked bass. I feel extremely lucky to have him in my corner, and I’m hoping to collaborate more with him on future stuff!

Oh Louise: It was terrifying. It’s hard to know that people I went to high school with might listen to a really vulnerable song about me feeling used or mistreated or whatever. I also often struggle with recognizing the legitimacy of my own feelings, so I worry about coming off a certain way to the listener. That has probably been the hardest part of this whole process, separating my anxieties about how the song will be received by other people from the work I’m doing to create the songs themselves. It’s hard to not succumb to the pressures of what’s popular right now, or what will be palatable to the largest audience. At the end of the day, I think I make music mostly for myself and for my own enjoyment, I really love the songwriting and recording process. If I could just make albums for my whole life and never have to perform live or release them, I would totally do it. But knowing that the work I do occasionally resonates with someone and makes them feel emotional is really powerful, which is why I decided to share these songs publicly. I like to leave the lyrics up to the listener’s interpretation, and often when people tell me what they think one of my songs is about, it’s completely different than what I had in mind when I wrote it, but it still works. In a way, it helps me to learn about myself just as much as the songwriting process. It’s really freeing to be able to say, “look, this is what happened to me, here’s how I feel, you can take it or leave it.”

Oh Louise: I think Everything On High is kind of a combination of all my various musical and artistic influences. There are some songs that are more melancholy than others, some that are more pop-y, etc. I think it is a really apt representation of who I am. I took a lot of inspiration from metaphysical topics for the lyrics on this record: Dreams, God, truth, heartbreak, feeling lost, etc. I think that allowed me some room to experiment with metaphors and to create worlds that I wouldn’t necessarily be able to access otherwise, if that makes sense. A lot of the songs on this record are recent (senior year of high school), but a few (Slip Away and How Much I Love You) were written during my sophomore year, so it’s interesting to see how my songwriting has changed since then. Everything On High is my first large musical project, and with songs that are spread out across so many years, it encapsulates a little bit of everything sonically and thematically, although there is definitely a more general tonal theme to the album. I was really inspired by Elliott Smith’s use of simple double tracked vocals and harmonies and intimate and pared down guitar sounds, which is something I tried to replicate here. I also love the melancholy sound of the cello. Roberta Flack’s “Jesse” was a huge inspiration for the presence and quality of the cello on this record. Nat Smith did an incredible job with the arrangements and performance, and I think his parts bring the songs to life.

Oh Louise: I hope that people like listening to these songs, and that they feel something they can relate to in the emotional content. I also hope to convey the idea that it’s okay to not know who you are, that’s something that comes with time if you’re lucky, and the way to find freedom is through love and honest work.

Actually making this music has taught me a lot, not only about the literal processes that are involved in making a record, but also emotionally. Writing music is actually incredibly difficult, especially writing songs that feel truthful. Trusting my instincts has been the most rewarding and also the most emotionally demanding part of this entire process, and this process has taught me that my instincts are actually not bad. I’m excited and proud to have a project of this magnitude under my belt, and going through this process has helped me to realize how much room I have to grow, develop my own sound and hone my instincts.

Oh Louise: I’ve been listening to Phia Lauree lately. My friend Nina, who designed the album cover with me, played me some of her stuff a year or so ago. She is an amazing artist. Her EP Magic Beans And Power is beautiful and heartbreaking. I also love her song Capacity 2. I’m also really into this guy Silas Carpenter. You should listen to his album The Big Idea if you haven’t already. It rocks.

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