The original Stage Girl was pitched as, essentially, The Rise and Fall of a Northeast Doll, with a narrative focus on Eli’s pre-transition life. Art about the angst of living closeted is unfortunately timely, and despite its glittery production, the record conveyed that pain. Yacht-rock revival track “Marianne,” in which Eli’s pre-transition narrator desperately pines after a woman who’s in love with “another” man, is like “Good Luck, Babe!” if Chappell Roan didn’t even know she was a woman yet. Meanwhile, on “Falsetto,” she whispers, “Sometimes when I’m inside of you/I wonder what it would be like to really be inside of you.” It’s a sentiment that may unsettle the ignorant (what, you’ve never heard “Fade Into You” before?), but in a sugary pop song, Eli makes it feel universal.
The deluxe edition mostly doubles down on the silliness, but muddies the sequencing with songs that, while frequently just as good as the original version’s, detract from the tight narrative. “Somebody I’m Not,” for example, is triumphant as a closer, but isn’t quite as effective as the third-to-last track. While they sacrifice the flow of the tracklist, the new songs further perfect her sound: “Feel Your Rain” and “Nobody’s Girl” are gloriously goopy, broad ballads that Eli performs with the urgency and intensity of her more personal music.
These are airtight pop songs, but with a foundation this strong, Eli could afford to be a little weirder and riskier. The biggest hits from the ’00s often have a “what were they thinking” quality to them (for proof, listen to the instrumental for “Single Ladies” without Beyonce’s vocals). Lyrically, Eli sometimes comes close to that level of this-shouldn’t-work-but-does, nailing lines like, “You should be his baby, not his babysitter” and, “For a man that’s such a child/You don’t know how to play with dolls.” But just as often, her lyrics aren’t as irreverent as they think they are: “iTouch (Da Da)” doesn’t distinguish itself from the long line of self-pleasure songs, and “Like a Girl” contains the clunker “make this pussy confirmed.”
Deluxe track “Beyond the Bend” encapsulates the greatest and most frustrating parts of Eli’s musical persona, putting the industry insider claiming, “I just signed a deal/Subtweet Brandon Creed/Tell Ariana I’m the girl of her dreams” right next to the aspiring role model who sings, “I do it for the boy stuck in the Bible Belt/I do it for the girl who couldn’t see herself.” But she doesn’t need the namedrops to be her most compelling. On “Love U Thru the DJ,” frequent collaborator Ayleen Valentine’s elongated, drifting vowels make a surprising contrast to Eli’s octave-hopping pyrotechnics; even if the production around them isn’t as punchy as on the biggest songs here, the track is perhaps the most beautiful in Eli’s catalog. On the outro, she diagnoses what’s holding her back: “Maybe I just am never sincere with myself,” she sings. Like the best American Idol contestants, Stage Girl and its deluxe version succeed when self-consciousness fades, leaving us to witness a pop star in all her idiosyncratic glory.
