INTERVIEW: Lila Drew releases debut album 'All The Places I Could Be': "I'm so drawn to the pop genre because it is the most subjective of any musical genre. There's so much you can fit within pop"

Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Vincent Haycock

London born, LA raised Lila Drew could very well become one of the defining musical voices of her generation. First releasing music in 2018, the Yale student of audio and literary culture attracted a fan base straight off the bat with her first single ‘faded/2am’ attracting over 10 million streams. With relatable, honest lyrics that confront the emotions of growing up today combined with music that truly defies genre and categorisation, she is in many ways everything you want in a pop star.

A former self-confessed ‘pop cynic’, today Drew releases her debut album All The Places I Could Be. The album focuses on the experiences of coming of age: the anxiety, the self-doubt, the lack of confidence, the heartbreak yet also celebrating some of the joy.

“I wrote this music primarily between the ages of 18 and 20 (and I'm almost 22 now), and at its core the spirit of the album is about exploration, about uncertainty, and in those emotions, trying to not be overly sincere or overly embellished when it comes to a coming-of-age narrative,” Drew says. “By that, I mean that the goal, lyrically, was to capture the sarcasm and humor and honesty and awkwardness that comes with growing up - exposing the fact that sometimes I really didn't have anything to write about because there was nothing in my life that felt worthy of writing about.”

One of Drew’s most impressive talents is her ability to create songs that refuse to conform to what a pop song should be. She mixes up her sound constantly, and just one song can take you through multiple genres and feels in just three minutes. New single ‘Used To’ is a case in point, which begins as an acoustic piano track, morphing into an earthy indie track before transforming into a delicious electro-synth-pop song. It is a delight to experience, especially on first listen.

‘Selfish’ is a claustrophobic, muffled dance track interspersed with floaty, ethereal sections while first single ‘2023’ brings back the electronic pop vibes. The second half of the album brings quieter, more introspective moments with ‘Lucky’ and ‘Crystal Ball’ pared back, country tinged ballads, a vibe that is revisited with a fuller sound on ‘What Are You Doing’.

Third single ‘Bad Juice’ brings back electronic beats, a dark and moody track with a hint of R&B which Drew has said is about "trying to figure yourself out in a rapidly moving universe and trying to have some fun while doing so.”

The album closes with ‘Lila’s Theme’ and ‘Moments’, gentle ballads that really showcase what is so special about Drew: warm, embracing music that wraps around your soul and an incredibly emotive voice that really hits you in the heart, effortlessly capable of both full-bodied power or a fragile upper register.

With the release of All The Places I Could Be it is clear Lila Drew is an artist to pay serious attention to. It is an impressive and confident debut album that signals exactly what she is capable of and we suspect she will only become bigger and better in the coming years. We recently caught up with her to find out more.

Hi Lila it is lovely to be chatting with you. And huge congratulations for such a stupendous and sonically explorative debut album. It's beautiful. First off, how does the title All The Places I Could Be encapsulate all these beautiful songs?
I'm trying to nail down exactly how I define it. The long and short of it is there's an aspirational quality to the record, in the same way that I think there's a real exploratory quality about it as well. My main goal in making the record from day one was: I need to figure out who I am, not really as a person, but who I am sonically, who I am musically, what resonates with me, what doesn't, and in turn, what lyrics make most sense for me? Rathe than how do I understand my life better through the music,it was more like how do I translate my life better into the music? How does that look for me?

I'm such a fan of music. I'm just a massive consumer of music. My wanting to do music only came from me loving music and wanting to make music like the musicians that I idolised. I started writing when I was super, super young, when I was eight or nine, but when I started recording, when I was around 14, 15, I felt that process was cluttered by my referencing. I felt like I was referencing so heavily all the time, to the point that it was clouding my own sense of self, my own sense of my writing, my sense of the sonics, my sense of all of it. I ended up coming out of it with products that I didn't really like, they felt like I was trying really hard and they didn't feel natural to me, mostly because I had no idea what did.

The whole process of making this record, which took a really long time, was a lot about trying to understand that it's okay to have those aspirations, and that can feed into the record as well and can add to the exploration. So that's how the title came about, it's not really about physical places, it's not about me wanting to travel, it's more about wanting to embody other things. Wanting to embody other people, wanting to embody other stories and also feeling, a lot of the time, that my stories in my life weren't worth sharing and, trying to figure out how to feel better about my experiences.

I was singing in my room one day after I'd written most of the record and was just ad libbing, humming random melodies with some words and that sort of just came into my mind, which is where the ‘Places I Could Be’ interlude came from. I started saying that lyric, and then was like, ‘hmm, this actually really encapsulates so much of this body of work’.

You brought up some wonderful points. What I find interesting is artists such as yourself that start a music career in their adolescence, you're still taught to second guess yourselves, because you're led to believe that you haven't lived or your problems are just fickle, and passing and hormonal.
Yes, and to be fair, I do think that the problems I've experienced in my life are fickle. There's so much happening in the world that is so unbelievably horrible, and I've been so privileged in my life to have a great family, loving friends and be able to fucking make music. All those things are so unbelievable, so I think it was more about I just felt like ‘who am I to be making art for the sake of art, or making music for the sake of music’ when the world is falling apart and blowing up all at the same time?’ It's partially that and it's partially just that feeling of do I even have any experiences that I want to talk about, or all my experiences just me waking up at six in the morning and going to high school? It's an interesting time to be a young person, an interesting time to be a young person who's trying to make music, make art. I have my own challenges with what that means and how to define that on a larger scale, but that's very meta.

Well, everyone turns to music for comfort, and also to charge them up to fight further battles. Not everyone can put on a pair of dungarees and do the hardest physical labour, so there's a role for everyone. That concern and navigation of your own moral compasses being an artist in a world that's crumbling, is that where your pop cynicism comes from?
No, I think my pop cynicism comes from me thinking that it's cool to be a snob! That's sort of the environment that I grew up in, especially growing up in Los Angeles, everyone is just so steeped in music and just on the forefront of the newest thing, the craziest thing, the coolest thing. And pop was never ever that until recent times. When I was younger, like oh my god, all of the boys that I ever liked had crazy eccentric music taste. All my friends had very eccentric music tastes. My parents never played modern pop music ever. If someone would have asked me when I was 12 years old ‘what music do you like?’ I would have been like ‘anything but country or pop music’. I was such an absolute snob. Of course, there's music that I love, and there's music that I can't stand and that’s what makes this whole thing work is the subjectivity of it all. This cynicism when I was younger really just came from the fact that I wanted to perceive myself as having better taste than that. But just to clarify, I love pop music, there's incredibly tasteful pop music being made now, being made when I was a kid, being made before I was born and I'm sure will continue to get made. I'm so drawn to the pop genre, because it is the most subjective of any musical genre. There's so much you can fit within pop. Going back to the referencing, the breadth of references that can be in a pop record is so crazy to me and so cool and I love that as a music listener. Some of my favourite artists I would consider pop artists, but I would also probably consider them indie artists and country artists and rock artists and all the things.

It's an ever shifting goalposts and I'm with you like looking back, I really regret not cashing in on artists because I thought I was too cool for them. Let's talk about the absolutely beautiful jazzy woodwind brass section of ‘Lila’s Theme’. Gosh, I love this so much. Your delivery is one thing I really want to talk to you about, because it sounds like you've recorded it in the way the video plays out, wrapped in blankets and recording it from a bed. Can you talk to me about this track?
Yeah, I wrote this song so long ago, I can’t even remember. I was rereading a lot of Joan Didion at the time, and I love her. I know that's like the most cliché literary reference, but I really do love her. She was the first woman I'd ever read who talked about mental health in a way that really resonated for me, that was really honest and wasn't like, ‘woe is me’. It was mostly ‘this is what's happening in my mind’. I was rereading The White Album, the essay and a lot of it is about Los Angeles in the 60s, when about her being the studio with The Doors, and the Manson murders and her mental health records mixed in and it's this really like cool pastiche piece about her but also about the city. I was so inspired by that and I'd been having a conversation with my friend that day about how frustrating it was to be living in LA. I had just graduated high school, I was living in LA in my parents house. I had no friends, I knew no one, I was in the studio every day from 11am to the middle of the night. I didn't do anything else other than write music. And I was like, ‘this is crazy, I'm supposed to be spending all my time writing music, but I'm not doing anything to write about.’

I was talking to a friend about how frustrating I found it to try to cultivate relationships online, it just feels really really unnatural to me. And by relationships, I mean romantic relationships, friendships, work relationships. So I had a bunch of things spiralling around and I started writing this song. It really didn't rhyme, it had no direction, no chorus, no verse, it was just this very free thing and I don't typically write like that. Either consciously or subconsciously I understand what's happening in the song and with this one, I really didn't. I wanted to start talking about this idea of how frustrating it was to have relationships that weren't in real life and then sort of move into the talking about how Didion was able to craft all of these relationships, because she needed them to be real. She needed to be looking at the subject in front of her.

That's how the song was born and for the horns and all of the craziness, this guy Stuart Cole did all the horns on the song, its French horn and trumpet. He runs them through these modular stents and they get these crazy, crazy very cinematic sounds that makes it sound like he's an orchestra of strange horn sounds, which was so cool, it was just amazing to get that. The song took a lot of different shapes, as did many of the songs on the record, but ‘Lila’s Theme’ was one of them that just had a lot of different forms. The first version of it was very electronic, a lot more synth heavy. The second version of it we added more guitar, and then the final version ended up being guitar, live piano, and the horns, which I'm so happy with, it was a really honest representation of the song. And as for the recording, this is one of the only songs on the record that I recorded in a real studio on a really high quality microphone.

Across the whole record, we were just so careful about not using huge amounts of compression, not trying to eliminate room noise, not taking out breaths, not processing the vocals in a traditional pop female vocal way. We wanted people to feel like I was whispering into their ear. Delivery is something I struggled with for so long. When I was growing up, the female vocalists I looked up to were really vocally emotive. Lorde is an amazing example, Adele, obviously, Taylor Swift. The list goes on and on. They have these ways of vocally emoting in a way that I always thought was a little too theatrical for me to do myself, it just felt really unnatural to me. And then I was like, ‘I can just sing quietly as if I'm singing it to myself and that is maybe a more honest representation of the lyrics for me vocally.’ I let the lyrics do their thing. I would never sing a lyric louder just because it was angry or it was meant to be more emotive. I think there are levels there.

You have absolutely nailed it. It's so beautiful. Lila, obviously we have All The Places I Could Be out now that is just so gorgeous. What else is coming up for you this year?
This album has been such a labour of love, really. I love albums so much, I sound like a broken record all the time but I just love listening to albums. That's the way that I consume music, it's the way I've always listened to music. So it's very surreal to be putting out one of my own that I'm really happy with and feels like a body of work and feels really honest. I'm also in school, I'm just trying to get through the year of being in school, which is certainly not easy to do while making music. I'm hoping to play a lot more live the rest of this year and the following year, that would be awesome. I'd love to be able to play these songs live more. I'm working on more music all the time.

All The Places I Could Be is out now via AWAL. You can buy and stream here.

To keep up with all things Lila Drew you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.