Lila Drew 52

Can you talk more about how you first got started in music?

How would you describe your sound for someone that has never listened to your music before?

I started making music when I was really young and became obsessed with production. I was born in the 2000s, so by the time I was eight, Garage Band was on the up and up. I became so obsessed with it and started writing and recording my own songs (with me playing guitar so poorly). They were tragically bad, but I thought they were awesome and would burn them onto CDs and decorate them to give to my parents and friends. I was also writing all the time and learning how to produce songs. In a very random chance encounter, someone at a publishing company overheard the songs I was making that I uploaded to SoundCloud and I was able to start working with producers. At the time I was 14/15-ish and I didn’t really think much about doing music as a career, but just really loved doing it. It took on a life of its own and soon I was in the studio everyday.

I am only 22 and I think that with time, my music and the style of music I gravitate towards will change. For example, when I look back on the music I was putting out at the beginning of my career, it is vastly different from what I am working on now. It all stays within the same realm of focusing on the writing. So I guess it is pop music with a songwriting focus. This is sort of what my goal is in making music right now, but it changes all the time.

I think that it’s encapsulated in the title of the record. I love albums more than any other form of music, and that is how I have always listened to music. It was important to me to expose the fact that this record was all exploration. I wanted this album to stand the test of time because I usually never make music that I like by the time it is released. In making this album, the goal was to figure out what music sounds like me and lean into what I write naturally, without references to other artists’ work. An element of that is leaving in all the imperfections and making people feel like they were in the room by exposing the mediums by which the album was made. Overall, the album is a mix of exploration and an aspirational longing to be somewhere else or to sound like someone else. I wrote this album between the ages of 18 and 21, so a lot of the lyrical content is about trying to figure out who I am and which of my experiences are worth writing about.

Your debut album All The Places I Could Be came out November 11th, what is this album to you? You came up with a lot of visuals to pair with the tracks, is there a video from the album that you feel best represents the project as a whole?

What do you want people to walk away with after listening to this project?

The “Used To” video, only because it is a collage of so many different things. It’s this pastiche of every medium and every story that is very representative of the album. Sonically, the album goes in a million directions, but it’s grounded in the fact that I wrote all of the songs myself. Having songs that do different things and sound different from each other was really representative of the fact that it was my first album and I was figuring out my taste through the process of making the album. I wanted people to hear that when listening to it. If the album was cohesive, it would be dishonest to people because it wouldn’t represent my process. The “Used To” video is very representative of all of these strands and stories.

I think I just want them to listen to it again.

There is something in the album for many different types of listeners. This wasn’t really the goal of the album, but it was a result of making songs that I liked which represented my tastes in different ways. My biggest goal for listeners is that they feel like the music is right in front of them. I just hope people listen and feel like there is something in it for them.