L’Rain

Music has always been around and I always knew it would be a part of my life but I never considered that it was possible to play music professionally. Honestly, even when I was starting to play music professionally I didn’t think it was possible to play music professionally – I was in a state of delusion maybe. None of it felt real. I think I had (have?) outdated ideas about work that I’m still trying to unlearn.

Thank you! It’s becoming increasingly harder to figure out who the quote unquote real me is, separate from the many other versions of me that exist. Maybe that’s the point? Maybe I’m the composite of all of these selves. L’ started out as a funny alter ego when I was a teenager. She’s kind of loud, abrasive, and thinks quicker than she talks so everything she says comes out a little jumbled. She’s brave, confident, and unintentionally hilarious. I would slip into this character every now and then as a kid, and the name L’Rain is in part an homage to her.

I only have agency over myself, not over others. I think it’s important to start with myself, knowing that whatever I am thinking through in my own life will somehow, in time, reverberate outwards toward other people. I trust that whatever I’m feeling will resonate out there in the world. I’m trying my best to transmute the energy required to identify my own mistakes into the strength and resolve to repair them. I want to become a healthier person in general, and hope that on that path of personal growth, I’ll also positively influence the world around me.

For me, it’s both: I’m interested in world-building through composition and production, but I also want the world I’m building to be relatable and grounded. I want to experiment and try new things but I don’t want to completely alienate people. Thematically too: I’m guessing most people have had to navigate difficult points in an important friendship or other relationship. I’m one of many.
As for my interest in synthesisers, I think it was fun to step into newer territory–we haven’t leaned as heavily into synthesisers on other records. My collaborator Ben is also an incredible synthesist, so we followed his interest a bit.

My collaborators and I think a lot about cadence and try to imagine the journey of listening to an album: the timing of peaks and valleys, when to introduce certain sounds and ideas, creating an intentional beginning and ending. I think the sequence of a record can change how you hear individual songs on it. We generally try to achieve a kind of steady ebb and flow through different feelings and moods, but sometimes a sudden shift feels necessary if we’ve been in a particular sonic space for a while.

I generally sample myself, and if I do use a recording of someone else it’s usually a recording I took myself or that was sent to me (a message on voicemail or something like that). This segment from Bill T. Jones fits in with the record’s themes in a lot of ways: the conflation of disaster and love, the implication of loss, the otherworldliness of dreams. I’d completely forgotten that I had this recording and I stumbled upon it in the middle of working on the record. It seemed like a sign that I was on the right path.

Yes! That’s my friend D, who DJs as Fresco D. The interlude features a message they sent me a while ago, trying to find the name of a song that was stuck in their head. We then made up a song to accompany the message, kind of embracing and poking fun at people who call my music jazz.
There’s so many other people to shout out! I’ll spare you the full credits, but today, I’m especially grateful for Joselia Rebekah Hughes, an incredible artist whose voice and writing begins All the Days You Remember; Spencer Murphy, the voice of Oh Wow, a Bird!; and Steve Head, who made miracles happen at the studio at Pulp Arts, literally making a fretless bass appear out of thin air among many other things.

L’Rain in general is a channel for me to sort out parts of my life that are especially difficult and processing grief, of all kinds, is always a subtext of the music I make. The entirety of this project is dedicated to my mum; L’Rain is a purposeful misspelling of her first name. In general, pursuing a solo (or quote unquote solo) project is also an homage to her: she would always ask me if I would ever consider releasing something on my own, after years of playing in bands. I was never interested until I was. Unsurprisingly, my mother ended up being right.

The root of this album, and of my music in general might not exist in a sonic sense. I would say that I am the root. I don’t think a genre can be discussed separately from the culture and people that create it. And culture and people are constantly evolving.

The music I really love feels timeless to me: it’s unclear whether it comes from 50, 100, 200 years in the past or 50, 100, 200 years in the future. But, if I have to choose between those three it would definitely be 90s R&B. I listened to so much as a kid, and I still love it so so so much.
To me there is also a deep connection between 90s R&B and baroque music, and those two genres in particular had a big imprint on me as a kid studying piano and listening to the radio. They are both genres that are influenced by the church, they’re both highly ornamental, they have harmonic similarities, and I even think there are timbral similarities–remember the harpsichord sound on Bills, Bills, Bills and other songs from that era?!

I would reassure her and hug her! I’d tell her to pay close attention to all the things that come naturally to her, feel right and feel fun. I’d tell her to hold on to all of those things and to nurture them, not be afraid of them. I would also probably tell her to try to be more organised and label the tracks on those Garageband files a little clearer!