Dreaming My Dreams: An Interview with Lauren Lakis

by - August 14, 2018


With an album title like Ferocious, it’s not hard to see how badass Lauren Lakis is.

Thanks to her mother, that gravitational pull towards empowered female vocalists, mostly from the 90s, steered her into the musical career she is pursuing today. Lakis moved to Los Angeles in 2011 and tried the band thing for a while before transitioning into a solo artist. Her last band project, LA Nova, was very much the training wheels for her solo career, which was put on the back burner as she focused all her energy on a relationship.

“When that exploded into flames, I felt very inspired and was grabbing onto all of my favorite female musicians more than ever in my life,” she said. “I felt like they were speaking directly to the pain that I was feeling and I remember thinking to myself, ‘what an incredible gift that is to give to someone and to create a piece of music that someone else can listen to and realize I’m not alone’. I’m not the only one that’s experienced this and I’ll get through it.”

Once she picked up the guitar again, the voices of Natalie Merchant and Dolores O'Riordan spoke to her more than ever. She always loved guitar-based music, and spent hours in her room working on what would end up becoming Ferocious.

The songs were finished in about five or six months, which poured out at a rapid pace. As she wrote each song, she didn’t think of what the end game would be for each one but instead thought of what she wanted to say. In turn, she created an album that encourages the listener to be unafraid to feel what they’re feeling.

“I feel like as human beings we have a very animalistic side and we have a spiritual side and I feel like sometimes in love that primal force and that animal viciousness can come out,” she said. “I had this imagery of a lion or some sort of brute force kind of animal that takes over the heart. It’s funny because later I started to read more about lionesses and how powerful and strong female lions are and I thought it was perfect in so many different ways for this album.”

As Lauren Lakis takes a page out of the same book that her female vocalist inspirations used, she realizes that everyone goes through the same emotions and having/expressing those emotions gives off the feeling of being ferocious. As her latest album continues to provoke that conversation, her music is sure to be as timeless as those who started it.

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