ABOUT ERIKA

Her songs speak to anyone who has known love lost, rejection, or the ache of feeling unseen — and they lift people up. Crocodile Tears gives voice to survivors of domestic violence; The Cage to political prisoners. Ma Lumière and Ce n'est pas si mauvais explore love and longing; Partners Song and Truth Remains trace long relationships where one heart is on its way out; Baby the Essence of Me Is You captures the rare recognition of a soulmate; and Solitude, gives voice to one partner dying and the grief that follows. Renegade, Find My Own Way Home, and Oyster celebrate true love that stands the test of time.

A poet and philosopher at heart, Erika draws inspiration from Hegel: The Self and the Other, Sartre's L'existentialisme est un humanisme, and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Her song Catch-22 explores the paradox of desire — the more you want someone, the more you push them away. Atlas Shrugged inspired Ashes to Dust, a song where, even as society crumbles, the relationship endures.

Erika won first place for piano composition and second place for 12-string guitar four consecutive years in the Johns Hopkins Talent Contest, and studied piano and voice at the Peabody Conservatory and photography at the Maryland Institute College of Art. After graduating from Johns Hopkins with a degree in French and a Presidential Commendation Award for her commitment to the Baltimore arts community, she studied at Columbia University Reid Hall program in Paris before moving to New York.

In New York, Erika was signed to Sire Records, with interest from Sony, and worked with Mark White and Aaron Comess of the Spin Doctors. Moving in the artistic and intellectual elite of the city — models, fashion designers, rock stars, actors, Wall Street lawyers, and graduates of Harvard, Duke, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Columbia — she absorbed the creative energy of that world firsthand. When her EP went unreleased, Erika and her brother Wade founded Angelwax Productions. She went on to record From the Triskel to the Tigereye (New York), Truth Remains (Paris), and A Slice of Dust (New York), releasing them to streaming platforms from Paris and Los Angeles. In France, she also worked in product placement for French and American feature films — placing brands like Jaguar and Ford on screen and reading screenplays — and founded her own film company, attending the Cannes Film Festival twice in pursuit of professional collaborators for her original screenplay, "The One That Got Away," then in development from a synopsis and concept.

Her career has spanned the spotlight and academia — UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, the Cornel School of Contemporary Music at Shepherd University, and most recently five years in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Loyola Marymount University. There, surrounded by language and literature, her love of songwriting deepened — and she found her way back to her first and truest calling: music.