After manoeuvring around a superhighway of ants, we settle down at a little spot by the stands of Elliott’s local basketball court. To Elliott, the mind behind Wednesday’s Child, it's a spot full of comfort and familiarity. But as moody clouds gathered above the Hougang skies, the court brought about a juxtaposed sense of warm nostalgia – an appropriately poetic picture that reflected her personal woes.

Comically, it was a Tuesday. I quickly ask her where her moniker originates from. Soon, I found that her moniker was inspired by a poem titled Monday’s Child, which I found later to be a popular rhyme to help young children remember the days of the week. Born on a Wednesday, Elliott found resonance with the line that matched up against her birthday: “Wednesday's child is full of woe”.

A melancholic mood colours Wednesday’s Child's music as well. Emerging with the impeccably lush Siren Song, her music swam in an almost glass-like mystique - but off the heels of her recent single Pedestrian Life, things seem to have shifted towards a more upbeat gear, looking beyond introspection. As children played around the court we settled at, our environment's mood seemed to begin mirrroring her music’s recent changes.

Right after we settled down, a kid comes up and touches Elliott’s boots.

“Shoes!” the child says repeatedly, as he points to her Doc Martens.

“Yeah! They’re very important!”, Elliott responds.

As Elliott points at the same pair of boots the kid touched earlier, she suddenly laughs, recalling a funny story. The story turns out rather grim – describing a traffic accident that she was caught in.

”My foot got run over by a car once, but I was saved by a pair of Doc Martens similar to these,” she explains. “It must’ve saved my feet. I mean, the boots were torn up! The accident caused a Lisfranc fracture on my leg, and since I had to put a cast on, I couldn’t walk for 6 weeks. But if I had worn something else, I truly believe it could’ve been much worse.”

Her misfortunes seem to be part of a continuing trend, recalling a recent incident where she stubbed her toe on her keyboard stand. “I think I’ve probably pissed off the god of feet?” she jokes. “If this thing keeps up, I hope it's for something good instead – like stepping onto a $100 note, or something.”

The conversation moves on to the rest of her outfit, one Elliott explains she bought for an MOE interview. “Enough with my boots, I actually want to tell you about my plaid pants! My default look is usually a pair of Uniqlo jeans, paired with a black tee. But I figured that wouldn’t be appropriate for something so adult – hence the pants.”

In fact, Elliott’s currently teaching music at an international school while also tutoring. Currently a tutor to primary school kids, she’s keen on helping them academically, while also wanting to provide them a platform to be heard. “I believe children need that. By being a teacher, I can be a champion for them, and that feels right to me.”

 That being said, she adds that teaching was not exactly a career she wanted. “I actually don’t know how to interact with children,” she admits. “I just don’t know how they work.” Nevertheless, she also recognises that having some sort of output beyond music is an important point to her for inspiration.

She affirms that she has no intention to stop creating music. “It’s something I'll always do. But if I'm doing music exclusively, I'm not too sure if it’ll be able to inspire me on its own as much. Music by itself can be pretty stressful – depending on what it is, it can really suck the joy out of it.” Believing it to be the best of worlds, she expresses her desire to be a music teacher.

Our conversation moves on to the other things she loves. She begins quoting games, like the recently-released action RPG “Hades”, and the classic god simulator “The Sims” – particularly its 4th edition and all its expansion packs (“Typical EA behavior,” she snarks). She also states that she’d love to play games like Fallout, but gets motion sickness from shooters, barring her the experience of embracing the game’s wastelands.

Bringing up things she wished she did more, she brings up her interest in painting. “I’ve only painted 3 times in my life, but something draws me to it," she explains. "I can’t stand being bad at stuff – maybe it’s because I'm so bad at it that there’s a need for me to improve, I guess."

When she was 18, Elliott gave up playing the keyboards because of the same attitude. Having been someone who played classical piano since she was 9, her unrequited commitment towards the neo-soul style of keys a la Robert Glasper forced her to stop. But incidentally, it was giving up the piano that led Elliott to pick up the bass.

“I thought, why not try the bass instead? It's four strings – it can’t possibly be that hard.” Finding its vibrations and low frequencies a comforting presence, she quickly found an affinity for the bass’ physicality – mentioning that even though playing the piano does give out some resonance when the hammer strikes the key, it just isn’t the same.

Yet ironically, despite her love for the bass, Elliott never starts writing with it. “Never,” she emphasises. “I always feel like if I start there, it would be more difficult to lay chords on top of it. So if my strength is in coming up with basslines, I’d rather come up with the chords I want first. Then, I can lay a bassline over that since I'd be able to do that comfortably regardless.

Her music demonstrates that sonic cohesiveness in spades. Despite her songs always featuring her soulful bass grooves, they never threaten to swallow her arrangements – instead, they serve to enable their surrounding elements. On Siren Song, her grooves give motion to the song's sparse, glass-like arrangements – while on the livelier Pedestrian Life, they mesh with soulful keys to accentuate a seductive yearning.

Explaining her background in music, Elliott took a Diploma in Music and Audio Tech at Singapore Polytechnic, which served as her first steps in writing and producing. “I have a pretty one-tracked mind, and I only wanted to be good at bass, particularly in Jazz,” she explains. “I didn't even pay much attention to most of the modules.”

Although she spent most of her time on bass at that point, she began fiddling with production on Logic Pro for school assignments. “I wouldn’t call that production per se?” she jokes, mentioning her overuse of the ‘SoCal’ drum preset for all of her songs. Nevertheless, those experiments continued until her internship at Zendyll Records, which she underwent in 2020. During her internship, Elliott worked under Claire, bassist and producer of mandopop outfit NEKO Highway, from who she picked up most of her pop production techniques.

“Producing mandopop demos wasn’t really my thing – but it helped me learn more about pop production techniques, and helped me dive deeper into production,” she reflects. Up until that point, she hadn’t shown her music to anyone, aside from those who were grading her assignments. But graduating after making music for three years, she decided that it was about time to put something out – with newfound experience, it was an intent that gave birth to the project’s first single, Siren Song.

“I didn’t plan to produce Siren Song at all,” she explains. “But I was very obsessed with the show ‘Killing Eve’ then – so I decided to write Siren Song from the perspective of one of its characters. After I wrote the lyrics first, I was playing the guitar one day when I realized I could put the two together.”

Elliott sent the initial demo to her friend, a jazz pianist & self-taught producer. Together, they co-produced the track that became Siren Song in two weeks, quickly establishing the group as a duo – without prior plans about the song, the pair decided to put it out to see how it’d fare amongst strangers. “Friends can be too biased with their opinions, so we decided to put it out to hear what random people would think of it,” she notes. “We didn’t even give enough time to plan its pre-release with media outlets and such, so it was really difficult to predict how it’ll go.”

But to their surprise, Siren Song began picking up. As it began placing on Spotify’s algorithmic and editorial playlists, the song began racking up streams on its own, with listeners coming in from cities like Tokyo, Los Angeles and Bangkok.