“If you’ve been on TikTok in the last year, chances are you’ve heard Jeffrey Eli’s viral vocal range. The 22-year-old singer-songwriter has been consistently putting out impressive vocal vignettes — and now he’s ready to share his original music.” – PAPER
LOS ANGELES, CA (May 23, 2023) – Today, breakout artist Jeffrey Eli releases his latest single, “Sleeping Beauty,” his first release with RCA Records in partnership with Zelig Records.
A sweeping, emotive opus driven by his jaw-dropping vocals, “Sleeping Beauty” is a sonic exploration of Jeffrey’s journey of self-discovery. The song opens with a gentle guitar strum as Jeffrey details the past life experiences that led him to hide his authentic self, playing a role of who he felt expected to be. As he embraces his identity, the song’s production starts to swell, crescendoing into joyous exuberance.
The single release is accompanied by its powerful music video, directed by Jeffrey Eli & Paul Mauer. The visual finds Jeffrey in an elementary school, reclaiming the space as a utopia of comfort and acceptance, finally able to express himself without fear.
As described by Jeffrey, “‘Sleeping Beauty’ is a song about embracing fluidity and transcending the gender binary. It’s a song that I needed as a child.”
About Jeffrey Eli
Before Jeffrey Eli was making pop music to break the gender binary, he was a pre-teen singing online from his hometown bedroom in Norfolk for 3 million followers. After being discovered on the platform by fellow Massachusetts native Meghan Trainor, Jeffrey got his start as a songwriter, cutting his teeth in sessions with songwriters like Corey Chorus, Johnny Simpson, White Gold, SiR, and Liana Banks, all while finishing his high school algebra homework. In 2019, he co-wrote AJ Mitchell’s “All My Friends,” which has amassed over 100 million streams, and started school at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, where he honed his production and songwriting skills to develop what he now calls queer pop.
Jeffrey Eli is an artist that is not so much defined by genres as he is emboldened by them; from the dada-art inspired, hyper-pop bop of “Zoom” to the stadium rock of “Sleeping Beauty“- as a chorus of electric guitars swoon in Jeffrey’s angelic plea “It’s not mind or world / It’s not boy or girl / It’s not life and death its birth while living is eternal” sounds as much as a generation-defining artist statement as it does a top-40 hit. At one moment, amidst a backdrop of thumping staccato guitars, his lyrics interpolate psychedelic imagery and investigate his fear of God, while at another, he is packing the emotional heft of years growing up gay into a digestible pop song. Calling upon influences of childhood imagery but with mature storytelling, he writes in dichotomy. His original songs and massive range have garnered him 16 million likes and over 830k followers on TikTok. In 2022 alone, these videos earned praise from the likes of SZA, Chloe Bailey, and Silk Sonic. Now having recently relocated to Los Angeles, and with a slew of upcoming releases slated for 2023, Jeffrey Eli is beginning to write his queer fairytale.
