I am Ellie Waldron, a transgender woman born and raised in the state of Georgia in the United States.

Growing up, I never really had much of an interest in music. I would hear stuff playing on the radio, and sometimes I would really like what I heard, but I never went out of my way to listen to music. When I was about 8 years old, my dad attempted to teach my guitar. My father is a musician and producer, but it was always just a hobby for him. Because of this, I grew up around music creation, and I remember my dad playing his guitar while I was in the room. Sometimes it would be his own songs, which I still remember some of to this day. However, I didn't have that spark to learn playing an instrument, so I very quickly stopped learning guitar. There were moments where I would try to create my own melodies while playing guitar, and this brought me a lot of joy, but I didn't end up sticking with it. At this time, I was most interested in playing games with my friends (honestly today that is still somewhat true lol). I also played sports, but I wasn't really that interested in keeping that up as well.

By the time I entered middle school, I didn't have any hobbies outside of playing video games. This combined with me going through male puberty, experiencing gender dysphoria for the first time, and losing many of the friends I had grown up with, I wasn't in a stable mental state. This is where I started to listen to music on my own. It started with me listening to the sound tracks to my favorite games at the time, mainly Halo, Sonic, and Undertale. I started finding myself especially resonating with the more electronic songs, which eventually ended up with me exploring random songs on youtube and Pandora. Alan Walker's Fade was one I really liked at the time, I eventually started going through The Glitch Mob's discography as I really liked their song Head Full of Shadows, and The Living Tombstone's FNAF Sister Location fan song I Can't Fix You was on loop back then. I was starting to find music that I liked and wanted to listen to, and I found myself bringing ear buds to school instead of bringing my 3ds. My dad probably noticed this, as he would bring me into his janky home studio setup to mess around, but I never did that for long. It was obvious I had a passion for music, but that wasn't fully shown until I found a specific band.

Near the end of 8th grade, I was browsing youtube one night, randomly going through Monstercat uploads (at the time I don't think I fully realized MC is a label and not an artist), and stumbled apon a video for the song Spitfire by Infected Mushroom. This song was unlike anything I had heard before, the sound, groove, cover art, and vibe completely captivated me. Youtube kept throwing me other Infected Mushroom songs, like Saeed, Bass Nipple, Heavyweight and Legend of the Black Shawarma. I love everything I heard from them, and very quickly I became obsessed. This was the first time I had fallen in love with a band/artist before, and it took over my brain unlike anything I had been into before. I continued to explore new music, eventually getting into synthwave, as well as many other Psytrance artists.

It was around this time, the summer of 2018, that I finally got the urge to start exploring music creation again. I wanted to learn how to play the piano, along with learning music theory. My dad really liked this idea, and took it apon himself to teach me. I love my father but I really don't think he was a good teacher for me, he tried to make it feel like school. Around this time my dad showed me what his DAW (he was using Protools) looked like, and this made me very excited. Something about the idea of having a midi keyboard in front of me and being able to produce any sound I could think of was very captivating to me, but my dad said I had to play everything out and that there "wasn't a shortcut". This combined with music theory being really overwhelming, and me not getting any fulfilment out of playing, caused me to drop the idea of music creation for the most part by the time 2019 started.

2019 Brought many new artists that would transform how I would look at music. I got really into Carpenter Brut and Justice, both ended up rivaling Infected Mushroom for my pure passion towards them. This year I started messing around with other artistic indevers like drawing, it was clear there was an artistic drive that I possessed. I didn't end up sticking with art though, it was just very difficult and I didn't get enough enjoyment out of it to make it worth it. I felt pretty upset by this, and really wanted to find some way to express myself. This was when I found out that 2 of my online friends, Nathan and joeiswoa, actually made music themselves, which blew me away. Music creation was something that seemed so difficult, and here were 2 of my friends who were doing it. Nathan showed me the web DAW Jummbox, a way to make songs using MIDI. This was the first time I had been introduced to a way of making music that wasn't playing it by hand, and it seemed so much more intuitive and natural for me. I started with just taking some melodies that I heard in songs that I liked, it was always just something I was messing around in. However, on December 31st of 2020, I attempted to create my own original song. This song was really bad, but I was so happy that I could create something like it. This is when joeiswoa showed the way that they made music, using a program called FL Studio. At the time, the music that Joe made was incredible to me, to the point I couldn't believe they could make something like it. I was still confident that I wasn't ever going to get to that point, but a part of me really wanted to make something as good as that. For the first 3 months of 2020, I made original songs in Jummbox just for fun, but was very quickly realizing that I was starting to get really into it. I wanted to try and see what I could do in a real DAW like Protools. I took a song I had created using Jummbox, exported it as a MIDI file, then imported it into Protools First, changed the instruments around, then exported it out. This resulted in the original version of R1S3. I had so much fun doing this that I did it again the next day, which resulted in the original version of what would eventually become the song H4NG. I liked this song so much, that I decided to release it on my dorment soundcloud account making it the first ever song I offically released. This upload is still public to this day. It was become very clear that this was more than just a facination, it was very quickly become an obsession.

About 2 days after I released H4NG, a message was sent out by my high school saying that school has been cacnelled for the next 2 weeks due to the spread of Covid 19. This 2 week period ended up lasting several months, resulting in the school year ending at this moment. All of a sudden, I had a lot more freetime than I knew what to do with, so back to music creation I went. After making and releasing the original version of the song FR33, I decided to finally take the plundge and buy FL Studio and Serum. One of the first things I ever made after getting the program was a cover of the song Calm 4, a song found in the files of early Minecraft versions. I uploaded this song on my personal YouTube channel. At the time of writing this, Calm 4 (Nerdy Remix) is the most popular thing I have ever made, I really don't know how to feel about that. I spent the next several months creating songs, learning FL Studio, and gaining knowledge through trial and error on how to produce. I released my efforts as soundcloud releases, songs like Factory, Innovations, Revenant, and HT23. My dream was to make a trilogy of albums, all albums that connect to one another, and I wanted to start making the first part of that trilogy at this point. Going from not having any knowledge on music production, to making a full album in less than a year was a bit ambitious, and I ended up cutting the album down to an EP. This EP ended up becoming The Origins of a Lost Cause, my first major release, and the first one I would release under the name Nerdlaw. My father goes by the name Nordlaw a lot of the time, which is our last name spelled backwords. Online I usually went by the name Nerdy, which I considered using for my music releases but it's such a common name that I didn't want it to cause issues with streaming services. This lead me to combine the names Nordlaw and Nerdy to create Nerdlaw. Regardless of the quality of the name, you can't say it's not unique. The name of the EP was supposed to represent how I viewed my music at the time, I still as it as a passing interest, something that would be gone eventually. I had the goal of one day having an audiance of people who listen to my music, but I saw that as so unlikely that I considered it a lost cause.

My dad had taken quite an interest in what I was doing with music. He was surprised that I had found a way to create music that he wasn't familiar with, and he was shocked at what I was creating. After I released Lost Cause, my dad listened to it in full, and fell in love with the song Innovations (for some reason lol). He came into my room and said that he would be willing to support me in any way he could, something I appreciate to this day. If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't have been able to make the music I make now. After Lost Cause, I wanted to make the idea of an album a reality, so I took some of the songs I had cut from Lost Cause, created a bunch of new ones, and put together The Heart of a Dark Future over the course of about 6 months. This release, despite it technically being my first album, is not one I like to go back to. However, it was a learning experience, as it allowed me to learn how to start creating my own sounds and experiment more with genres. This is where I first started to get the idea of making synthwave with the new version of R1S3. After this ablum, I wanted to start work on my next album, which I wanted to explore synthwave more on. I spent the second half of 2021 working on what would eventually become An Exercise in Futility. What was going to be an album, ended up being cut and turned into an EP, which ended up releasing in 2022, right at the tail end of my senior year of high school. This release marks the true beginning of Nerdlaw for me, as it's where I feel my writing style started. This was the first release that I started to really advertise, and it's the one that has the most listens out of all of my original music. This release was an end of an era for myself in a way, as about 2 months after I released this EP, an event would take place that would change my life forever.

On May 14th, 2022, I had the realization that I was transgender. Almost instantly my entire life had been recontextualized and changed permenantly.