We recently connected with Lizzy Hilliard and have shared our conversation below.
Lizzy, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the best or worst investment you’ve made (either in terms of time or money)? (Note, these responses are only intended as entertainment and shouldn’t be construed as investment advice)
When I prepared to study abroad in London during college, I had only been playing guitar for about a year and some change, and I knew I wanted to keep practicing and playing while I was there. Checking the guitar on the plane would have cost about a hundred dollars, so I decided, in lieu of paying for the transit of the guitar I’d been loaning from my parents, to buy a guitar on facebook marketplace when I got to London and sell it before I came back. The guitar I found cost around $150 and came with a hard shell case, and I picked it up the day I arrived, a half an hour after I moved into my flat. I played that guitar daily for the three months I was living in England – I wrote a lot of music on it, took it to my first open mic, and played it in the play we performed at the end of the semester – and by the time I had meant to sell it, I was too emotionally attached to it. I knew it would cost a lot of money to check the guitar on the plane, but I gritted my teeth and brought it with me to the airport anyway. When I got to the baggage check area, the employee checking the bags took one look at my guitar, looked at me, threw a bunch of ‘fragile’ stickers onto the case, and stuck it on the conveyor belt without charging me. I’ve now been playing on this guitar for nearly five years.
Lizzy, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
In my creative practice, my general goal is to convey the whimsicality and gentleness that we associate with children’s media to a grown up audience. As a multi-hyphenate artist, I work across a handful of disciplines, so I have a lot of opportunities to do this. Right now, most of my time is spent in the indie/folk music scene where I typically perform, write, produce, mix, master and design artwork for my own releases. Though I love collaboration and aim to introduce it more and more into my artistic practice, I also love realizing a creative vision and learning how to execute it yourself exactly the way you picture it in your head. In the past few years, I completed a project called ‘growth’, which was a three-volume album anthology that explored the transition from college into the world. After ‘growth vol. 3’ was released in 2023, I started my next project – a challenge to play a song for every state and territory in the US, either by covering a pre-existing song or writing a new one. I finished the state songs project in 2024 and in addition to the cover songs, wrote a total of 18 new ones. I chose 6 of those original songs to comprise my newest EP which came out in January 2026, ‘Road Trip’. My next recording project is already marinating and involves themes of the celestial and otherworldly.
Outside of being a singer/songwriter, I wear many hats, one being that of an actor. After acting in over 20 plays and musicals through grade school, I received my BA in theater arts and music in 2022. Acting constantly teaches me new things about myself (Among many other theatrical pursuits in college, I also discovered I love being funny via acting in/writing for a sketch comedy group called Boris’ Kitchen). I love discovering new sides of my personality through the characters I get to play in theater and I’m excited to continue to explore acting more and more. Another way I get to do this is as a playwright and composer/lyricist. As a senior in college, I wrote and performed in an abridged staged reading of a new original musical called The Pocket Girls. I’ve continued to work on this show since graduating while also beginning work on another musical about snail mail and murder in a small town. I absolutely love combining my theater background with my music background through creating these stories and conveying them through song, and my ultimate dream is to have these musicals professionally produced and perform in them.
In the process of marketing my work in all of these areas, I’ve found a love for content creation and built an audience on social media. It’s been really special to get to share the work in progress stages of my craft and to have others following along from start to finish in what is otherwise often a solo effort. I’ve met so many amazing artists and friends through social media and I’m really grateful to have such a unique and kind community there.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
My journey in building an audience on social media started during the pandemic when I began sharing short, mostly comedic songs on TikTok in 2020. I was in my junior year of college, and TikTok was still sort of a mystery to me and I think there was some freedom there. Very few people I knew in real life followed me on that platform, so any ego or nerves I had about feeling embarrassed to do something sort of kitschy and silly were nonexistent at that point, I felt like no one I knew would ever see what I was posting. I was lip syncing/acting out songs I wrote and recorded a cappella arrangements of, and they were about having a lot of dirty dishes in your room, about marrying people just because they’re nice to you, about collecting beautiful notebooks and being afraid to write in them – and because it was the pandemic, I was literally just taking classes in my dorm room and I didn’t have a lot of extracurricular stuff going on like I had before, so I used all of my free time to make these videos. They slowly started getting more elaborate, I added instruments, I changed DAWs, I got some better equipment, and I hit my first half a million views on a video I shared in 2021 with a song about making tea and forgetting about it. I evolved a lot between then and now, and I don’t make many videos in that style these days, but I think it was really important for me to start out that way because that was a part of me putting in my 10,000 hours towards producing/writing/editing music and content. Having such low stakes and having fun making those videos while I was in school was so important because now, it’s a skill that I use every day and I have a vocabulary and a comfort with it – and now, the stakes are higher because it’s my career and I’m not in school anymore. I learned how to do a lot of the things I do now on a daily basis because in 2021 and 2022, I would be working on a project for social media and think, “oh, wouldn’t it be so cool if *this* was in it?” and that meant I had to figure out how to add whatever *this* was.
The first video I ever crossed a million views with was a song I wrote called ‘if you were a worm,’ and that song only happened because I agreed to do a livestream on TikTok to raise money for the American Heart Association and the incentive was that if we hit our goal, I would write a song during the livestream. We talked in the chat about what hearts made us think of and we ended up on worms (because worms have multiple hearts) – and I don’t think I ever would have thought to write about that if it wasn’t for that very unique situation! The success of that song led to the success of other less silly songs of mine, and I feel really grateful for that. It’s difficult to ask an audience to follow you into more introspective and sincere music when they find you in a comedic setting, and I’m thankful that I have some listeners who embrace it all.
I try hard not to think about numbers, but if you’re asking, each time my audience has grown on social media, each time I’ve had something perform well in a numbers way, I believe it’s been because I tried something new and I thought about what experiments *I* wanted to do with my work, rather than focusing on what I thought other people wanted to see. I try not to be interested in making something because I think it will get views, but to make the thing either because I think it will teach me something as an artist, because it will offer something that I believe there needs to be more of, or because I think it will be fun to make. I’ve found that, generally, if you want to watch it or hear it, someone else probably does, too.
The last thing I would be remiss if I didn’t say here is that my absolute favorite thing that has happened in my life since I started sharing things on social media has been discovering new artists who turn into friends and collaborators. 90% of the relationships I have with artists began from an interaction on social media, which is something I never would have expected when I first started sharing my art on TikTok. The musicians who play in my band for live shows, the collaborators I work with, the artists I share bills with – so much of it comes from a mutual respect that begins on social media.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
Artists get turned down so often and I think many people will relate when I say that personally, it feels really difficult to stay motivated to put your work out there and try for opportunities when you’re constantly facing so much rejection. I learned in the past few years that a big piece of this comes from the idea that our focus is, most of the time, placed on chasing after some kind of success. Which makes sense! Especially because in our culture, we only really celebrate success stories when they come with the expected outcome of getting the award or winning the scholarship or booking the job.
In the past couple of years, I have started really carefully investigating my burnout – something a lot of artists accept as par for the course – and trying to figure out what causes it and how to keep it from happening. Along the way, I saw a post on Threads from @trilbydrew that posed the possibility of attempting to get rejected 100 times in a year. I was so intrigued by this, I challenged my frequent collaborator Sofía Campoamor to try for 50 rejections in 2025 with me. By the end of the year, I had tried for more opportunities than, I think, I had ever tried for before, and I had been rejected 76 times (and accepted a few times, too!). I also took more intentional breaks that year than I ever had before, and my takeaway was this: focusing on an ideal outcome can make the work grueling. Focusing on the effort means that you always win. Making the rejections the goal was important because it gave us a number to work towards, highlighted the work we were doing to try for so many opportunities, and desensitized the pain of hearing ‘no’. We both loved the experience so much that Sofía and I opened it up for any and all creatives to participate in 50 Rejections 2026, and in our Discord server, artists have begun sharing their own experiences with the project and sending opportunities to each other. I could talk about my takeaways from this experience all day, but the moral of the story is when I started thinking more about the work I was doing and celebrating the ‘no’s and being open about the labor that comes before hearing a ‘yes’, I became a different artist. Tell people about the effort you’re putting into your work! It’s way more exciting than the traditional success story.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.lizzyhilliard.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lizzy.hilliard/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/p/Lizzy-Hilliard-100094128641796/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@lizzy.hilliard
- Other: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2iup0a0Zq02hGiVfDzzrzE?si=zAV5lQnBQBmuw474eXNlgg
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lizzy.hilliard
bandcamp: https://lizzyhilliard.bandcamp.com/music
Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/lizzy-hilliard/1490701303
Tidal: https://tidal.com/artist/10753855
Image Credits
William Ruben Helms
Lydia Lee
Rachael Franklin