New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Pop songwriter Lila Drew releases All The Places I Could Be, her debut full length album via AWAL. The 22 year old, London-born, L.A-raised Yale student transforms all the unease of young adulthood into high-impact pop songs, tapping into the refined musicality she's honed since writing her own material from the age of 10.
Yesterday, Lila shared a new music video for album stand out track "Used To", via The FADER, who is saying Drew's "big hooks and emotionally charged songs often feel as if they are being delivered with a wink." The video, directed by on-going creative collaborator
Vincent Haycock (Lana Del Rey, Harry Styles, Florence & the Machine), perfectly captures the bright and playful spirit of the song and further highlights the theme of interpersonal relationships through a pastiche of mediums that weaves seriousness with silliness - capturing the emotional kaleidoscope of growing up.
"'All The Places I Could Be', for me, was (and is) centered around the intersection of aspiration and exploration. Figuring out how to make an album, how to write music I'm proud of, how to laugh at myself a bit more, how to not beat myself up over it, were all part of it. So many elements of my life were changing in real-time while I was making this record, and writing through those changes exposed all of my insecurities and aspirations and things I wanted to explore. 'All The Places I Could Be' isn't about wanting to be somewhere else, but wanting to be someone else, embodying your younger self, exploring things you haven't experienced but are too afraid to seek out, and embracing mistakes and discrepancies (both within the music and outside of it) in the process," explains Lila.
Like her contemporaries Clairo, Beabadoobee, and others, Drew examines what it means to come of age, but her debut album focuses on the paradox between the worlds crafted by her favorite writers (Joan Didion's "The White Album" was a big point of inspiration for Drew) and her own — For Drew, what she saw in Didion's work was how she was able to create relationships that were unfiltered and raw, compared to the ways in which technology inhibits relationships and experiences off the "crystal screen" for Drew and her generation.
Across the album campaign visually, creative director
Vincent Haycock and Lila were inspired by iconic 90s campaigns grounded in minimalism -- Helmut Lang ads, Gregg Araki films, and Tracey Emin sketches and installments in particular. "I love Tracey Emin's short films that she made in the 90s. They were so unfiltered and talked about sexuality and femininity in all of their strange elements in such an honest and funny way" says Drew. These themes can be seen across the four music videos Haycock directed for the album.
This summer, Lila debuted many of the songs from All The Places I Could Be live on a European tour that included a sold out headline show at the Folklore in Hoxton, London and dates across
Europe supporting Oh Wonder.
Lila has been releasing singles since high school garnering major attention for her pop chops. Early on, Drew was co-signed by critics like Rolling Stone, Harper's Bazaar and The FADER who said she "has a voice so smooth it reminds you of the sunshine of her hometown."
