Lila Blue
New York City, New York, United States | Established. Jan 01, 2013 | SELF
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Lila Blue
The Hollows Hold the Healing
Lila Blue is a 16-year-old singer from San Francisco who sounds like a cross between Mirah, Tegan and Sara, and Regina Spektor. The Hollows Hold The Healing is a delightful and delicate assortment of acoustic guitar-laced tracks encrusted with Blue’s sturdy, athletic voice. - SF Weekly
The Hollows Hold the Healing
Lila Blue
Listen to Lila Blue, and you’ll have a hard time believing that this San Francisco singer-songwriter is indeed only 16 years old. Not only does she have a mature, muscular voice redolent of someone twice her age, but the messages and stories she encodes in her songs — which deal with the oppression of organized religion, sexual assault, absent parents, and the pain of breaking up — make her sound wise beyond her years.
There’s also something about her that is acutely Margot Tenenbaum-esque. Aside from the obvious similarities — they’re both from New York City and have been involved in theater, be it through music composition or playwriting — Blue and Tennenbaum are also driven and absurdly talented young women.
Blue was around the age of 14 when she recorded her self-titled debut album at Tiny Telephone, which she followed this year with The Hollows Hold the Healing. On the album, which Blue co-produced, the teenager plays acoustic and electric guitars, bass, and ukulele, lending a folksy feel to the record — that is, if you ignore the vocals. Blue possesses an athletic voice that is capable of shifting between a fluttering, breathy drawl (as in the album opener, “To Dust”) and a more plaintive, curved wail (“Kill All the Witnesses.”) The strength and subject matter of her songs offset the folksiness with a bit of soul and blues, similar something you’d expect from, say, Fiona Apple or Tegan and Sara in 2007’s “Call It Off.” It’s the kind of stuff that is just as likely to tug on your heart strings as it to make your jaw drop. Jessie Schiewe - SF Weekly
Summer is in full swing and we're making the most of the season by keeping our favorite tracks by Lila Blue, Justin Bieber, and Queen Latifah in heavy rotation! Lenny Staff
What Lena Dunham is listening to:
I am fucking obsessed with Lila Blue, a 16 year old from San Francisco who breaks my heart then pieces it back together again with her ukulele. Her maturity (and voice) are an astonishing gift. Her debut album Lucille, recorded when she was just 13, is music for getting well to. - Lenny Letter
Discography
LUCILLE (2014)
THE HOLLOWS HOLD THE HEALING (2016)
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Bio
A youthful, emerging talent whose incisive and uniquely devastating songs speak out from an almost ancient wisdom, New York based singer-songwriter Lila Blue is an artist who pulls no punches. Whether she’s creating for the theatre or crafting the labyrinthine tracks that appear on her new album, Leave Me Be, Lila’s songs are worlds unto themselves, coaxing out the rich inner lives and fragile humanity of each character with a prowess that stuns from the very first note.
Coming off of the success of her last release, the 2017 EP Have A Look, Lila strove to create a lush, orchestral project in contrast with her earlier work. Leave Me Be is an album with microcosmic songs blended into a wider tapestry of sound and story. With Lila re-enlisting her veteran collaborator and engineer Sami Perez to helm this intense undertaking, the pair entered Tiny Telephone Studios once again in September 2018. They brought with them a variety of songs, some fully formed and aged to perfection like album highlight “Somber Silence”, which Lila wrote at 14 years old. Others were inspired by the creative energy of the studio - the breathtaking “Shallow Pond” was written on the very first day of recording. Together the two wove the songs into a sonic narrative, each song woven into the next with interludes that pull the listener along on a surreal, cinematic, and deeply human journey alongside Lila.
This more calculated intensity speaks to Lila’s evolution as a songwriter and producer over the past two years, overcoming and celebrating what she calls the most beautiful and difficult years two of her life. In her own words, Leave Me Be is a testament to “the complex and gnarly work that is being your own confrontational mirror, and growing up into a young woman I’m proud to be.” A kaleidoscopic vision of love, lust, conflict and tragedy, there’s no better place to begin falling in love with Lila Blue.
Lila Blue performs regularly at clubs and festivals in San Francisco and New York; in-studio live performances include Paste Magazine, KPFA, and KUSF. She has appeared as a Special Guest Vocalist for the award-winning dance performance troupe, Noche Flamenca, at New York's Lincoln Center Out of Doors summer series, and in WEIGHTLESS, a rock opera by The Kilbanes, at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, Under the Radar Festival in New York. Lila has written and arranged original theater scores for the New Conservatory Theater of San Francisco, and for the past 9 years has been scoring for the Chekov Project of New York. She has had songs placed in several films including Lifetime’s “Story of a Girl” and The Chekov Project’s “I Am a Seagull.”
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