Picture this.
It’s Friday night and you’re about to make a bad decision. After months of maddening radio silence, they finally reached out, meaning this “ghost story” is about to get a whole lot scarier: against your better judgement, you’re giving them a second (fifth) chance. Evidently, your friends’ advice has gone in one ear and out the other, but, fear not—BIZZY’s latest single “Don’t Tell The Girls” surely won’t.
Complete with grenadine-soaked guitars and endlessly-screamable lyrics, “Don’t Tell The Girls” pays humorous homage to the lessons we still haven’t learned and the friends who still love us when we slip back into our old habits. Like her earlier releases “Spinach In My Teeth” and “Tastes Like Shit,” BIZZY’s newest track is delectably self-deprecating but never devolves into depressing territory. Even while divulging her most humbling experiences, her upbeat spirit persists.
In “Don’t Tell The Girls,” BIZZY invites listeners to join her in the confession booth. Too scared to share the nature of her late-night whereabouts with her besties—“Don’t tell the girls that I spent the night at his house,” she chants in the chorus—BIZZY elevates us to the status of her closest confidantes. In an interview with the Voice, BIZZY revealed that she wrote the song after reflecting on a phone call with her best friend where she conveniently side-stepped a few key details of a story to spare herself some embarrassment.
“If we’re leaving something out of a story when we’re telling it to each other, you already know it’s wrong,” BIZZY said.“We’re the type of friends where I’m telling you every graphic detail of anything, so if I’m leaving something out, it’s for a reason.”
In the music video, BIZZY transports us to the scene of the crime. During a cozy girls’ night, BIZZY’s phone lights up with a call from an all-too-familiar contact, prompting her to abandon her wine glass and pizza slice to slink off to the bathroom. Though his contact reads “The WORST,” you’d never know based on BIZZY’s sunshiney expression on the phone—denial is a river in Egypt and, by Jove, she’s swimmin’ in it. In a matter of minutes, she’s applying mascara in the mirror and swapping out her sweats for a slip dress.
Amidst BIZZY’s dizzying descent down the rabbit hole, we are treated to scenes of boxer-clad boogieing a-la Tom Cruise in Risky Business (1983). Costumed in men’s button-downs, red sunglasses, messy buns, and smudged red lipstick, BIZZY and her two older sisters dance around the house while screaming the lyrics of “Don’t Tell The Girls” into a hairbrush.
Though parallels to Cruise’s iconic dance scene are readily apparent to any old school movie buff, according to BIZZY, they weren’t originally intentional.
“I didn’t even think about that,” BIZZY said. “I just wanted it to look like the day after, like the deranged You’re-Just-Gross-And-Wearing-A-Man’s-Shirt Look™. And then we were filming it and [my sisters were] like, ‘This is Risky Business’ and I was like ‘This is perfect!’”
Rather than taking her cues from Cruise, BIZZY cites Taylor Swift and pop princesses of the early 2000s as some of her biggest inspirations.
“I have two older sisters and one younger sister, and so anything my older sisters listened to, I listened to,” BIZZY said. “It was a lot of Hillary Duff and Avril Lavigne.”
These artists’ fingerprints are visible all over her discography—BIZZY blends Swift’s storytelling, Duff’s effervescence, and Lavigne’s knack for an anthemic chorus with her own unmistakable charisma. Still, above all others, BIZZY’s budding career most seamlessly aligns with that of her idol, Julia Michaels.
Like Michaels, Elizabeth Chiaramonte—known professionally as BIZZY—got her start by writing music for other artists. After growing up in Maryland, she studied songwriting at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., a city where, according to her, “everything changed.” There, Chiaramonte realized she wanted to pursue music professionally, but one little thing was standing in her way: her debilitating stage fright.
“When I told my family I wanted to be a singer, they were like, ‘Ummm that’s not gonna work— you literally can’t get in front of people,” BIZZY joked.
Thus, to continue nurturing her musical passions while avoiding the spotlight, BIZZY focused on sharpening her songwriting skills during her college years by collaborating with other performers. In doing so, she leaned into a role that already felt familiar to her—that of “the little sister in the room,” learning from those who had already made the scary jump to solo artistry.
Chiaramonte was content to work behind the scenes for a time, but then the pandemic hit. Quarantine gave her ample time to pause and ponder her life’s trajectory, meaning she was no longer able to ignore the elephant in the room: “Why am I not being the artist?”
“The only reason it came down to was fear,” she said. “And I was like, that’s the dumbest thing in the world.”
Determined to stop letting fear hold her back from her creative ambitions, Chiaramonte began working on her own material throughout the remainder of 2020. In 2022, she finally started releasing music as a solo artist under the name BIZZY—a nickname given to her by her dad when she was three on account of her “squirrely” demeanor and her inability to pronounce Elizabeth as a toddler. Though she also goes by Libby, Chiaramonte “[does]n’t identify with the name Elizabeth at all.”
“When someone calls me Elizabeth, I’m like, ‘Fuck I’m in trouble,’” BIZZY said.
Soon after formally launching her solo career, her song “Anybody” blew up on TikTok, with multiple promotional videos filmed from her car racking up over 1 million views. Today, the single boasts nearly 12 million streams on Spotify. Despite TikTok playing a critical role in her early success, BIZZY is admittedly not “a big social media girl.” Still, she recognizes its value as a powerful tool for professional advancement and for facilitating meaningful fan-artist connections.
While promoting “Don’t Tell The Girls,” BIZZY launched her latest social media project on her Instagram (@srryimbizzy): BIZFlicks. A play on Netflix, this new web series features a handful of short-form episodes which dive deeper into the story established in the full-length music video. BIZZY has also been working to spread the word about her newest single by sharing clips of her and her friends doing the music video choreography.
“Me and my best friend from D.C. spent an entire night drinking wine and making up that dance,” BIZZY said.
This spring, BIZZY’s busy-streak will continue as she accompanies indie starlet Rachel Chinouriri on her All I Ever Asked For Was A North American Tour. The tour will kick-off in Washington, D.C. at the 9:30 Club, with shows on Friday, May 9 and Saturday, May 10.
“There’s two songs that I’m gonna play that I’ve never played live that aren’t out yet,” BIZZY said. “So I’m really excited for that.”
In “Anybody,” BIZZY sings that she “could fall in love with anybody.” But the flip side is also true—anyone could fall in love with BIZZY. In large part, that is thanks to her natural warmth, optimistic outlook, and her palpable passion for the work she does.
“What I always say about songwriting is it’s the best, because you can go in with like the worst day, or the saddest song, and you get a gift out of it at the end,” she said.
Go tell your girls that “Don’t Tell the Girls” is available to stream now!
