Description
Allison Ponthier – Faking My Own Death / Shaking Hands With Elvis – Blue Vinyl Record
Includes both the Faking My Own Death (2021) and Shaking Hands With Elvis (2022) EP’s.
Allison Ponthier’s first two EPs, Faking My Own Death (2021) and Shaking Hands With Elvis (2022), form a compelling diptych that chronicles a deeply personal and artistic evolution. Raised in Texas and later immersed in the Brooklyn indie scene, Ponthier brings a rare blend of folk storytelling, country imagery, and modern pop production into her music. These EPs showcase not just her sonic versatility, but also her emotional candor — inviting listeners into a world where queerness, grief, existential dread, and myth coexist with delicate harmonies and poetic lyrics.
Faking My Own Death, her debut EP, is a bold introduction that centers around themes of identity, alienation, and self-reinvention. The title alone suggests a desire to erase and re-emerge, a motif that runs throughout the six-track collection. One of its standout songs, “Cowboy,” is a meditation on Ponthier’s relocation from Texas to New York and her subsequent journey of coming out and becoming. While the lyrics grapple with feeling out of place and misunderstood, the instrumentation remains warm and earthy — a grounding contrast to the emotional weight of the themes. Tracks like “Hell Is a Crowded Room” explore social anxiety and internalized fear, while others like “Harshest Critic” and “Faking My Own Death” focus more pointedly on self-confrontation and the painful process of letting go of outdated versions of the self. Musically, the EP leans on acoustic textures and gentle arrangements, giving space for her vocals to deliver confessional lyrics with vulnerability. It’s intimate but not indulgent — a snapshot of someone beginning to articulate their truth in a voice all their own.
A year later, Shaking Hands With Elvis emerged as a continuation of that narrative but with higher emotional stakes and broader symbolic reach. If the first EP was about rebirth and finding one’s footing, the second is about grief, legacy, and what we leave behind. The phrase “shaking hands with Elvis” — a euphemism for death — becomes the central metaphor of the title track, which Ponthier wrote after losing a close friend. Where Faking My Own Death was about the imagined death of old identities, Shaking Hands With Elvis confronts actual mortality and the lingering questions that come with it. The EP opens with “Autopilot,” a song about emotional numbness and routine, setting a more somber, reflective tone. As the EP unfolds through tracks like “Chasing a Feeling,” “Hardcore,” and “Late Bloomer,” Ponthier explores themes of longing, growth, and the complex process of healing. The production is more layered and atmospheric than before, incorporating ambient elements, subtle electronics, and lush harmonies that mirror the EP’s dreamlike, otherworldly undertones.
The closing track, “Shaking Hands With Elvis,” is the emotional and thematic centerpiece. In it, Ponthier imagines a celestial meeting with Elvis as a stand-in for the afterlife — a surreal, glittering vision where the dead are remembered not just as ghosts, but as icons. The song weaves together personal grief with pop culture mythology, suggesting that memory and legacy are as much about storytelling as they are about truth. It’s a poignant meditation on how we process loss, how we preserve the people we love, and how performance and persona intertwine. Rather than being morbid, it feels tender and strangely comforting — a farewell wrapped in rhinestones and reverence.
Together, these two EPs reveal a songwriter who is unafraid to wade into difficult emotional terrain and who does so with a voice that is both fragile and unwavering. Allison Ponthier uses metaphor and genre fluidity to explore queerness, faith, loss, and the contradictions of modern identity. She’s part of a rising generation of artists who treat songwriting not just as entertainment, but as a form of self-exploration and catharsis. What makes her work so affecting is that it doesn’t reach for grand declarations — instead, it sits with uncertainty, offering a soft but powerful acknowledgment that sometimes, simply naming your feelings is the most radical act of all.
Brand new, never played and still sealed in the factory plastic
Track Listing
Autopilot
Chasing A Feeling
Hardcore
Hollywood Forever Cemetery
Late Bloomer
Shaking Hands With Elvis
Cowboy
Paid For
Harshest Critic
Hell Is A Crowded Room
Faking My Own Death
Tornado Country
