London-based singer/songwriter Liang Lawrence talks to Atwood about her new EP ‘What’s Dead and Gone,’ using social media as a creative outlet, and how her unique childhood brought her to music.
‘What’s Dead and Gone’ – Liang Lawrence
Storytelling is at the heart of singer/songwriter Liang Lawrence’s music, and it always has been.
“Songwriting was a place for me to escape into and really be able to tell stories any way I wanted to,” Liang Lawrence tells Atwood Magazine about when she first got into music growing up.
Lawrence had lived in eight countries on two continents by the time she turned 18, so she had plenty of unique experiences to explore in her music. Her family moved every few years due to her father’s job, which took them to a wide range of places including New Zealand, Malaysia, Kuwait, and San Francisco. While she looks back on that time with gratitude for the opportunities she had to see so many places, she’s also aware of the lack of stability it brought.
“To be honest, it was quite a turbulent childhood,” Lawrence says. “But I think it made me the person I am today, and I would never change it. It’s made me very comfortable existing in this in between space – in between cultures and in between languages.”
During those years of moving from place to place, Lawrence turned to songwriting as a source of constancy. “Because of how emotional that was, it really made me lean into how emotional you could be in writing,” she says.
When COVID hit, Lawrence was in college, and she again turned to music to help her handle the challenges of the pandemic. She spent time writing songs every day and started posting some of them to TikTok, more for herself than anyone else. But she quickly began to gain a following online, and her career has continued to grow from there.
“I try to think about it as another limb of my creativity,” Lawrence says of navigating the complexities of social media as a musician. “The music is one part of my storytelling, but then my Instagram can exist to be this other creative space. And a lot of time, TikTok can be an archive of my songs – baby versions of my songs where I don’t put too much pressure on it.”
“When I’m feeling most sane, that’s the way I like to separate it,” Lawrence continues. “But don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of the time where I’m like ‘I want to just delete everything, and I don’t want to be perceived ever again,’” she adds with a laugh.
It was through this process of posting clips of songs online as a kind of musical diary that Lawrence’s song “Eulogy” found a massive audience.
But at the time the song blew up, Lawrence hadn’t yet recorded a studio version of the track, so she rushed into the studio to record the song and release it as a single.
“It felt so surreal,” Lawrence says of the moment “Eulogy” began to go viral. “It definitely sped things up massively.”
On “Eulogy,” Lawrence, with her whispered, emotive vocals, tells the dramatic story of running into an ex outside of a supermarket while wearing all black. The all-black outfit then becomes a metaphor for the death of the relationship, and she sings of what the funeral mourning that separation might look like:
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 closure
Spare the details of the gore
You say, “Wait ‘til it blows over”
Along with lyrics that stop you in your tracks, the instrumentation and production choices on “Eulogy” help tell the story as well. The song’s first section is sparse and minimal, but by the end, the intensity picks up as the force of Lawrence’s vocals expand and crunchy electric guitars join the fray. Then in the song’s final moments, things quiet down again as Lawrence asks one final question:
But if you knew
all you had to do was say sorry
Would you do it over, do it over?
With the momentum “Eulogy” gave to Lawrence’s career continuing to propel her forward, she has now released What’s Dead and Gone, a new EP available via The Other Songs Records.
“Eulogy” bookends the EP, with the original studio version opening the project and a stunning acoustic version of the breakout hit closing it. In between, Lawrence continues to showcase her stunning songwriting with a set of her most honest and vulnerable songs to date.
The title of the EP came from Lawrence’s desire to document a moment in her life in which she was trying to rediscover who she was after the end of a long relationship while also signaling the conclusion of that period. “The title is more for myself than anything,” Lawrence says. “I wanted it to mark the end of all the behaviors and habits that I was talking about in the EP. Not to forget about it at all – but it let me just tell the stories as lessons in my life.”
On “Use Me,” a breezier track on the generally dramatic and introspective EP, Lawrence writes about the fun side of taking a carefree approach to living. Accompanied by shimmering electric guitars and propulsive drums, she opens the song by describing this sense of throwing yourself into lots of different circumstances in search of what you feel is missing from your life:
Some days are for getting high with strangers
Some days are for crying while I dance
There’s nothing logical or planned
I climbed myself into a can and shook it up
Going into the songwriting session in which she would write “Use Me” with collaborators Path Boshell and Steven Battelle, Lawrence was having a bad day and wasn’t feeling the same passion and motivation she often feels toward her music. “My brain was already upset about things,” she says. “But I told myself, I don’t want to be sad about these things anymore, or at least, I don’t want to write a sad song about them. And we ended up writing ‘Use Me.’”
But even on this more upbeat track, Lawrence can’t keep from contemplating the consequences of her actions in a perfectly rendered depiction of the comedown after the party ends:
Woke up to a feeling in my stomach
I always blame it on the wine
I spilled my guts out to a friend,
told them I’m losing it again
God, I can’t keep doing this
I’ll play pretend
Give you my best lines
Tell me what hurts
Promise I won’t bite
I’ll never take my own advice
But I know what I’d prescribe
Just before the acoustic rendition of “Eulogy” brings the EP to a close, the gorgeous, journalistic, “If Only” returns to the themes of reflection, regret, and questioning whether things could have turned out differently. The song begins with only an acoustic guitar and Lawrence’s voice before strings bring the track to its emotional crescendo:
Holding me
‘Cause anything’s better than lonely
I don’t think you could have shown me
Colors that were more true
You had me
Around your neck
‘Cause darling I’m your best kept
Darling I’m your best kept
And I’ll take this to both our graves
‘Cause I’m so ashamed of it
I’m so ashamed of it
But you’re not ashamed of it
“If Only” was the last song Lawrence wrote for What’s Dead and Gone. She wrote the heart-wrenching ballad in one sitting and posted a version of it online that same day.
“It just kind of fell out of me,” she says. “I don’t really have an explanation for it. Sometimes, especially when I’m alone, I feel this need to write, so I’ll sit down and get my guitar out, and I’ll just let it happen. It was one of those songs that just needed to happen.”
Lawrence will be getting her full band together for her debut headlining show on September 12th at Omeara in London.
And as an artist who processes so much of her life through music, she’s already thinking about getting new songs out into the world.
“I’ve been writing so much, and I’ve really been in the headspace of trying to be as authentic and genuine as possible,” Lawrence says of the songs she’s written since finishing What’s Dead and Gone.
And with a distinct voice and so much songwriting talent, as Lawrence moves forward, she’s now starting to focus on creating her own unique sonic universe.
“At the core of my music, I’ll always keep my storytelling – that’s the line through it all,” she says. “Which in an exciting way means that I can keep messing around with sound the way I want to. So, I’ve just been trying to put myself in different sounds and see if they feel like me.”
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