Right on Time

Ella Ryann Cottrell on Becoming Her Most Honest Self

On a crowded week night in Athens, long after most students have closed their laptops and called it quits, Ella Ryann Cottrell is just getting started. The lights in the bar are low, the soundcheck hums in the background, and there’s that familiar hush she always feels right before she steps up to the mic, a kind of stillness she describes as “a quietness in my mind.” It’s funny, she’ll tell you, because stage fright was never really part of her story. “I’ve only been nervous a handful of times playing music,” she laughs, like she already knows how lucky that sounds.

The stage feels like home to her, steadier sometimes, than everything else she’s juggling: her classes at the University of Georgia, her shifts bartending, and the path she’s actively carving toward dentistry. Ella Ryann’s life is full; beautifully, chaotically, some-times overwhelmingly full, yet music is the one thing that never drains her. “Music is one thing that does not feel like work to me,” she says. “Everything else has some aspect of work in it..."

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Written by Landon Knight | Photographed by Daniel Shippey