Eliza Sirpenski’s velvety voice peaks during the engaging chorus of her new song, ‘Moon in the Morning Sky’, which she released on major streaming platforms earlier this month.

“Sing the silent whir
Hear the broken breeze
Sense the chorus stir
Dream of minor keys
Always with you, everywhere
I am
The moon in the morning sky
The magic borne by sunrise.”

“Eliza's personality shines in every note she sings,” said David Lauria, a music teacher and choral director at Mt. High School, who wrote the song specifically for Sirpenski. “She has a great style. Eliza is a natural on stage, and is just a cool person. I'm glad to be able to help out a bit as she gets her career off the ground.”

Lauria plays guitar on the track and his son, Jacob plays drums. The song is currently on Apple Music and other music streaming platforms.

She began by belting out Adele and Amy Winehouse
Sirpenski has been singing ever since she could remember. She began belting out Adele, Amy Winehouse and other songs from her favorite pop artists at age 9. Like many in her generation, she would record herself with a phone and post them to YouTube.

“I would dress up. Put on makeup and had a microphone and very loud speakers. My sister hated it,” she said. “I would sing in my room, the shower, the car. Singing always made me feel better. It helped me channel my emotions.”

She auditioned and acted in her first musical at age 10. She took voice lessons, honed her skills and performed in “Alice and Wonderland Jr.”, “Annie”, “Children of Eden”, “A Christmas Carol”, and other plays.

She began writing her own songs and met Lauria at Mt. Hope High School in 2015, where he was a chorus and music teacher. Lauria produced the school’s first Musicafé, where students could perform in front of their families and peers.

“He is a terrific musician that can mix and produce songs and make them into a reality,” she said. “We were all yearning to do that. Get up in front of an audience and express ourselves in a way we can't really do in choir. I just can't thank him enough for like really pushing for that and getting it done.”

Needed to get out of Bristol
At Mt. Hope High School she took chorus and did more acting in the Mt. Hope Masqueraders program. She performed in plays “Bye, Bye Birdie”, “The Arsonist”, and also performed at all of the Musicafés.

“Eliza was the first student to bring a band to Musicafe,” Lauria said. “They performed a Fleetwood Mac song called ‘Dreams’ and did a wonderful job. We started writing songs together during COVID, because it was something we could do outside.”

Everything was going smoothly until sophomore year, when she decided that she needed to get out of Bristol.

“I said to my mom, ‘Get me out of here.’ I was being a teenager,” she said.
To her surprise, her mom said, “Okay, you can go live with your aunt in England.”

Sirpenski stayed with her aunt Joanne and went to high school there. Though she had more independence living with her aunt, life was more difficult. Her high school experience was much different than at Mt. Hope High School and it was tough to make friends.

“I never really had trouble with anyone in Bristol. But there, it was a different story,” she recalled. “The girls were really mean to me there.”

There were no music and theater programs. Rumors were started, and it became much more than the stereotypical “teenage girl drama”.

“I was like, oh my god, I don’t know how to deal with this,” she said. “They just weren’t that nice to the new kids.”

Back on course, but a new challenge
Sirpenski came back to Bristol for her junior year and got back into her music, writing songs and singing.

“I wrote a lot of songs about that time,” she said. “Really big things happened that I feel like altered the course of my life.”

She wrote, “Show’s Over,” a gritty song with harsh lyrics about her time there. She recorded it and put it on YouTube, Shazam and other platforms.
“I saw the world in a different way. I gained so much maturity and I had like, a ton of experiences that I wasn't gonna have here probably,” she said. “I just learned a lot about myself. I would never take it back.”

Sirpenski was a straight-A student, but senior year she was absent nearly 30 days.

Eating was making her sick. She couldn’t drag herself out of bed due to low energy and she was losing weight. Eliza graduated in 2018 but wasn’t sure about going to college due to the unknown illness.

“I think I had every blood test done in the world,” she said. “I was getting really sick and the doctors weren’t helping me. It was really hard. All of the time I was losing weight. I don’t think I hit 100 pounds.”

One day Sirpenski found something on her skin and she soon began to figure things out on her own. She went to the dermatologist and asked her to test for endometriosis.

“It was a shot in the dark,” she said. “I was Googling like a maniac because I'm like, what the hell, it’s right on my skin. My doctor said, ‘I’ve never seen that before’. I'm like, just test it. She called me a week later and said ‘You were right.’”

It took four years, but Eliza was finally diagnosed in 2022 with a rare form of endometriosis, called cutaneous endometriosis, a subtype in which tissue grows on the skin, causing lesions to form.

“They told me it can be found on any organ, on the brain, lungs, in the eyes,” she said. “Mine was on my skin. I was covered in it.”

There was one surgeon in Rhode Island that was qualified to remove it, she said, and she underwent surgery in January 2023.

“They make tiny incisions and go in and cut every single nodule and lesion out,” she said. “They burn what they can’t cut out, which isn't really recommended, because it can grow back. But you kind of have to pick and choose.”

She woke from surgery and immediately felt better.

“Aside from the initial pain of having the procedure, I was like, oh my god, I don't feel like I did before. I was gonna get better,” she said. “And that’s how my life really kind of turned around.”

She got her associate’s degree from CCRI and currently majors in global studies at RIC.

“I’m super interested in human rights and in politics and it’s something to fall back on if my music career doesn’t blossom,” she said.