Music
Interview
Liang Lawrence: “I try to tell stories in a way they haven’t been told before”
Chatting to the indie singer-songwriter ahead of her first headline show at London’s Omeara
The Omeara is a wonderful venue in which to debut as a headliner, agrees Liang Lawrence, but your first headline show is always going to be a stomach-churning prospect.
“I’m really excited, but, yeah, incredibly nervous,” she says on the phone, the low noise of a local café in the background. “I always get nervous before shows, and it being my first headline has made me really nervous, but I’m very excited. It’s the first show that I’ve really been able to curate and guide.” She adds – “The fact that we sold it out is such a dream.”
Lawrence gained her the majority of her fans through TikTok – a platform that has a divisive relationship with art, but that nonetheless undeniably hosts a huge community of people eager to discover new confessional pop. Enter Lawrence and her first self-released song, ‘Santa Cruz’. From 2020 onwards, she built her platform on the app and in the wider industry, releasing two successful EPs and fostering an audience dedicated to her soul-baring indie sound. We caught up with Lawrence ahead of her show at the Omeara to talk about her international upbringing and how she almost had a career in biology.
Could you tell me a little bit about your relationship with music growing up?
I was quite dependent on music, mostly because I wrote from a place of processing and trying to understanding my feelings and my experiences. I’m not very good at emotionally speaking, and I think lyricism kind of gave me a way to work out my feelings in my own time. Because it was a song, it almost felt like less pressure than trying to explain to someone how I felt. So that’s kind of why I started writing.
I actually hated any kind of music lesson; anytime anyone was trying to teach me how to play guitar, anytime anyone was trying to teach me to play violin or piano, I hated it. I really could not stand it. The only way that I wanted to keep going was when it was on my own terms. My parents were like, “No, no, we need you to learn guitar, and you need to technically learn, like, actually go to lessons.” And I was like, “Absolutely not. You’re not touching this.” I think the writing side of it was the main thing that I really enjoyed. I really enjoyed the storytelling, and when lockdown hit and I was away from home for the first time at 18, I just leant completely into writing like I’ve never leant into it before. I started posting on TikTok, and just used it as an archive of my songs. I never really thought much of it, but people seemed to resonate with it, and then I started to really enjoy it even more when I realised that other people needed the words to help them process their experiences as well.
What made TikTok the right space to build that archive of songs?
It feels super intimate. My videos were literally just me in front of my phone with the guitar in my bedroom. It felt like you were just in the room with me.
What kind of things did songwriting help you to express?
I think it was the everyday emotions that everyone kind of goes through: heartbreak, friendship breakups, all of those things. But also I was moving around a lot at the time. I grew up moving every two to five years. I don’t think at the time I really thought much of it; I don’t think I felt I had the time to process how those moves were really affecting me, and how much leaving the people that I loved really affected me and how that then affected future relationships. I think my writing kind of really let me take a second and just try and understand how I was feeling. Those are the main things that I was trying to work through, and now even to this day, I still write music about those things.
With moving around so much, is there somewhere in particular that you think of as home?
I’ve been really lucky to live in some amazing places around the world. I feel like you develop such a disjointed and weird concept of home that everywhere can feel like home. I have such a soft spot for all the places I’ve lived. I loved living in Asia. I lived in Japan for a bit, and that was the closest we ever got to me living back home in my home country, China. I’m half Chinese and half English, and I’m lucky now to live in England, but I’ve never been able to live in China. I think Japan was the closest to that, even though they are so culturally different, but it felt close to home. Whenever I’m back in Asia, I feel very, very much at home. Everywhere can kind of become home for me, which is nice and in some ways a bit weird, but I try to think of it as a really good thing.
When you were first putting these songs out, did it feel natural to be discussing these private feelings on a public forum, or did you find it quite vulnerable?
It’s been weird because I really struggle to speak about how I feel to people in a conversation. But putting music out doesn’t scare me. It scares me in that I don’t know how it will be received and if other people will like it, but the vulnerable side of it doesn’t scare me too much, and I honestly don’t really know why. I think it’s just a lot easier for me to express my feelings in a kind of musical package than in any other way. I’ve always posted my songs on the internet since I was literally, like, 14. I didn’t think much of it. I just kind of loved that I could share my words with other people.
When did you realise that this could be a career?
Oh my god, I don’t think I really have even to this day! It’s a bit of a weird one, because I’ve never been technically trained or anything. I have imposter syndrome constantly. I think it discredits me too much to say that I fell into it, but I was quite naive in how I went about things, and I never thought that it would be plausible to ever work in music. I thought that I was going to have to be this incredibly skilled and talented musician and know how to read music and play scales on all these different instruments. It took me a long time, and even now I don’t think I’m there, but it’s constantly a process of me being like, “Maybe there is something in the musician I am, and it’s very individual to me, but it’s still something skilled and talented in a different way.” Every day is a bit of a process in understanding what is it about my music specifically that people are drawn to, and really just being grateful for that.
I think I’ve done it an interesting way around. But to be honest, now I do see what role it can play in my life. Don’t get me wrong, I think I’m still gonna find it incredibly difficult, because it’s like unlearning all of my bad habits. But I do definitely look forward to the learning. I mean, I’m learning every day at the moment, just being in studios with incredibly talented people. There’s an endless amount to learn within music.
You’ve actually got a degree in biology – what led you in that direction?
I never thought music was going to be something I could actually pursue. I was at school and just writing on my own and playing the guitar on my own in my bedroom. That was literally the extent of it. But I really loved science, and I realised that I loved learning it, but I wasn’t going to be able to be creative within it the way that some really incredibly talented and intelligent people are able to, and I realised that I didn’t resonate with being in that field. The thought of being in a job that I didn’t have that drive to really challenge myself in made me kind of just want to cry every day. Don’t get me wrong, I still would love to work with animals one day, but there was more of a creative outlet for me within music and less in biology. I do kind of still think of them as my two loves in life, and I hope one day I get to bring biology back into my life a bit more.
Could you tell me a little bit about the process of putting your 2024 EP, What’s Dead And Gone, together?
It was basically just the last year of my life. What’s Dead And Gone kind of came about in my year of coming out of a relationship that I wasn’t very happy in, and realising that I had been in a relationship for so long and didn’t know anything about myself, and the process of trying to explore myself and my femininity and trying to understand all of these new things that I was now confronted with coming out of a relationship. I wrote What’s Dead And Gone through it, basically. It speaks a lot about my exploration with relationships in my life, different kinds of people in my life, and what I wanted out of a relationship, which I didn’t really know anymore. While doing that, I was practicing a lot of habits that weren’t very healthy, and interacting with people that weren’t very good for me. The title is more a message to myself than anyone else, referencing things that I hope get left behind and not necessarily forgotten, but just left in that time of my life.
That sounds like a really empowering process.
Yeah, I think it was. It was the first time that I really wrote a project, as opposed to just putting together a few songs, if that makes sense. I loved my first EP, but when I look back on it, it was just a bunch of songs that I had written. With every project, you learn more and more about yourself, and that project really showed me what kind of sound I wanted to go into, and What’s Dead And Gone really showed me how to tie everything together in a project, and really find a narrative; find stories that you want to tell.
You just released a new single – what can you tell me about that one?
Oh my gosh. I’m so excited for ‘Out Loud’. I wrote it really close to when What’s Dead And Gone was meant to come out, or just afterwards. Obviously, when you’re releasing music there’s a bit of a delay on things, and I find that really hard as an artist, because I try to stay quite authentic and genuine, but when you can only release something six months after you’ve written it, sometimes it doesn’t really feel authentic anymore, because you’re now in a different headspace. ‘Out Loud’ was really exciting for me to be able to put out because I’ve written it so recently, within the last two months, and I think it’s just such a fun song. It’s very light-hearted, and it’s a love song, and I’m currently in this love bubble that I’ve never experienced before. I’ve never felt this way about anyone in my life. I feel like a 16-year-old again. That song, I hope, just encapsulates that silliness. I really wanted to put it out before the headline, to give people an extra thing to be excited about.
When you’re deciding whether or not to put something out, what qualities do you look for in the songs you’ve written?
I just basically try to tell stories in ways that they haven’t been told before. People say there’s only a certain number of stories that we end up telling, at the core of everything, and you end up getting reiterations of the same story, or different angles and different perspectives. I just try to keep things as authentic to me and my experiences as I can, while still getting across those core, fundamental emotions at the heart of those stories, but put a twist on it, make it a bit weird. What can I get away with? How far can I take this story?
Where would you like to be in five years?
I’d love to have an album out by then, maybe two. I hope that wherever music takes me, I am still being as authentic to my own experiences as possible, and five years from now, I hope that if I’m lucky enough to be playing bigger shows and selling out huge venues, I’m still getting to tell the stories that are mine, if that makes sense. I always say this to my manager – as much as I love the industry, I think people get really sucked into it, and you can end up just living the same life as every other musician, and then you’re all just telling the same stories. I hope I get to pursue this career alongside my real life, and I hope I get to be able to travel to some crazy places, have some crazy experiences, take a really fun dance class and write a song about it. Just mundane things, but I hope that’s always where my music comes from. Regardless of how big the numbers get and how crazy the venues get and how crazy the experiences get, I hope I’m still grounded.
Liang Lawrence plays the Omeara on 12 September. Find tickets here.
