LAUREN JUZANG
I had met Lauren Juzang in passing a few times before this interview. We shared friends, we danced in similar circles.
Even with my limited knowledge, I always sensed that she had, for a lack of more coherent words, a charged ease to her.
Let me explain what I mean by that.
In the most complimentary of ways, she’s remarkably unserious. She abbreviates a lot of words. Every sentence ends in an airy chuckle. Even the darker moments have an air of comfort or silliness. Or sarcasm. Or admittance.
And for the most part, a silver lining.
Ease.
Yet, she’s tremendously honest.
She’s unafraid to share the bends and loops of her journey, how she’s felt in taking each step. She’s comfortable in this expression, as her trials feel separate from her. She doesn’t paint her identity with these past experiences… when she could have. But she’s extremely expressive and open about them.
Charged.
What is specifically striking to me, is that her music, which is all written, sung (and recently, produced) by her, also has the same charged ease. There’s no parallax error.
It’s emotional, and it’s fervent, yet it swims in a pool of weightlessness. Her indie-pop-folk melodies welcome a comfortable sadness, a warm nostalgia.
In this conversation, I sought to understand this duality to her - both the emotional charge, and the comfortable ease - in both her humanity and her music. And ultimately, if the latter are symbiotic.
In understanding her soul, maybe you can understand yours, too.
WELCOME TO EGO DEATH.
In some cool pocket of a Silverlake coffee shop, Lauren and I - both tall women - find a way to comfortably lounge within the confines of a comically small table.
She looks around for her friend, who she hoped was working today. This is a spot, and a friend, that she visits regularly.
I soon come to learn that friendship is at the heart of everything for Lauren. She even credits her friends as the forces that propelled her into music.
It all originated, ultimately, with a desire for belonging.
“I have two older brothers who both played D1 sports. One is in the NBA. And…I was not that. I was not that girl.”
Because her most immediate models of success, along with her parents, had already found their paths within the world that weren’t of interest to her, Lauren began seeking where she might fit. From a young age, she was presented with the question, “What else can I do to find myself?”
She always wanted to write and perform. She recalls yearning to sing in her third grade talent show with an original song - but she just didn’t know how to craft that dream yet.
“I just kind of swept it away until I was old enough to figure it out.”
By the time middle school rolled around, a few musical friends entered her life - that changed it for the better.
“I went to school with this girl, Grace, whose dad worked in music. He would take us to a lot of the pop punk shows we wanted to go to…. Five Seconds of Summer, All Time Low, Blink-182, Twenty One Pilots.
I wasn't depressed at all in middle school, but I thought, maybe I am, so I could relate to this music. Even though I was literally 12 years old with… a blowout… and everyone in the crowd was actually emo, in the moment, I felt so a part of something. And that's what I wanted to emulate.”
The act of being a part of something, being associated with this artistic niche, made her feel inspired, excited, edgy. It made her feel autonomous.
While she had already begun her musical exploration in taking piano lessons since age five, and dipping her toes into the elementary school plays, she, now, picked up the guitar. She also felt inspired by songwriters like Gracie Abrams, who would write songs and post videos by the piano or with the guitar - simply in their room.
Lauren’s interests didn’t truly actualize until the fateful meeting of her friend, Jason Harris, who, according to Lauren, was “the genesis of everything.”
“Jason was always making music. He was crazy good at guitar. He would come with his ukulele to school, he would just play guitar behind his head. I thought he was so cool.”
Jason not only offered kind, genuine friendship, but served as a source of inspiration for Lauren. Someone who she felt understood her perspective on music, her passion. It was another affirmation of belonging.
By the time high school rolled around, she felt confident enough to form an indie-jazz-inspired band with her two close friends, Jasper Richards and Otis Gordon.
“We’d collab and we'd perform a lot, which was really helpful. I got so much out of the way with them from 13 years old to 17 years old - bad shows, learning how to put out music, how to collaborate with people.”
Simultaneously, she began recording music with Jason. This was the beginning of her first EP, HAHAHHAHA, which she worked on throughout high school.
In this process, she truly began to view songwriting as a craft. Some sort of a puzzle, a narrative.
While she had been writing music for years, Jason, along with her band, allowed her to bring these ideas to life.
My mouth sews shut all on its own.
No need for hands to shut it closed.
He likes to listen before he goes.
So we sit and listen to lost echoes.
…Don’t like to speak too much out there
So we listen across the room and stare.
…My mouth sews shut all on its own.
I’ll finally scream when we’re alone.
~ “Lost Echoes” from HAHAHHAHA
“You have things that you don't deal with, and as a kid, it kind of catches up to you. I had never seen a therapist, had never talked to anyone about it. My brothers were very loud and successful in what they were doing. I wasn’t in the background, but I felt like it. I grew up being very quiet, would never speak my mind, never speak up at family dinner. I think all of that got mangled.”
While one might be able to feel that through her initial project, Lauren recently released a song called “FINE!,” off of her EP, “EITHER WAY??!?” that reflects and contextualizes this time in her life.
“I'm surprised I haven't fully written about it until now. I was definitely adjacent to the [party] scene in high school. I had the biggest crush on the senior who threw the parties and one night, I ended up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning. And that's when I realized - one, I'm so depressed and I need to see the therapist and two - I don't care about anything. That was my reckoning. That was my realization moment when I was in the hospital, and I thought, what's going on? I need to stop doing this. I fully was suicidal.
Therapy really did change a lot for my life.”
Coming out of this time, especially after leaning into the help that she needed, allowed her to come even more into herself - and as an artist.
Maybe it was a light in a dark place. Maybe it brought her back to that sense of belonging.
She soon solidified her path in committing to Syracuse, specifically, the highly respectable Bandier Program - where she studied music and the business of music.
Syracuse was a godsend, as it offered Lauren a burgeoning sense of artistic community. A congregation of musicians - where collaboration was welcomed and absolutely necessary.
Not only did this community grant her the tools to develop her craft and sound, but it taught her to be even more autonomous. While she learned what it meant to be a band and put out music in high school, college taught her how to make a name for herself in a music scene.
Suddenly it was “[her] music, [her] vision, [her] direction.”
A year before she graduated, in 2023, she released her second EP, “Peek-A-Boo!” which took on an even different tone and collection of themes. While it still displayed elements of loss and fear, similar to her first release, it dove more heavily into feelings of love and beauty.
This was around the time where she met someone extremely important to her.
“This was my first relationship. In high school, I had crushes on people and kissed people or whatever, but I never dated anyone. At sixteen years old, I was thinking, why does no one like me? or.. do I actually really like you? Then I met him, and thought, Oh my GOD, I totally get what falling in love is.”
This last year of college proved extremely significant for Lauren. Learning to navigate this new, exciting, scary, wonderful aspect of her life.
If “PEEK-A-BOO!!” marked this new phase of life, “EITHER WAY??!?” her most recent EP, marked its beauty, its tragedy, its indecision, and maybe even its finality.
“I was a wreck of a person. We were trying to work through it because I loved him, and I was fully ready to spend the rest of my life with him. The last six months, before we broke up, I was angry and going through all of the emotions.”
“The first song on the project is called ‘All That’ and it's about recognizing things wrong with your relationship and being angry or impatient. I wrote that right after something in my relationship - a catalyst happened - but it wasn’t ruining my life yet. I wrote it with my friend Aidan, for fun. We had a session, and I thought, okay the melody's cool. Then months later, it was insane how accurate it was to my life. It just came out of me. I never would have consciously done that.”
I shifted in my seat, disrupting the equilibrium of the small table that stood between us. I had to inquire as to what she meant by that.
She would never have “consciously done that” ? Then what did her process as a songwriter look like - if she didn’t mean to directly express her feelings into writing her music? Was it more subconscious? Prophetic? Revealing? Magical?
“I'm very much the type of person who never shoots their hand up in class. I really think about it, I don't want to say the wrong answer, so I really have to know it's right.
I take my time on a lot of things, and I think my writing process is similar. If something happens, I'll need to process. I kind of process it as a person, and then it will come through music wise.
I don’t trust my feelings. Even when I'm talking to friends, if something happens, I won't immediately be mad. I’ll need, even if it’s just five minutes, I need to just feel it.”
While Lauren wishes she could process everything in the moment, through song, it doesn’t work that way for her.
“I’ll have an instinctual feeling, and usually melody and lyrics kind of come together.
I don’t think there’s a goal. Maybe just to tell a complete story that makes sense to people. It's so hard for me to go into sessions and say, this is what's happening in my life. I respect people who can do it, but I am just not that as a person.
In crafting the story around [the feeling], it often is the truest thing. Or two months later, that was exactly how I was feeling, but I didn't know it yet. It’s super subconscious.
So I'll kind of go a roundabout way, and then it always comes back to true. It's me, even if I don't intend it to be.
And then I’ll look back and think, oh my God. That was so bad. Not the work itself, but whatever I was feeling that I didn't want to consciously talk about. At that time.”
Writing, for Lauren, isn’t one thing or another.
“I think music is fun, it is an outlet inherently, but I think most important to me is its time capsule effect on my life at whatever moment is happening.”
While Lauren may not dwell or bask in the darker feelings on the day-to-day and within her artistic process, songwriting, she has come to understand, has a sneaky way of revealing what’s below the surface for her. That is where the duality lives.
And, in the context of our entire conversation, the time capsule analogy makes perfect sense. Each project has been a unique emotional flavor to the important events and chapters of her life. And that is, ultimately, the greatest gift that music gives her.
The biggest part of that time capsule for Lauren, though, is the friendship that serves as the spine of her art. The collaborative aspect.
Over the past year, as Lauren has transitioned out of college, she has found new avenues of community.
Right up until the release of her new album, she spent time on tour. While being an extremely fulfilling and enriching experience for Lauren (and something she already misses, having just got home), it was more of a solo endeavor.
“I was just on tour, and I was doing it solo. I was traveling with the headliner and their crew who were amazing. But I was playing solo, it was just a party of one.
But then when I got back to LA, me, Jason, and my best friend Jakob were my band, and then my friends Ben and Emma designed this stage banner that we worked on together - they came early, set up the stage. I had this friend from high school, who I'm not super close with, but he just agreed to come help and shoot the show. I thought, oh this is friendship. We're all helping each other out.
That’s the only pressure I have - my friends who are musicians. That means everything to me. My friends’ approval.”
While this approval significantly adds to Lauren’s art - on a collaborative, inspirational, practical, gratifying, and emotional level - she also shared that on a human level, this approval may take the form of being too considerate or appeasing or pacifying.
“I think we've talked about this a little bit, but I'm definitely very considerate. I’m not always worried about other people before myself, but I think I'm a little too apologetic. We make ourselves a little smaller to appease a situation, to kind of bend to what the situation needs. If this person is acting out, I will be normal and not react. I wish I was a little more confident in those realms. Confident to make someone mad. I wish I was more comfortable rocking the boat a little bit.”
As Lauren reflected on her nature of maybe being a little too considerate of others, I wondered, now that her relationship is over, now that she’s out of college, back in her city, rebuilding a life, community, career - what does she want for herself? How does she feel?
“I feel good! I haven’t felt super depressed in a while. Well, since my relationship and that era. Now I know what my happiness avenues are. I find different ways to deal with it. Din Tai Fung, going to the AMC.
In terms of music, I want to make albums that people really care about, tour sustainably, and build a show that feels authentic and fun and intimate. And make a living doing this!!”
As we walked away from our silly, tiny, table, and we said our goodbyes, she shared that she’s about to start writing her next project. Or, rather, time capsule.
With a joking distress, she suggested she was fearful to start writing, as she has no clue what she’s going to write about.
I jokingly suggested that it might not matter, as whatever she writes will reveal its meaning after the fact. She chuckled.
I feel like her music and humanity are symbiotic in that way. Maybe even a gift.
I’m so excited for the world to listen to Lauren’s music - because in listening to her sound, you are meeting her - with all of her beautiful complexities, emotions, depth, and lightness. The dualities that make her feel human.
And make every listener feel seen.
EGO DEATH
Story // Taylor Thompson
Photos // Taylor Thompson
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