FEATURE: Spotlight: Lauren Spencer Smith

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Lauren Spencer Smith

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I have been tipping…

PHOTO CREDIT: Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times

quite a few young artists for success through 2023. One that I am fairly new to but has the potential to be a mainstream star is Lauren Spencer Smith. The English-born, Canadian-based artist broke through in 2022. In 2019, her album, Unplugged, Vol. 1, was a Juno Award nominee for Adult Contemporary Album of the Year at the Juno Awards of 2020. Spencer-Smith gained international acclaim when her song, Fingers Crossed, reached the top twenty in several nations, including the U.S. It also cracked the top ten in countries including Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. Like many of her peers, Spencer Smith has found an audience and attention through social media. Many are cynical when it comes to those who find fame through TikTok, but the quality of Lauren Spencer Smith’s music shows that she can be compared to contemporaries such as Olivia Rodrigo. There have been a few interviews published this year, as Lauren Spencer Smith is an artist to cherish. A Pop act whose music is not reserved to a particular demographic, I know that there will be a lot more great tracks from her through this year. I want to bring together a few interviews. We get to find out more about a hugely promising young artist. At nineteen, she is one of the youngest modern artists who is being tipped for big success this year.

The first interview I want to highlight is from CLASH. They spotlighted her as part of their Next Wave series. It is clear that Lauren Spencer Smith is turning heads and showing that she has a big future:

“Whether it be watching her parents get divorced so young or entering the music world as a teenager, her life is marked by a fighting spirit. She’s been at this for a long time now, and one can only imagine where life will take her.

When it comes to Lauren’s career, it all seemed to start overnight. But it took three years of viral videos to bring momentum to her career. Like many Gen Z success stories of late, it took one or two TikTok videos to blow up and truly show the world a new talent. Speaking on this, she explains: “It was a little bit overnight. ‘Fingers Crossed’, was definitely over a period of a month, it just got bigger and bigger and bigger. But it definitely had 10 million views overnight. I thought ‘oh my God, it’s viral’. I don’t know what to do with myself. It was definitely overwhelming and just crazy, but because it was the first time that it was happening. It was so exciting and fun. So everyone was just so happy. But when I was about 15, I had a video that blew up on Facebook and got 40 million views. I took the song that I covered and I put it on Spotify.”

Even with an overnight viral moment, not many speak on how this can impact on the mental health side of things. It could be the simple things many don’t think about: such as travelling across the world immediately or the need to stay consistent. Even if social media wasn’t something to worry about, there’s the pressure of being an artist in general. But with Lauren, it’s slightly different. She outweighs the positives and negatives and makes sure she only works on herself. It’s something to admire as not many 18-year-olds would get to that point on their own. Then again, Lauren is a different breed.

Lauren Spencer Smith was featured on American Idol and reached the live finals, which is where she was able to truly understand how much she wanted a career in music. Blocking out the noise of the comments on her and the music was what allowed her to have that tunnel vision. When discussing that moment in her life and how the world perceived her, her focus remains on her work. It’s an admirable thing”.

Tracks like Flowers and Narcissist were among the freshest and most memorable Pop tracks of last year. In August, RANGE profiled a TikTok-fuelled artist whose Soul-Pop is tackling heartbreak with a distinct edge. She has this remarkable maturity and focus at such an early age. Someone who can relate to and connect with the teenage market, she also has this far broader reach and potential. A definitely festival headliner of the future:

“Early interviews with pop-soul rising star Lauren Spencer-Smith often find her sitting in her childhood bedroom, the walls adorned with posters of Sam Smith and Ed Sheeran. After the runaway success of what was only her third original single, “Fingers Crossed,” the 18-year-old from Port Alberni, BC on Vancouver Island, connects to RANGE from a hotel room in New York City, having just gone to Times Square to see her face on a billboard right above the American Eagle.

“That was one of the coolest things that’s ever happened,” she beams. In the months that followed, that particular accolade was joined by a couple more options to choose from. After “Fingers Crossed” quickly shot up the global Spotify charts, reaching as high as the runner-up spot after going viral on TikTok, Spencer-Smith has sold out tours across the US and UK, performed at the Juno Awards, and inked a major-label deal, all while sending another heartbroken hit, “Flowers,” to the charts and preparing the release of her latest single, “Narcissist.”

The singer is wide-eyed and excitable, speaking rapidly and clearly a little overwhelmed by her schedule suddenly becoming jam-packed and chaotic. Still, on some level, she seems confident that it would have happened sooner or later. Spencer-Smith will attest to having a fondness for singing that began around the same time she learned how to walk and talk, and has already racked up the kind of resumé that most aspiring musicians would dream of.

Dominating her local talent show at the Port Alberni Salmon Festival, after three straight victories in the “12 and Under” category the organizers made her compete outside of her age range for fairness’ sake. Spencer-Smith only went up from there, appearing on the Steve Harvey show after scoring a viral video with a cover of Lady Gaga’s “Always Remember Us This Way;” she then finished in the Top 20 of American Idol, and even scored a 2020 Juno nomination in Adult Contemporary for Unplugged Vol. 1, a live cover album recorded during a concert at Nanaimo’s Port Theatre. Most recently she performed her new single “Narcissist” on the Jimmy Fallon Show, which was followed by a stunning homecoming concert of sorts, headlining in Vancouver BC where she left her audience awestruck.

“I’ve always been a dreamer, so there has literally never been a time in my life where I was like, ‘this is not possible,’” she says. “But just being in front of 20,000 people, I really felt the feeling through my body like, ‘this is really what I want to do for the rest of my life’.”

Spencer-Smith wouldn’t be much of a dreamer without what she calls her Manifestation Notepad, which she credits for working overtime to bring her to the level of success she’s experiencing now. Lately, she’s been filling up the pages by writing her greatest aspirations repeatedly. At the time of our interview with the rising star, the most recent success was the acquisition of her US visa, which she used to relocate to Los Angeles, link up with some top-tier producers and get to work on her debut album. Once again displaying her incredible ambition, she notes that she would have done it sooner, but she legally had to wait until her 18th birthday to live alone south of the border.

“Whether it’s just me writing ‘I am happy’ or ‘I am successful,’ or something like ‘I’m gonna have a #1 song,’ I write it down and speak it into existence,” she says. “I refuse to believe that ‘Everything happens for a reason’ type stuff. If you don’t have a manifestation journal, go buy one. It’s legit.”

While the #1 might still be coming in the future, Spencer-Smith did obtain her first top 20 hit on the Billboard charts with “Fingers Crossed,” joining a contingent of Generation Z superstars like Lil Nas X, The Kid LAROI and Olivia Rodrigo who have grown up with a comprehensive understanding of social media and how to utilize it to their benefit.

The parallels between “Fingers Crossed” and the latter’s breakout single “drivers license” are almost eerie – both are lyrically hyper-specific songs in the midst of teenage heartbreak, teased to widespread acclaim and anticipation in a November TikTok post before being released in the first week of the following year and prompting a bevy of Google searches from those not in the know when they shot to the top of the charts. Time will tell if history will repeat itself.

PHOTO CREDIT: Micah Suarez

Success stories like these might seem like a brilliant stroke of luck on the surface, but Spencer-Smith knew exactly what she was doing. She could talk about the ins and outs of the TikTok algorithm for half an hour straight. “TikTok is the one platform that anybody can go viral on,” she says. “You don’t have to have a following, they just put you in front of so many people’s For You pages, no questions asked. The music industry has shifted so much from what it used to be – you can just post a video on TikTok and be the next biggest thing in music.”

It’s difficult to sum up the diverse music of an entire generation, but the one connecting thread between all of the biggest hits seem to be the same kind of emotional vulnerability and half-joking openness about deep-seated issues. Spencer-Smith and many of her contemporaries grew up idolizing Taylor Swift’s legendary pen, and now most of them are emulating her model – with a little bit more profanity. Spencer-Smith draws reference to another teenage TikTok success story of the moment as an example. “GAYLE and her song ‘abcdefu,’ that’s a Gen Z song for real,” she says. “You would never hear anyone in my mom’s generation doing that. They’d call it disrespectful. We’re like ‘screw disrespectful, we’re Gen Z, we can do whatever we want!’”.

I would point everyone in the direction of Lauren Spencer Smith’s music. It is coming from a remarkable assured and professional young artist who is going to amass to a fine selection of incredible songs. Her music is already connecting with a massive audience. When Billboard spoke with Spencer Smith at the start of last year, they were tipping the then-eighteen-year-old for success. I wanted to bring it in to show how far she has come in a year:

“Like Rodrigo, Taylor Swift and other storytelling singer-songwriters within the current mainstream, Spencer-Smith hones in on the specifics that are equally personal to her and relatable to a wide audience.

“It is the best feeling when you post a song, and so many people relate to it — It doesn’t make you feel alone,” she shares of the next generation of rising artists’ emotional vulnerability online, before adding with a laugh, “In a bad and a great way, I live for the drama — because anything that happens, I’m like, ‘There’s a song!’”

Spencer-Smith goes into detail about the “drama” right from the first line, so much so, that it feels like reading thoughts straight out of the teen’s diary. The track opens by painting the picture of a relationship at its peak: “Introduced me to your family / Watched my favorite shows on your TV / Made me breakfast in the morning / When you got home from work.”

“Legitimately, I envisioned myself in his room with his family watching my favorite shows on TV,” Spencer-Smith explains of her songwriting process. “I’m very specific with what happened in the situation.”

From its devastating storyline, you’d think “Fingers Crossed” was written in a post-heartbreak funk. In reality, though, it was written in reflection while she was feeling loved and appreciated in a healthier, new relationship — and she says she had a blast recording it.

“For a while, I think I was in an ‘I’m heartbroken, nobody loves me, I hate myself’ mindset while writing songs. But for this one, I met somebody new that was raising my standards and teaching me how I should be treated,” she explains. “I went into my session feeling angry and wanted to write a heartbreak song. We came up with the ‘Fingers Crossed’ idea, and I think the song speaks for itself. It has that angsty emotion. It’s not just, ‘Oh, you’re going to cry in your bedroom.’ It’s, ‘I’m mad at this person, I’m angry, I could say sorry but I’m not.’”

With only a couple days’ worth of chart metrics following its release last Wednesday, “Fingers Crossed” already has debuted at No. 69 on the Billboard Hot 100, and will likely jump up the chart next week following its first full week of tracking. And with the chart placements, new followers and hype surrounding the song, the 18-year-old takes away an important lesson from the pain that led to “Fingers Crossed,” and the much healthier relationship that came from it.

“Keep your standards high, women!” she concludes. “It’s not you. It’s the men that you’re interested in that aren’t meeting your standards”.

I have seen Lauren Spencer Smith named as an artist who will define 2023. There were end-of-year lists about the artists to watch in 2023. There are more coming through now. Although there is a lot of competition and alternatives, I feel she will definitely create huge waves. I know she is working on a new album at the moment. It will be exiting to hear that. Her latest track, Single on the 25th, is one of her very best. It is exciting to see just how far Lauren Spencer Smith…