FEATURE: Spotlight: Liang Lawrence — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Mila Austin

Liang Lawrence

_________

I am quite new…

to the music of Liang Lawrence. She is someone who instantly intrigues me. As she herself is quite new to the scene, there are not a tonne of interviews out there. I would advise people to check out interviews like this. I am going to bring one in very shortly. On 2nd August, she released her magnificent E.P., When Dead and Gone. It is a phenomenal release from one of the brightest and most engaging young artists coming through. A singular talent whose music genuinely will blow you away. I am going to come to some features and an interview soon. First, from the Wilderness Festival website – Liang Lawrence recently played there -, here is some brief biography:

“Liang Lawrence is a singer-songwriter currently creating and performing in the UK. Her debut EP 'letters to myself' was released in August 2023 and racked up over 1 million streams in a matter of weeks.

Having grown up in 8 different countries before she was 18, Liang’s ability to find a home everywhere she goes is reflected in her borderless audience with listeners around the world.

Liang was drawn to music as a source of grounding consistency - painting pictures with words, Liangtaught herself to play guitar and write songs from her bedroom, she found in music a love for story telling and a way to express the messy emotions of everyday life.

Liang’s raw and honest tunes lean into indie folk, soft rock and electronic territories in the vein of Clairo, The Japanese House, beabadoobee, boygenius and Lizzy McAlpine. Most recently, Liang has played a BBC Introducing Showcase and supported artists including Adam Melchor, Will Joseph Cook, Sophie May, Bully, Olive Klug and New Rules”.

One of my favourite singles of the year is Eulogy. A gem from What’s Dead and Gone, I am glad that it got some attention and spotlight. I want to bring in a review of the track from Atwood Magazine. This song showcases what a stunning talent Liang Lawrence is. If you have not heard Lawrence, then you need to follow her on social media and listen to her music:

“Eulogy,” a stunning song from singer/songwriter Liang Lawrence, draws you in from the very beginning, thanks in large part to its unforgettable opening lines:

Intentional or not
I keep on wearing black out to the shops
Now we’re talking outside Tesco
And it looks like I’ve been mourning for months

With lyrics like that, it’s no surprise that Lawrence has quickly become a rising star in the music world. The artist had a unique upbringing, living in eight countries before she turned 18. During this time, she taught herself to play guitar and started writing songs, finding comfort in music as one of the few constants in her life. Now she brings her unique experiences and perspective to her songwriting, telling stories from her everyday life that are clearly resonating with her growing legion of fans.

The situation unfolds in a way that is very theatrical and a bit surreal, and that’s the point. Lawrence explained the inspiration behind the song in a recent BBC Music interview: “I was thinking about how dramatic it all felt when I first broke up with my partner,” she said. “And I really wanted to kind of make fun of that difference — how you feel months later, you’re like ‘I’m so fine now,” but then months before you were feeling really horrible.”

While the song’s imagery and the details of the story it tells may be highly specific, it describes a scenario many people will likely find relatable — it’s that feeling in your stomach when you run into an ex out in the world, and the flood of emotions that accompanies such a chance meeting.

After this dramatic opening, “Eulogy” takes a more serious and reflective tone, with Lawrence thinking back to what caused the relationship to end and wondering if things could have been different:

If you knew all you had to do was say sorry
Would you do it over, do it over again?

Sonically, the song unfolds in three acts — the acoustic opening, a middle section that introduces drums and additional instrumental layers, and a final section in which a crunchy electric guitar accompanies Lawrence as she repeats the question she can’t get out of her mind: “Did you love me?”

But the version of the song that’s now on streaming services was far from the only arrangement Lawrence tried in the studio.

A snippet of “Eulogy” first went viral before the song even had an official studio version, so Lawrence and her team scrambled to record and release the full song after its initial success online. During this process, they continued to reinvent and tweak the song’s production.

“We must have gone through 40 versions of the song,” Lawrence told the BBC of the recording process.

Lawrence has also performed and recorded alternate interpretations of “Eulogy,” including a gorgeous, wistful acoustic version for that same BBC interview. This ability to reimagine her songs is a testament to the strength of Lawrence’s songwriting and musical creativity, and it makes me even more excited for her new EP What’s Dead and Gone, which will be released on July 26th via The Other Songs.

So now that we’re here
Shall I read you out my eulogy?
Oh, I’ll speak in remembrance
You can say all you should have said to me
And we’ll gather our friends
Paint a picture of an end
That’ll help them all find closurе
Spare the details of thе gore
You say wait ’til it blows over

And if you knew all you had to do was say sorry
Would you do it over, do it over again?
Do it over, do it over again?
Do it over, do it over”.

This is another interview that I suggest you listen to. This one is from 2020. I guess, when I said that Liang Lawrence has not been on the scene long, four years is a while! However, in terms of releasing an E.P. and really getting to the attention of journalists and radio stations, these are still the first steps. I am going to finish with a fairly recently interview. However, first, there is an interview from 2022 that interested me. A graduate of Exeter University, Lawrence was interviewed by The Tab about her work. This biology graduate and TikTok was already being recognised as a hugely promising artist:

“When thinking of graduate prospects, the main thing that comes to mind as a best case scenario is a nice grad scheme perhaps with a potential job at the end of it. Otherwise, it’s back to the pub in our home town which employed us when we were 16. Whilst a few of us may have come to uni with dreams of fame, still harbouring teenage fantasies of being spotted, these soon died as we realised that we couldn’t even rouse a cheer at the Vic open mic night and consequently haven’t sung since. Losing your dignity in TP is one thing, losing it at an open mic night is another. However, Liang Lawrence has officially put the rest of our graduate prospects to shame, having been snapped up by a recording company just months after graduating.

Despite having done her undergraduate degree in Biology, Liang also found time to regularly write original songs and share them with her 111.2K TikTok followers. Combining her love of music with her natural activism, she’s produced songs which touch on everything from: anxiety, seasonal depression, and relationships to abortion rights and climate change.

Talking to The Tab Exeter, Liang said that “it’s just so crazy how things are starting to happen I guess, I never would have thought this could happen for me just from starting out in my bedroom teaching myself the ukulele.” Although she has so many highlights, a stand out moment would probably have to be releasing her original Turns Out on TikTok, which drew attention and praise from pop and celeb royalty including Joe Jonas and Sabrina Carpenter.

She’s already working with some top bands and musicians, including the likes of Fickle Friends and has recently collaborated with Flyte *fangirls*. But, you can still catch Liang at open mic nights around Exeter, performing her originals and some banging Oasis covers too. She admitted she had a special soft spot for Pura Vida as it’s where she did her first ever live performance, and soon became the resident Thursday musician at its sister café: Sunset Society. Although she loves performing solo, she mentioned that “she’s going to start looking at finding a band soon”. *immediately sends her a DM despite having zero musical talent…* She’s releasing new music in a month”.

I will wrap up in a minute. What’s Dead and Gone is Liang Lawrence’s second E.P. It follow’s last year’s letters to myself. That was another stunning E.P. One that I have listened to a lot. View of the Arts spoke with Liang Lawrence earlier this month. The globetrotting artist has this rich and fascinating multicultural background. Discussing the difficulties of personal growth and artistic development, it is a fascinating chat:

“View of the Arts: Liang, you’ve had a fascinating upbringing, having grown up in 8 different countries before turning 18. How has this multicultural background influenced your music and artistic expression?

Liang Lawrence: I’d like to think it’s made me quite an open person and I mean that in both very open to being vulnerable but also very open to learning from other people’s experiences and stories.

View of the Arts: Moving between countries at a young age must have been challenging. How did you find consistency and stability in music during those times?

LL: I think writing and music was the only thing I thought I could control and had to myself. It was the only way I felt that I could express myself whilst having such an unsettled feeling all the time. I’m part of a family that very much dealt with the grievances of moving around by “just getting on with it” and I think I never wanted to feel like a bother or a burden expressing just how overwhelming things felt but the music was able to turn something I thought would be annoying and difficult into something lovely and easy for people to hear. I remember the first few times I’d finished writing a song and it was the proudest I’d ever felt.

View of the Arts: You mentioned that music has been “a grounding force for you”. Could you elaborate on how learning to play the guitar and writing songs from your bedroom helped you navigate the difficulties of your childhood and teenage years?

LL: I think it gave me something to completely lose myself in. I always struggled to focus at school but the second I started to write or learn a song, I was fixated on getting it perfect and spending as much time as needed to get there. To this day, I am terrible at explaining how I feel, I practically go mute when I’m asked to talk about how I feel but if I’m able to write a song and explain it in the context of a story it feels a lot less scary.

View of the Arts: You just released your second EP, What’s Dead and Gone, which contains 6 songs that explore themes of youth, romance, and modern femininity. How much of your personal journey over the past year influenced this release?

LL: They could not be more influenced by my personal journey over the past year, to be honest. All of these songs were written in the year after my first EP, which came out almost exactly a year ago. I spent the majority of the past year of my life just dying to understand myself and trying to feel true to myself, my femininity, and my sexuality, to be honest. It resulted in plenty of terrible and wouldn’t-ever-go-back-there experiences, but equally, I think I needed to go through them to understand myself better.

I was practicing some pretty reckless behaviors by myself and with others, sometimes strangers, and just realized that so much of my validation came from other people, specifically men. Once I kind of circumnavigated that, I realized that so much was tied into it. I had a period where I was almost experiencing what I can only understand as gender dysphoria and just feeling like I wasn’t “a good woman,” and I couldn’t express myself sexually without crying, and I never wanted anything to do with my own body unless someone else wanted it. All that to say, those are the feelings that were governing my headspace when I wrote these songs.

View of the Arts: The title What’s Dead and Gone is quite interesting. Can you tell us how you came up with it and what it signifies for you?

LL: To be honest, it was more of a title for myself than anyone else. I just wanted to mark the end of the bad habits, feelings, and people this project revolved around. In the most dramatic and lowest of times, I really felt like whatever personality and character I had in me was dead and I was just this corpse that was unattractive and uninteresting walking around, so there are also a lot of references to death throughout the EP.

View of the Arts: While I truly love all the songs on this EP, two of my favourites are Set Me Up and If Only. Could you share more about the creative process behind these tracks? Specifically, I’d love to hear about your approach to the musical arrangements and what was going through your mind when you wrote the lyrics.

LL: Those two songs stem from the same story, they’re just talking about two very different angles and feelings that were sparked by the same situation. I wrote them just a month apart from each other as well so I think I was finally able to process the situation in a way that meant I could almost choose how to approach it. I find I can only really write about something once I’ve processed it. I wrote Set Me Up with a lovely writer/producer, Hugo M Hardy. Truly one of my favourite people ever. It was our first session and I came in with this experience that I wanted to tell a story about that painted me as the villain in a way.

Set Me Up talks about letting someone fall in love with this ideal version of you and love that that’s as far as it will go. It was a really interesting spot to be in and it was just a realisation both of us were projecting this ideal on our relationship and ourselves. We changed the demo of this song a lot, it was a bit more of a soft rock sound at first and then I wanted to give more space to the lyrics and story so we stripped it back a bit and slowed it down and Joey Walker and I put it in this electronic folk world that gets busier and “messier” as you get further into the song/story.

PHOTO CREDIT: Nick Ilott

If Only was the last song I’ve ever written about this relationship I had and I think it was very much just an acceptance that there was a part of me that wanted something to work out between us, which I think I felt guilty about for a long time for several reasons. But I think I was combatting that guilt and not sitting with it for months because of how they treated me and who they were and the nature of our relationship and then eventually wrote ‘If Only’ as almost a surrender. Joey and I wanted to keep it pretty stripped, especially being the last track of the EP. Then when we added strings we just knew that was all it needed and I immediately cried when Jed Bevington played the outro in the studio.

I think “What’s Dead and Gone” is even more introspective than ever. It’s the most honest I’ve ever been in my music.

View of the Arts: Your music leans into indie folk, soft rock, and electronic territories. How do artists like Clairo, The Japanese House, and boygenius inspire your sound and songwriting?

LL: I love how honest and almost “in real time” all of their writing is. Eulogy was the first song we worked on in this project and that soft rock and electronic folk sound just really suited the way the stories needed to be told.

View of the Arts: You’ve supported various artists and played at a BBC Introducing Showcase. What have been some of the most memorable moments from these experiences?

LL: My guitarist and I recently played some amazing shows in China supporting HONNE and I think those were just so special for so many reasons. I got to see my family and be back home for the first time in five years all while doing what I love. Not to mention the crowds were the biggest we’d ever played and they were so sweet.

View of the Arts: As an artist with an Asian background, how do you perceive the representation of Asians in the music industry? Do you feel a sense of responsibility to bring more visibility to Asian artists?

LL: I think especially in folk, indie, and the singer-songwriter world, I do often feel incredibly out of place and frequently think about how I don’t look like most of my peers. I believe it’s the industry’s responsibility as a whole to recognise that POC have been overlooked and silenced in all genres for years and years, so shedding light on POC artists with, ultimately what is the most important aspect; that they have different voices and experiences and stories to tell through their music, is always so important. I will never stop sharing Asian artists I love and am inspired by and I think it’s so important that it’s made clear that there is room for all of us and pitting artists against each other for the token space of “Asian Indie Pop Girly” (just as an example) is incredibly toxic and undermining.

I think it’s also important to note that when asking an Asian artist about their sense of responsibility to represent an entire continent of people isn’t very considered which is part of the problem. There are five different regions within the continent of Asia, made up of 48 countries of which have incredibly different cultures and incredibly rich and complicated histories. I feel incredibly lucky and grateful to be where I am but the space I take up in this industry could never be used to represent “Asian artists”.

View of the Arts: You’ve drawn comparisons to artists like Clairo and beabadoobee. How do you feel about these comparisons, and how do you see your musical style?

LL: I love Clairo and beabadoobee, I love how they are experimenting with different genres in pop. I also love both of their vibes. I think at the core of my music it’s always incredibly honest and telling some kind of story which means that I’m able to experiment with my sound until I find one that feels most like me. I think I’m still coming to grips with my sound and that’s so fine and so important but I’m excited as it feels closer and closer with every song I write.

View of the Arts: When you are not working and writing songs, what do you do to get away from it all and relax?

LL: To be honest just spending time in nature is when I feel most relaxed. I love going for sea swims so when I can get away to a beach I am the happiest.

View of the Arts: What are your plans for the future? Are there any new musical directions or projects you’re excited to explore?

LL: I’m super excited to continue to explore working with my band. I love collaborating and the idea of creating a project with my band and then getting to perform the song is so exciting to me. I’m in a real country/grunge/midwest emo phase so hopefully there will be stuff coming in that world soon. I also am just excited to get even more honest in my music than I have ever been. As grateful as I am for the people who have found me through social media, I’m interested to see how things change as I worry less about my social media presence and “image” and more just about the stories I’m telling”.

One of our very best young artists, everyone needs to throw their support behind the incredible Liang Lawrence. What’s Dead and Gone is a wonderful E.P. from someone I can see being in the industry for many years more. She has this voice that hooks you in. Her songs stand up to repeated plays. Such a compelling songwriter and artist. I have never heard her perform live, though I will try to in the future. It is clear that the sublime Liang Lawrence is…