Lizzy McAlpine may have moved to LA but her love for Wawa remains undiminished

Since Lizzy McAlpine released her debut album Give Me A Minute in 2020, the singer-songwriter from Lower Merion Township’s quietly emotive songs have commanded the attention of Philadelphia audiences at venues large and small.

McAlpine — who pronounces her name muh-KAL-pine and grew up in Wynnewood, Narberth, and Merion Station — has played the Theatre of Living Arts, opened for English songwriter Dodie at the Fillmore, and later headlined that Fishtown venue herself.

Last year, she opened for Coldplay at Lincoln Financial Field, and this coming week the now Los Angeles-based artist will be back home for two shows at the Met Philly on Monday and Tuesday in support of her pretty, stripped-down new album Older.

That McAlpine’s artfully crafted, confessional songs have moved her up to a two-night-stand status at the 3,400 capacity Met demonstrates the rapid upward trajectory of her career. Thanks to her viral hit “Ceilings,” she’s connected with an audience that overlaps with young heart-on-sleeve artists writing coming-of-age songs like Olivia Rodrigo, Noah Kahan, and Laufey.

And it also speaks to a newfound confidence as a performer that McAlpine, 24, has found. It’s all the more impressive considering she never intended the songs she recorded on her laptop as a Montgomery County teenager to find a wide audience.

“I was just writing songs for myself,” said McAlpine, speaking last weekend via Zoom from Manchester, Tenn., before going onstage at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival. “It was like a diary entry to help me process things. It was for me and my friends and really wasn’t any bigger than that. I never played in a coffee shop, or anything like that. My dream as a kid was never to be a touring musician.”

Instead, McAlpine, “who pretty much started singing once I could open my mouth,” dreamed of Broadway. When she was 8, her grandmother started taking her and her sibling Emory to Broadway shows.

“Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Mary Poppins, all that stuff. My mom listens to Wicked in the car. I was around musicals all the time, so it seeped into me.”

At Lower Merion, McAlpine performed in musicals and plays like Noises Off and Arcadia. At 12, she started writing songs, posting them along with covers of Dodie, Tori Kelly, and Adele, first to Soundcloud, and later Instagram and YouTube.

“Every day I would come home from school and sit at my piano and sight-read. I’m weirdly good at sight-reading. So I would just sit in my room and play music, every day. It was fun for me.”

“I was really shy,” she said. “Theater helped me come out of that shell a little bit ... that was a way for me to express myself without having to be Lizzie, you know? I could be the character. I still miss theater, and every day I wish I could be doing it again. That’s why I didn’t gig my own stuff around Philly: I just didn’t like being myself onstage. It was nerve-racking, and I had to build up to that.”

McAlpine started to overcome her discomfort after she graduated from Lower Merion and moved to Boston to attend the Berklee College of Music.

“I remember on the first day going to this jam session with my roommate and I just sat in the corner and didn’t say a single word or sing anything. But being around my friends there and being more comfortable with myself and my voice and my writing just naturally pushed me out of my shell.”

McAlpine gained attention online for songs like “You Ruined The 1975,” about a bad breakup that caused the singer to stop listening to her then-favorite band. (And yes, that would be the band whose Matty Healy is believed to have inspired songs on Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department.)

By the spring of 2020, McAlpine, a sophomore, had enough songs for her bedroom-pop debut, but her father died suddenly on March 13.

She wound up moving home to Wynnewood to complete the semester, and wrote one more song, “Headstones and Land Mines,” as the 13th song of the album, for her father.

Since then, she’s written two more songs to grapple with her grief and included both as the 13th tracks on subsequent albums, with “Chemtrails” on 2022′s Five Seconds Flat, and “March” on Older. On Zoom video, she held up her right wrist to show her “13″ tattoo.

The pandemic made it impossible for her to tour behind Give Me A Minute, but the music made connections online, and she decided to drop out of school.

Five Seconds Flat featured contributions from fans like musical polymath Jacob Collier and Finneas, Billie Eilish’s songwriting brother. It also included “Ceilings,” about a clever romance with a surprise ending that blew up her audience. She wrote the song while visiting London following a breakup.

The song was never released as a single, but a sped-up stream of the final verse — in which the tender moments that precede it are revealed to be a daydream — has been repurposed in over 600,000 TikTok videos. On Spotify, the sad song has been streamed 534 million times. Once McAlpine noticed people leaving after she sang it in an earlier spot, she moved the song into a show-closing encore position.

In L.A., where McAlpine moved in 2022, she misses “the way the weather changes,” and a certain convenience store.

“I miss Wawa all the time,” she said. “My order’s kind of weird. I get a tuna club sandwich. Which is amazing. The brownies are incredible. And usually the Apple Peanut Butter Dipper. Or a soft pretzel.”

Older centers on heartbreak. But in this case, it’s a college relationship that initially lasted only a few months, then dragged on for years. Songs like “Drunk, Running” are marked by a maturity and clarity that McAlpine rightly recognizes as a breakthrough.

“With every record, I’m trying to get closer to who I am,” she said. “This album — and the song ‘Older’ in particular — is the closest I’ve gotten so far. Now I look back on my first album especially and see I was so naive, I didn’t really know anything about love.”

On tour, McAlpine and her band members sit in a semicircle, recreating how Older was recorded in a studio in Pasadena last year. The songs are presented without bells, whistles, fireworks, or an opening act.

“On every other tour I’ve done, I felt not like myself and couldn’t really pin down why,” she said. “And I think I was doing my show the way I saw everyone else do theirs. You’re standing and walking around and giving the mic out to the crowd to sing.

“But that didn’t sit right with me. I felt off the whole time. This tour is different. I’m playing with a bunch of people who I consider family. We’re just playing as a band. And I think people are picking that up. I mean, I’m not going to be up there dancing. That’s not really my vibe.”

Lizzy McAlpine at the Met Philly, 858 N. Broad St., at 8 p.m. Monday and Tuesday. $43-$201. themetphilly.com