Old Rock House Presents:
Em Beihold: Tales of a Failed Shapeshifter Tour
with Janani K. Jha
All Ages
Friday, November 06, 2026
Doors: 7 pm // Show: 8 pm
Em Beihold VIP Soundcheck Package
– One General Admission ticket
– Early entry into venue
– Access to a pre-show soundcheck and Q&A with Em Beihold
– Group photo with Em Beihold in front of stage
– Specially designed Tales Of A Failed Shapeshifter tote bag
– Commemorative VIP laminate & lanyard
– Priority merchandise shopping
– Limited availability
All ages show – $2 cash surcharge at the door for minors
To prevent ticket fraud and resale, we use a delivery delay for all online purchases. You will receive an order confirmation immediately after your purchase, and your tickets will be sent to you via eTix THREE DAYS before the event.
Em Beihold
Singer-songwriter Em Beihold knows a thing or two about shapeshifting. On her long-awaited debut album, Tales of a Failed Shapeshifter (Republic, 2026), she’s ready to tell all the ways she’s done that: in relationships, friendships, and most of all, as an artist.
But in order to make this album, Beihold needed to learn who she was when the shapeshifting stopped working.
When Em Beihold’s “Numb Little Bug” became a runaway hit, she was on top of the world. Her 2022 single about her experience taking antidepressants cracked the Top 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 and reached platinum status. By the time it broke through, Beihold was already several years into her career. She self-released her debut EP in 2017 and had found early success through a growing fandom on social media.
“Numb Little Bug” opened doors Beihold couldn’t have imagined before. In 2022, she appeared on a viral remix of Stephen Sanchez’s “Until I Found You.” She performed her hits on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and The Late Late Show With James Corden. She opened for acts like Jonas Brothers, Lewis Capaldi and King Princess before embarking on her own headlining tour in 2024. As the rollercoaster of the song’s momentum and a couple years straight of touring wore down, so did Beihold. She knew it was time for a debut album but she couldn’t crack the code.
“I had the worst kind of writer's block and identity crisis,” she says.”I didn’t even know what I was trying to make or say or what I liked.”
That feeling is particularly difficult to grapple with when your whole worth is tied to being an artist. She couldn’t see value in herself when she wasn’t able to write songs.
“When I was feeling so blocked, I'd spend hours at the piano and nothing would come out. I felt like maybe it was a power that I lost because I would process my emotions through writing, and when I couldn't write, I couldn't process.”
During her summer in outpatient therapy, Beihold returned to the artists who inspired her to write songs in the first place: Regina Spektor, Marina, Sara Bareilles, Feist, and Lily Allen. “When my body didn't feel like home, I went to the things that in the past made me feel like home,” she explains. Meanwhile, she found herself befriending many of the other patients seeking treatment—the older ones putting much of what she was going through into perspective. One even said something that helped spark Beihold’s return to self: “How would you feel if Regina Spektor tried to be Britney Spears?
When she felt ready to re-enter the studio, Beihold did so with two producers who finally understood her sound and voice: James Flannigan (Marina, Carly Rae Jepsen, Weezer) and Jason Suwito (Benson Boone, K.Flay).
“Meeting the right collaborator was sort of divine timing,” Beihold says. Before she entered outpatient treatment, she had been in a revolving door of failed sessions with other producers who weren’t the right fit.
The first track Beihold and Flannigan worked on together was the single “Brutus.” Beihold began writing the song during outpatient, channeling her feelings of comparing herself to her pop peers into a moment of relief that her writing spark was still alive.
She says the song is inspired by her experiences with comparison to peers who were blowing up while she felt stuck. “It was important for me to write a song about jealousy that didn't necessarily put the other person down but was about how intense the feelings could be. People say jealousy is a map of the things that you want and it can be embodied by a person.”
Other songs on Tales of a Failed Shapeshifter dig deep into her archives of journals and voice memos. Bits of “Scared of the Dark,” a song about co-dependency, were first written when Beihold was just 13.
“The album is about me trying to fit all these roles that weren’t natural to me,” she says. “Whether it was staying in the wrong relationships for sake of comfort or writing music that I thought was ‘cooler,’ I learned that you really can’t fake being in the wrong skin for too long. That will make itself known either consciously or subconsciously.”
When Beihold played some of the songs she had written for her A&R at Republic, they read the lyrics as a reflection on what it’s like to be a girl and how you could feel on top of the world one day then at the bottom the next. Beihold wanted to write a song that more directly spoke to that feeling and quickly penned “Hot Goblin” with Suwito and writing collaborator Nick Lopez.
As dark as the world became for Beihold, the world of Shapeshifter is a bright one. It’s always been a goal of hers to tackle the darkness with levity, and she accomplishes as much on her whimsical, smart and honest new project. And she’s doing so more certain than ever of who she is and what her powers are.
“I really hope the album emphasizes that it's okay to have these dark moments,” she says. “They really don't last forever even if you think they might.”
But in order to make this album, Beihold needed to learn who she was when the shapeshifting stopped working.
When Em Beihold’s “Numb Little Bug” became a runaway hit, she was on top of the world. Her 2022 single about her experience taking antidepressants cracked the Top 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 and reached platinum status. By the time it broke through, Beihold was already several years into her career. She self-released her debut EP in 2017 and had found early success through a growing fandom on social media.
“Numb Little Bug” opened doors Beihold couldn’t have imagined before. In 2022, she appeared on a viral remix of Stephen Sanchez’s “Until I Found You.” She performed her hits on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and The Late Late Show With James Corden. She opened for acts like Jonas Brothers, Lewis Capaldi and King Princess before embarking on her own headlining tour in 2024. As the rollercoaster of the song’s momentum and a couple years straight of touring wore down, so did Beihold. She knew it was time for a debut album but she couldn’t crack the code.
“I had the worst kind of writer's block and identity crisis,” she says.”I didn’t even know what I was trying to make or say or what I liked.”
That feeling is particularly difficult to grapple with when your whole worth is tied to being an artist. She couldn’t see value in herself when she wasn’t able to write songs.
“When I was feeling so blocked, I'd spend hours at the piano and nothing would come out. I felt like maybe it was a power that I lost because I would process my emotions through writing, and when I couldn't write, I couldn't process.”
During her summer in outpatient therapy, Beihold returned to the artists who inspired her to write songs in the first place: Regina Spektor, Marina, Sara Bareilles, Feist, and Lily Allen. “When my body didn't feel like home, I went to the things that in the past made me feel like home,” she explains. Meanwhile, she found herself befriending many of the other patients seeking treatment—the older ones putting much of what she was going through into perspective. One even said something that helped spark Beihold’s return to self: “How would you feel if Regina Spektor tried to be Britney Spears?
When she felt ready to re-enter the studio, Beihold did so with two producers who finally understood her sound and voice: James Flannigan (Marina, Carly Rae Jepsen, Weezer) and Jason Suwito (Benson Boone, K.Flay).
“Meeting the right collaborator was sort of divine timing,” Beihold says. Before she entered outpatient treatment, she had been in a revolving door of failed sessions with other producers who weren’t the right fit.
The first track Beihold and Flannigan worked on together was the single “Brutus.” Beihold began writing the song during outpatient, channeling her feelings of comparing herself to her pop peers into a moment of relief that her writing spark was still alive.
She says the song is inspired by her experiences with comparison to peers who were blowing up while she felt stuck. “It was important for me to write a song about jealousy that didn't necessarily put the other person down but was about how intense the feelings could be. People say jealousy is a map of the things that you want and it can be embodied by a person.”
Other songs on Tales of a Failed Shapeshifter dig deep into her archives of journals and voice memos. Bits of “Scared of the Dark,” a song about co-dependency, were first written when Beihold was just 13.
“The album is about me trying to fit all these roles that weren’t natural to me,” she says. “Whether it was staying in the wrong relationships for sake of comfort or writing music that I thought was ‘cooler,’ I learned that you really can’t fake being in the wrong skin for too long. That will make itself known either consciously or subconsciously.”
When Beihold played some of the songs she had written for her A&R at Republic, they read the lyrics as a reflection on what it’s like to be a girl and how you could feel on top of the world one day then at the bottom the next. Beihold wanted to write a song that more directly spoke to that feeling and quickly penned “Hot Goblin” with Suwito and writing collaborator Nick Lopez.
As dark as the world became for Beihold, the world of Shapeshifter is a bright one. It’s always been a goal of hers to tackle the darkness with levity, and she accomplishes as much on her whimsical, smart and honest new project. And she’s doing so more certain than ever of who she is and what her powers are.
“I really hope the album emphasizes that it's okay to have these dark moments,” she says. “They really don't last forever even if you think they might.”
Janini K. Jha
Janani K. Jha (fka J. Maya) is a singer-songwriter, performer, and author hailing from California’s Bay Area. After graduating with academic honors from Harvard College and earning acceptance to Harvard Law School at the age of twenty, she decided to defer her legal ambitions to pursue her lifelong pipe dream: music. Today, with millions of followers and listeners across platforms, Janani (pronounced jenna-knee) has transformed this dream into reality.
Janani’s music career was launched when a demo of her Greek-mythology-inspired pop song, “Achilles Heel,” found a viral audience on TikTok. Praise for the track inspired her to release it as her debut single in 2021, and to keep writing mythology- and literature-infused music to share with her growing audience. In 2022, another of Janani’s original songs, “Sunday Crossword,” went viral when she connected its lyrical wordplay to her history as an MVP on the competitive punning circuit. Her videos about the song have been viewed over fourteen million times across platforms. Janani followed up with her debut EP, Poetic License, featuring several other fan favorites from that year (“Library Card,” “Two Roads”), and played her first ever headline show to a sold-out crowd in Los Angeles.
Janani released her debut album, The Rest of the Laurels, in December 2024, a concept album inspired by the mythological and literary canons that are dear to her and her audience. To date, songs from Laurels have been streamed over forty million times. The album, released independently, charted on the global iTunes pop charts. Janani performed to a crowd of hundreds at Brooklyn’s Baby’s All Right for the sold-out album release show in January 2025, and then to sold-out crowds in Chicago (Schuba’s) and Los Angeles (The Echo).
The Rest of the Laurels is accompanied by a digital companion novella, Katathon, written by Janani, which chronicles the story behind the concept album. Each chapter of the novella corresponds to a track from Laurels. Katathon charted at #1 on Amazon in its genre.
Janani also plays the role of Aphrodite in EPIC: The Musical, a musical retelling of Homer’s Odyssey written by Jorge Rivera-Herrans. EPIC has attracted a cult following online, and the cast album on which Janani featured amassed over 20 million streams in its first week, charting at #1 on iTunes, #1 on Billboard Soundtracks, #9 on Spotify’s Top Songs: Debut Global, and #75 on the Billboard 200.
Janani has been praised for her “whip-smart” songwriting and named one of the freshest voices in music by institutions such as VOGUE, Forbes, NME, SPIN, and the Recording Academy. With big plans for her future across live music, theater, film & TV, and writing, Janani is just getting started.
Janani’s music career was launched when a demo of her Greek-mythology-inspired pop song, “Achilles Heel,” found a viral audience on TikTok. Praise for the track inspired her to release it as her debut single in 2021, and to keep writing mythology- and literature-infused music to share with her growing audience. In 2022, another of Janani’s original songs, “Sunday Crossword,” went viral when she connected its lyrical wordplay to her history as an MVP on the competitive punning circuit. Her videos about the song have been viewed over fourteen million times across platforms. Janani followed up with her debut EP, Poetic License, featuring several other fan favorites from that year (“Library Card,” “Two Roads”), and played her first ever headline show to a sold-out crowd in Los Angeles.
Janani released her debut album, The Rest of the Laurels, in December 2024, a concept album inspired by the mythological and literary canons that are dear to her and her audience. To date, songs from Laurels have been streamed over forty million times. The album, released independently, charted on the global iTunes pop charts. Janani performed to a crowd of hundreds at Brooklyn’s Baby’s All Right for the sold-out album release show in January 2025, and then to sold-out crowds in Chicago (Schuba’s) and Los Angeles (The Echo).
The Rest of the Laurels is accompanied by a digital companion novella, Katathon, written by Janani, which chronicles the story behind the concept album. Each chapter of the novella corresponds to a track from Laurels. Katathon charted at #1 on Amazon in its genre.
Janani also plays the role of Aphrodite in EPIC: The Musical, a musical retelling of Homer’s Odyssey written by Jorge Rivera-Herrans. EPIC has attracted a cult following online, and the cast album on which Janani featured amassed over 20 million streams in its first week, charting at #1 on iTunes, #1 on Billboard Soundtracks, #9 on Spotify’s Top Songs: Debut Global, and #75 on the Billboard 200.
Janani has been praised for her “whip-smart” songwriting and named one of the freshest voices in music by institutions such as VOGUE, Forbes, NME, SPIN, and the Recording Academy. With big plans for her future across live music, theater, film & TV, and writing, Janani is just getting started.