Elizabeth & The Catapult is a Brooklyn-based pop/rock trio consisting of musicians Elizabeth Ziman, Dan Molad, and Pete Lalish. Formed in 2004,[1] the band is best known for its 2009 album Taller Children, produced by Mike Mogis and released on Verve Forecast. 

History

Ziman, who grew up in Greenwich Village, trained from youth as a classical pianist, writing her first songs on an upright piano in the laundry room, using a running clothes dryer as a metronome. At sixteen, she began to focus on vocal training, and subsequently performed with the New York City Young People's Chorus. She attended the Berklee School of Music on a scholarship to study classical composition,  and was awarded the 2001 ASCAP Leiber and Stoller award for her song "Like Water is to Sand." Her original plans to pursue film scoring were changed in 2002 when Patti Austin came to Berklee to recruit background vocalists for an Ella Fitzgerald tribute tour. Ziman toured with Smith for 18 months, causing her subsequent compositional style to draw heavily from jazz vocalists such as Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughn.
Upon returning from the tour, Ziman met drummer and fellow student Dan Molad at a party during their final semester at Berklee, and began performing together shortly afterward. Guitarist Pete Lalish, another Berklee student, later joined the band after Ziman saw him performing at a Boston bar and invited him to collaborate. After ZIman and Molad completed their studies, the band moved to Brooklyn in early 2005. Using Molad's home studio, the band financed, recorded and produced an EP, Elizabeth & The Catapult in 2006. The band was the featured Billboard Underground Artist for October 2006, and signed with Verve Records in 2008.

Taller Children

Having been popular for years on New York's Lower East Side, the band achieved a measure of national notoriety in the spring of 2009 with their first album under Verve, Taller Children. The band chose to travel to Omaha, Nebraska to record the album in the studio of Mike Mogis. Ziman wrote all the songs on the album with the exception of the Leonard Cohen cover "Everybody Knows," and several of the tracks were derived from demos recorded previously in Molad's home studio. The album was recorded quickly, and the band returned to New York shortly thereafter and released the album in June 2009.