Dreaming My Dreams: An Interview with Lauren Lakis
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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