Lila Drew shares All The Places She Could Be with her new album

By Mia Weisfeld

Recently, New Haven-based, LA-born singer-songwriter Lila Drew released her debut  album titled All The Places I Could Be. Sonically riveting, Lila explores pop music in a way that is unparalleled by other pop artists today. I had the chance to talk to Lila about her experimental musical tendencies, her album’s lyrical elements, her tour experience with the pop duo Oh Wonder and her 20-minute short film accompanying the album. 

Lila, do you want to introduce yourself?

Sure. I'm Lila and I'm 22. I just put out my first album, my debut album, last week. And it's very crazy. Thanks for having me.

Of course. So, Lila, how'd you start making music?

This is so funny because I feel like people are always like, how did you start writing? And I really just liked singing a lot. I just figured that singers write songs. I was eight years old, so that was my perspective on the world. Obviously, the veil was sort of uncovered years later, when I learned that a lot of singers don't write their own music, which is also totally fine. But, I was just really drawn to singing really at a young age, and I love music so much. I'm just such a massive music fan. I was always listening to music as a kid – that was my only activity, and still, my only activity in life is listening to other people's music. And yeah, I just started singing a lot, and I was playing piano, and I was playing guitar, and I loved writing poetry. This is elementary school sort of time. I just loved writing, so it felt really natural. It was also the dawn of GarageBand. You know, like 2008 was GarageBand [being] introduced to the world. We had Macs in my school for the first time, and I was able to use GarageBand and record songs on my music teacher's computer. I would burn my music on the CDs and give them to my parents. That was literally what I thought me making music would be for the rest of my life, genuinely. So this is all very crazy.

Did you write all of your own music for this album that you just released?

Yeah, I mean, I collaborate with other people in terms of production. There's a little bit of  co-writing, in the sense of co-writing melody and chords and stuff like that. But the lyrics are all mine, always. I'm always asking the people I'm working with in the room, “Do you like this? Or do you hate this?”, and that has a huge influence over what I end up writing as well. But yeah, the writing is always mine. I'm bad at writing with other people.

You're a full time student. How do you balance your schoolwork with your music career?

Not well. Haha, it's a challenge, you know? I think in the way that there are athletes who are at school with me [and] their schedules are 100x crazier than mine. So, I try to be cognizant of that. I don't have 5 am practice every day. But, I think that the challenge is more switching modes. Being in class all day, and then getting back to my room and being like, “Okay, I need to go make this TikTok”, or “I need to go work on the song”, or “I need to do this call or this interview”, or whatever. Switching modes from class to music is challenging for me. But, I think what's nice is I really have been working on this record for so long and a lot of the things that I do work on while I'm at school is not actually the music itself. It's sort of all the other elements around this release; all our videos and all of our edits and things are actually accessible for me to do on my own computer. As well as just me writing demos and stuff too. But, it's definitely challenging to not have access to a studio 24 hours a day. 

I love the song “Lila’s Theme”. What was the inspiration behind this song?

Not to be overly intellectual here because I don't want to do that, but I was reading… Also, not to be totally cliché, but this is about to be totally cliché to any female college student… I was reading a lot of Joan Didion at the time. This was a while ago, and I was living in LA with my parents. Everyone I knew had left the city. I had graduated from high school. I was taking time off before coming to college. I had no friends, like literally no friends. I was in this huge city [and] I knew no one. I was reading a lot of Joan Didion's work, mostly because I felt like it gave a really honest portrayal of LA, and I was sort of exploring the city for the first time, even though I'd lived there for a long time. I was so fascinated by the way she was able to sort of craft relationships with other people that she was meeting. She has this whole bit in her essay, “The White Album”, about [going into the studio with The Doors and] how they all wore these tight leather pants and everything was about sex. It’s just this brilliant passage. I remember being like, “Wow, it’s so crazy to me that she was able to form relationships like this”, because we never form relationships that are that real, or that are honest or whatever, because of technology. I was feeling really stuck and feeling like everyone I was meeting, whether that be like romantically or otherwise, I was meeting via Instagram, or via the internet. And I was just like, “This is so bizarre in so many ways, and I'm never getting an honest representation of the people that I'm meeting”. I always have a preconceived idea of who this person is before I meet them, and I just felt so drained and tired from that. So, I was in the studio, and I was reading Joan Didion, and I was thinking about all these things, and I wrote “Lila's Theme”, which ended up becoming this very sprawling, stream-of-consciousness thing. [It’s] sort of a meditation on all of those ideas, but mostly on the relationship between relationships and technology. There are a lot of Didion references in there. There are Joni Mitchell references in there. Yeah, it's a really weird track in the context of the album because none of the other songs are written from that place. 

I know you mentioned Didion and Mitchell, but who are your other inspirations? 

There's so many, oh my god. I say this all the time, but I think that inspirations for me are never static. I think there are inspirations that have lasted a long time, only because they're artists that I listen to all the time, and I think there are more subconscious influences than fully realized influences or actual referencing. So things are changing all the time. I feel like [with] every single song I write I'm thinking about different people, artists, references, and bands. Like everyone else, I'm deeply obsessed with The 1975. I love them so much. Matty Healy is my favorite writer, ever. I think they make the best-produced pop music I've ever heard, genuinely. And so I love them so much. [Their album] Notes On A Conditional Form had a massive impact on my record, but I think the rest of the stuff that we were listening to was really random; a lot of pop music from when I was younger. So, a lot of Natasha Bedingfield, Lily Allen, and Jamiroquai. We were listening to a lot of Cocteau Twins. It was a really random array. Whoever we were listening to at the time sort of snuck into whatever we were making in the studio. 

I was listening to your song “What Are You Doing?” and it almost sounds like there's some country influence to it. What can you tell us about that track?

That was a funny track. That was the last song I wrote for the album. I'd written the whole thing. I took a break from music just because of COVID. Also because I felt like my record would be made a lot better if I barred myself from listening to it for a little bit, and was able to look at it with a fresh perspective and with fresh eyes. Or fresh ears, I guess. I taught myself how to play guitar during COVID. I played it when I was a kid and I quit, so I was like, “I'm gonna really commit to doing guitar again”. I wrote, “What Are You Doing?”, it was the first song I ever wrote on guitar, which is so crazy. 

I grew up listening to a lot of Springsteen (my dad's from the East Coast), a lot of Lou Reed. I also became really obsessed with British Folk music. So Nick Drake, there's this guy, Bert Josh, who I became really obsessed with. I also love Elliott Smith. I feel like there are so many people that I listened to who have lowkey huge country influences, even though they're more rock/folk music. I also love Dijon. He's one of my favorite artists, and he has this amazing ability to combine sort of southern-sounding production with these really all honest, sort of quasi r&b songs. 

Anyway, so we ended up doing, “What Are You Doing?”. It's also the only song on the album that's 100% live. There's no computer-generated instruments on that song whatsoever. It's my favorite song to play by far because I can actually play it on guitar, so it's a whole new experience. I think with the country influence thing, there was a huge element of the record, which was I just wanted to be able to explore all the music that I love. I wanted it to be clear to people via the record that I was exploring that during the process, so all of the sporadic-ness of the record was really purposeful. Not only just for the purpose of wanting to find a bigger audience, and wanting everyone to like at least one song, but from the perspective of [loving music a lot]. Therefore, I wanted the album to sort of encapsulate all of it, especially because it was my first record, and it'd be dishonest of me to make some super-duper cohesive, super-perfect pop record when that's not where I was at. I don't think I hadn't realized myself in any sort of way at that point, nor have I now.

I know that you went on tour in Europe with Oh Wonder. How was that experience? Do you feel like you got a lot of inspiration from traveling?

It was so fun. It was so crazy. We got a call from my agent being like, “Do you want to go on tour with Oh Wonder? They leave in a week”. I was like, “What? I don't have a band, I don't have a set. I don't have equipment. I'm in London”. It was so bizarre. I remember just being told you really should do it and if it's bad, then it’s bad. It's just experience or practice. We ended up throwing together a set and finding a band in three days. I think number one, it was so awesome to play the songs live, mostly because the record was written to be played live (a lot of it). It just gave me a whole new lease. And also, I'm such an insecure person in front of other people, in that respect, but I don't really feel that way performing, which is weird. I hate being in front of a camera so much. I have such body issues, I don't like being in front of the camera. I don't like being filmed, it really freaks me out, but I love performing for people and I love singing. It's something that I forget about when I'm just stuck in a studio working on music. It's so easy to lose sight of that whole world, that whole space. 

But, traveling was so fun. I'd never been to Germany before, but it was so cool. I loved it so much. The guys I toured with are my best friends now. I think the whole thing was so inspiring. The travel being one element, but mostly just being able to play for huge crowds of people who had never heard my music before and people being like, “I really liked that”. Or I'm sure there are people who didn't like it and that's great as well, you know, that's part of the whole thing. I miss it so much.

That's great. I love that. So kind of backtracking, we had talked about how hard it is to be in front of a camera. And you did shoot a short film that went along with this album. 

It's surprising because this record has a huge visual element to it that I didn't expect it would have. I didn't expect I would be making five (music) videos for the album, not including the live film. It was so awesome, and I had an amazing time. It was directed by Vincent Haycock, who directed the videos for “2023”, “Used To”, “Bad Juice”, “Lila’s Theme”, and he creative directed for the whole record too. We just ended up becoming really close through that process. When he had proposed the idea of doing a live film, I really was drawn to it, partially because it really freaked me out. So I was like, “Okay, I'm gonna challenge myself”. And also partially because I felt with COVID and me being in college, I so rarely was able to show people or tell people that I actually can perform. [Performing is] actually something that I think is a strong suit of mine and something that I love doing. 

The live film is 20 minutes long. It's five tracks from the album, which is “2023”, “What Are You Doing?”, “Lila’s Theme”, “Bad Juice” and “Used To”. Totally not in that order. Sachi, who I worked on a lot of this record with, and a lot of the guys from his band Joy Again, also played in my band for the video. I just love those guys and we had so much fun doing it, and being together and, you know, having the sort of community element. I think the thing that I love the most about the video is that it's this weird piece about the fact that you can be at one show and everyone in the audience has a completely different story and a completely different thing going on in their lives. That was a huge element of the video, doing the sort of documentary style interviews as the songs were playing with people who were watching. I love that about it, and I think it adds a whole other layer to the lyrical and thematic elements of the songs. I loved it. We had such a great time.

What was the overarching message of your new album?

I wish that I could encapsulate it in one sentence. It's so not a concept album in the sense that there was never one big theme. I say this all the time, it's such a broken record. But, I really went into the process of making the record in hopes of just making one song that I really liked. One song that I loved, one song that I would listen to outside of it being my own music. And I think it ended up becoming this whole thing about exploration and aspiration, which is the best way to sort of encapsulate what the record is about. Exploring all of these elements of myself, both personally and musically. Also, aspiring to both be better musically, and as a person. I think that's where the title comes in.

All The Places I Could Be has nothing to do with traveling or wanting to be somewhere else. It's more about wanting to embody another experience that's not yours. I felt that, through the process of writing the record, I was really, really stuck, and really had a lack for what experiences of mine were worthy of sharing with other people. I think that's what so much of the record is about. About that sense of “my experiences are meaningless and nothing exciting has ever happened to me in my life”. Or on the other hand, “nothing traumatic has ever happened to me in my life”. Which is not necessarily true, there's trauma for different people in different ways, but I just felt like “Who am I to be pushing my own stories down other people's throats?” So it ended up being this whole mix of exploring myself and also a sort of longing, which is where the title really fits in. I guess that's a huge element of the record. On the other hand, it also has this whole side of trying to not take itself too seriously. You know, there are a lot of mistakes in the album. Tons of mistakes that we all picked through and chose super intentionally, so that people can hear the reality of us making the record. I think there's a huge element of funniness on the album, as well as sarcasm, and trying to mix in the deep sincerity and seriousness with a playfulness and childishness. 

So, what is your favorite track off of the album? I know it's hard to choose, but what do you think best encapsulates this exploration/aspiration idea?

Lila: I think the song that best encapsulates it, and I'm not saying this because it's the lead single, I think “Used To” probably encapsulates that idea best. “Used To”, in reality, is a super-duper sad track, you know. My album opens with, “I don't write like I used to/If I told you that I did, then I was lying.” That's how the whole world is opened up from there. I think that just so perfectly encapsulates the whole record. Also, then “Used To” goes into this bizarre soundtrack of pop music that I loved as a kid, that has a huge Natasha Bedingfield influence. Sachi’s mom yells on it – she had recreated a sample from The Princess Bride. There's weird record scratches and all these weird funny things. It was mostly just Sachi and I fucking around in the studio and trying to be funny, and making each other laugh. It's sort of throwing shit at the walls and seeing what stuck. That song also was the one that we had the most versions of. We probably did 50ish versions of the song just to get it to the final from the demo. We would just add and subtract all day. Whether that be lyrical changes or sonic changes or production changes. 

I think the song just encapsulates that exploration aspiration things so well, both in the, in the lyrics, which we think are super-duper aspirational, but also in the sort of sonic elements which have this weird “let us explore all of these different sounds that we're drawn to” [feeling]. I love that track. It's so fun and so funny to me to listen to. Sachi was only a few years older than me and I felt like we really grew up listening to the same types of songs on the radio. We wanted to explore what it meant to make a pop song that felt classic to our childhoods and I think we succeeded. I totally could have heard it on the radio when I was a kid, but I also don't think it's so early 2000s either. We just wanted to make a pop song that could really stand the test of time, that wasn't relying on trends. 

In your song “Lucky”, you say, “Lucky/You made it look easy / But I have a pretty hard time letting go.” What kind of space were you in when you were writing this song? Was there a particular event that inspired this existential questioning?

Lucky was one of the more emotional sessions. I think I was crying in the studio that day. It was really weird. Basically, we wrote “Lucky” the day before LA went on lockdown, like literally the day before. I think [we] were freaking out. There's this line in the bridge. It's, “I'd never know what happened if I contemplated some kind of natural disaster.” And that was like COVID, which is so crazy that things took a turn in the way they did. But, the long and short of it is that before I was born, when my mom was pregnant, she and my dad would refer to me, as an unborn child, as Lucky. That was their nickname, and that’s where my name came from. They wanted an L name. Anyway, I’m being sappy, but the whole idea of the song was to write this sort of letter to myself. It's just a really honest track. It was also a track that Sachi helped write a bit too. I'd known him for a while at that point, and I wanted to sort of let him into my lyrical process, too. He ended up writing a few of the lyrics in there. We were just sitting and talking a lot. I remember thinking, when I was writing this record, about predictability. This idea that the way in which I acted when I was four years old is the same way that I acted when I was 18 is the same way that I will act when I'm 45. I don't know if that's true, but that was just something I was thinking about a lot. I felt like I was so predictable to myself in a way that was really upsetting me. That I was acting out of fear so much of the time, but that I was so aware of it as well. That's sort of what the song ended up being about. Those fears and, I know, that sounds all very existential, and it was. But it was sort of those questions of, “Will I continue to act in these ways that I really don't like about myself, even if I gain more self awareness about the fact that I'm doing it?”

I feel like both the sappiness and the vulnerability came through in a way that was absolutely beautiful. For “Bad Juice,” what was making that song like?

I wrote that song in Bath, England with Matt Hales, who's also known as Aqualung. I had written “Moments” the day before, and I had written another song (that didn't end up being my record) that was also a very emotional song two days before that. I felt so beat and so tired of making songs that I was gonna go back to my hotel and cry about it. I was just like, “Damn, I don't have any more crazy stories to tell today,” and remember Matt being like, “I don't think it really matters. You're funny.” I don't know if that's true, but all Matt and I would ever do is laugh, we would just joke around all day. Then, we would work on these super serious songs for an hour, and then we'd laugh again. I really felt like I had no stories that were worth telling, and I especially didn't at that point because I've written a lot of those stories already. Matt was like, “I just don't understand why you need to have some grand idea. Why can't you just write a song that's funny. You can write a song that's about nothing and that's also valid.” 

And that's sort of where “Bad Juice” came in. He had told me the day before, “I have this amazing idea for a song. A song title, but I have never written the song to it. I've had it in my notebook for years.” He had written in his notebook in huge letters, “I'm super fun.” He was like, “It'd be so funny if that was the title of a really sad song.” So, I ended up writing this whole song, “Bad Juice”, which is partially about The Shining and partially about this idea of, “Hahaha, I'm super fun. Listen to my sad ass record.” We wanted that chorus to feel like a middle school band was playing it, having this really sloppy, very laid back guitar that was sort of driving that chorus. It's so funny that people like it, I always thought it was the most bizarre song, and it was the one that I was the most worried about people not liking because it's so odd to me. But yeah, people seem to really like it. I'm glad they do, because I think it's really hilarious. I listened back to the lyrics like, “Damn, those are really ridiculous. Those are so silly, and I don't know what I was thinking.” 

But I love that song. It gave me a new lease on writing. Period. I was able to just write for fun. I literally had never done that before. I felt like songwriting was this really daunting process. Then, I wrote “Bad Juice”, and it was just so fun. And now I've written a bunch of songs like that since. 

I love that, being silly is one of the best things you can do. What advice would you give to a new artist just starting out?

Hmm. I don't know, I feel like I'm a new artist just starting out, but not really. I guess, listen to yourself. I wish someone had told me that a few years ago. I wish someone had given me the permission to really like the music that I like. I feel as I've gotten older, I've become less and less of a snob, musically. And, I wish someone would have just told me to write the music that feels most honest to you. At least right now, I'm thinking a lot about what kind of music I would write if I'd never heard music before? There's actually this band called, (I want to say they're called) The Shags. They're a band of three sisters in the 60s and their parents were like, “You guys are gonna be pop stars”. None of them had ever played music or had ever written music. None of them knew how to play an instrument, and they went into the studio. They were all handed instruments.The music is awesome, it's so cool. I don't know, I wish someone had told me to think about that. And, “What is the thing that comes most naturally to you?”, rather than, “What is the thing you that you want to be?” Because I was really unhappy for a long time trying to make music that I thought other people would like, but that felt really unnatural to me. 

That's a great piece of advice. This might be kind of a daunting question since you just released an album, as well as a short film to go along with it, but do you have any insights on upcoming releases? Maybe some features, some tours, some shows, anything?

Yeah. I mean, I'm trying to bask in this release for a little bit. It just came out last week so, I'm trying to just take my time with that and be excited about that. The live film is out. I'm so excited about it. I hope people like it. I think it really gives a new lease on the songs. Definitely tour plans in the future, but you know, TBD at the moment. I'm sure there'll be new music soon as well. But also TBD, super TBD.

Well, it was so amazing to talk to you today. Lila Drew, do you have any last sentiments for us today?

Go listen to my album. It's called All The Places I Could Be. Yeah, hope you like it. I think it rocks. I hope you think it rocks, too.