Lowell’s Songwriting Career : As busy as ever after her songs on Grammy-winning Beyoncé album nets inaugural Juno nomination

March 10, 2025

By Karen Bliss

Elizabeth Boland, professionally known by her middle name Lowell, won the Canadian Songwriter’s Hall of Fame’s Slaight Music Emerging Songwriter Award in 2019 for her work on two EPs by Juno-winning artist Bülow, and the breakthrough debut album from American singer Madison Beer.  

Six years later, her cachet could not be any greater: Lowell has two co-writes on an album by one of the best-selling artists of all time, Beyoncé: the global hit “Texas Hold ‘Em” and single, “Bodyguard,” from her 2024 genre-defiant Cowboy Carter, which earned 11 nominations at the 2025 Grammy Awards and three wins, including the coveted Album of the Year and Best Country Album. 

“’Texas Hold ‘Em,’ we knew that we had that song years before it came out and then we celebrated it and then forgot about it and then one day it just was out,” she laughs. Two other Canadians are on the cut, Nathan Ferraro and Megan Bülow.

It’s the type of career-changing get to which most professional songwriters aspire and will forever bring Lowell opportunities, a name likely always listed first in her credits, followed by any of the following: Charli XCX, Tate McRae, Charlie Puth, The Beaches, Lennon Stella, Nessa Barrett, Hailee Steinfeld, Lu Kala and Leah Kate, with more to come. 

“To be honest, before Beyoncé, I was already too busy and already struggling to prioritize and schedule, and now, definitely, I have more opportunities and more things that I just can’t get to, which is frustrating because there’s only so much time,” says Lowell, who is booked roughly three months in advance.

She can’t elaborate, but the bio from her management company, Kilometre Music Group, says, “Lowell has become a trusted collaborator for the legendary artist.” 

“Yeah, I’m still working with her,” she confirms.

For her contribution to Cowboy Carter, Lowell, who is signed to Artist Publishing Group (APG), received what the Recording Academy calls Grammy participation certificates, “which recognize anyone who was creatively or professionally involved in a Grammy-winning or Grammy-nominated recording.”

But for the 2025 Juno Awards, Lowell is directly up for the first-ever Juno Award for Songwriter of the Year (Non-Performer), a category she lobbied for for years and the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences (CARAS) finally added. 

Presented by the performing rights organization SOCAN, it recognizes the writers behind the hits. It’s an area of the industry that enabled 1969 hits like Frank Sinatra’s signature song “My Way,” written by Canadian Paul Anka, and fictional band the Archies’ “Sugar Sugar,” co-written by Canadian Andy Kim, to fall through the Juno cracks. 

“More recently, if you look at Simon Wilcox, I don’t think she’s ever been nominated,” Lowell points out. “She wrote [2014 top 10 US hit] ‘Jealous’ for Nick Jonas.” 

Lowell, who co-wrote Tate McRae’s “r u ok” (2020), Charlie XCX’ “Yuck” (2022) and the Beaches’ “Blame Brett” (2023), says the conversation to add the non-performer songwriter category started after she noticed, year after year, that her work was not recognized by Canada’s biggest and most prominent music awards.

“I knew my name was never going to be up there because it was pretty clear to me that only artists were getting nominated in the songwriter category,” Lowell says. “Also, after doing a lot of pitch tracks and seeing that it’s pretty much impossible to have an artist cut a song that you wrote without them taking a little bit of publishing — which means they’ll be written as a songwriter on paper — I realized that that left songwriters doomed in that category because the famous person will always be written as a songwriter and I’m not going to be famous, obviously.”

She says that she started “cornering” SOCAN CEO Jennifer Brown and CARAS CEO Allan Reid “at every event for five years,” she laughs, as well as speaking out online, advocating for herself and her fellow professional songwriters. She also says, “I owe a lot of my gratitude to my hubby, Kieran Roy [president/co-owner of Arts & Crafts Productions], because he is involved in CIMA [Canadian Independent Music Association] and on all these boards, and he was very vocal about it.”

In the end, it was a joint effort by the Songwriters Association of Canada (SAC), the Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency (CMRRA), Arts & Crafts, peermusic, Music Publishers Canada (MPC) — and Lowell.

Fortuitously, the Songwriter of the Year (Non-Performer) category debuts the same year Lowell had her biggest credits to date, leading to her inaugural JUNO nomination for her two Beyoncé co-writes and The Beaches’ “Takes One To Know One.”

From rock band to R&B/country, Lowell doesn’t give genre much thought when she’s writing or make any adjustments to her creative thinking.  She says that was a lesson learned in her early days. 

“I think people make this mistake when they go into pop music.  I was like, ‘Oh, that’s going to be easy. Pop music is dumb,’ and then I realized that it’s not as simple as that. I always thought doing country, I’d replace a word like ‘Lamborghini’ with ‘truck,’ but what I’ve learned as a songwriter, and what found me the most success, is not letting things be that surface level.”

It still comes up. She says she was in the studio with the Beaches recently when someone said the song “sounds too country.”  “I said, ‘Genres don’t have time signatures or chords; it’s all about the instruments you use,’” Lowell recounts.

Having previously worked with the Beaches on their hit album, Blame My Ex, as a co-producer and co-writer, she knows the four women well, but for a session with someone she doesn’t know, she says, “My biggest thing is getting close with the artist, digging deep into them as human beings and who they really truly are, authentically, and with that might come different lingo. It’s a much deeper, more sophisticated way of connecting.”

Like a music journalist, Lowell will even look up the artist’s interviews before writing with them for the first time, “study the person,” she says, “and see how they talk” and then often the first hour of the session is just talking.  “Artists are pretty good at letting you know who they are pretty early on in the day,” she laughs.

And what would they learn about Lowell?

She left her native Calgary for Toronto at age 18 to study music at the University of Toronto. A singer, pianist and guitarist, she didn’t set out to be a songwriter who was mainly behind the scenes; her original focus was to be a recording artist and performer. “As an artist, I knew that my favourite thing and my passion was songwriting and production and building songs. I thought that being an artist was the only way that I could do that,” she explains.

In her early 20s, she moved to the UK to work in west London’s Kensaltown Studios with producer Martin Terefe, a link-up that came from her then-manager who also repped Ron Sexsmith and was a member of the group Apparatjik with members of Coldplay, a-ha and Mew. They collaborated on the 2012 EP, If You Can, Solve This Jumble.

“Martin brought me under his wing and taught me more about recording and songwriting,” Lowell says. “I saw a lot of people in that studio that were songwriters making a living doing that. Sasha Skarbek was there, who had just written ‘Wrecking Ball,’ and Martin also brought me into the Backstreet Boys [writing] sessions and some Westlife sessions, so I saw people doing that and it looked like more what I would want to do. 

“But, I also saw how hard it was,” she adds. “I watched them do the Backstreet Boys record for the two years that I was there, and then almost getting their song on the record.  I thought maybe it was a bit of a pipedream to do that. So, I put out my album [2014’s We Love Her Dearly] and just did that for a while, and didn’t come back to writing for others for another five years or so.”

That debut album was on Arts & Crafts, the esteemed Canadian indie label she remains on today. Her sophomore album, Lone Wolf, came out in 2018, just as her pro songwriting career was kicking off, having co-written two EPs with newcomer Bülow, 2017’s Damaged Vol. 1 and 2018’s Damaged Vol. 2, including the hit “Not A Love Song” and “You and Jennifer,” respectively.

“I look at that as my patient zero because I wasn’t really doing much writing for other people. A little bit,” says Lowell. “Dragonette had taken me on tour, so I’d done some writing for them and, also, Iconopop had taken me to Sweden to work with them. But Bülow was the first one. I did her first EP, and her second EP, and they both kind of blew up. And so. that was a great opportunity for me to go to LA and work with some of the artists that were fans of her project. That was how I met Madison Beer, who was a big fan of Bülow and wanted to do her record with me. So, I did that next. “

Lowell didn’t return to her own recording project again until 2022’s Hurry.

It wasn’t just that she found more success as a songwriter than a performer that prompted her to pull back. She enjoys being onstage and the energy she gets from a crowd; what she wasn’t keen on was always being on the road, a commitment she wasn’t willing to make to further her career as a pop artist.

“I got to a place where I felt like I might want to be more low-key in my life and was watching a lot of my older peers, maybe in their 30s, having to be on the road and maybe wanting to start a family. It just didn’t look like something I wanted my future to be,” Lowell says. “I was having fun in the moment. I had a great time. I was 21, getting drunk, going in front of crowds.  Anyway, I just didn’t want that to be me. Older.”

These days, Lowell is very much in charge. She’s learned over the years what she wants, and what she doesn’t and is ever evolving based on experiences, good and bad.  “I just keep my head down and keep doing what I’ve always done, which is work on artists that I believe in and on projects that move me at all different levels,” she says.

She co-wrote the 2021 horror/thriller movie, Bloodthirsty, with her mom, Wendy Hill-Tout, about a singer-songwriter under pressure to write her sophomore album and received two Canadian Screen Awards nominations, for original score and original song. Last year, she was in Alberta directing her first feature film, another music-themed horror/thriller called Witches X and is writing the soundtrack.

Lowell also has her own label, For The Love of Pop (FLP). She signed established musician/producer Gus Van Gogh, but is also developing artists, like Baby Nova who has a single out now, “Killed for Sport.” It’s the perfect way for her to mentor young women and provide a safe space for navigating the music industry. “I’m equally as excited working on her, as I am working on the next Beyonce stuff or whatever artists come my way,” says Lowell. 

With the Beyoncé cuts has come more freedom to pick and choose.

“I definitely have more opportunity to cut out some of the mid-range artists that I was working on before that maybe I wasn’t super passionate about, but I was like, ‘Well, I should do this; it’d be good for my career,’” she admits. “This gives me the opportunity to just keep working on things that I want. I approach each artist that I come across in its unique way because sometimes I’ll partner with different people based on the artist.”

Does she think she’ll keep releasing solo albums every so often?

“Yeah, I try not to put too much pressure on it,” Lowell says. “I think every once in a while, I get tired of giving so much of my empathy and art to others, and then get a little wind to write for myself. But for me, it doesn’t really matter who puts the music out. It’s just about the music.”