Culture Cabinet

Lana Love has quite a resume. One that reads like a technicolor dream sequence, Love has done it all: performed as a Disney princess in over 40 countries, landed syncs on major networks including Netflix and PBS, appeared on NBC’s The Voice, and even shared songwriting credits with the likes of Hans Zimmer. But ask her how it all began, and she doesn’t start with a stage or a spotlight. She starts at the very beginning.

“I like to say I started out of the womb, because when I was five years old, I was just hypnotically entranced with the piano, and that was really my first love,” she recalls in an interview with Culture Cabinet. “My mom tells this story that apparently one day I sat down at the piano and just picked out ‘Music of the Night’ from Phantom of the Opera by ear.”

That theatrical spark lit a fire that would shape her entire artistic path. “To be honest, I’ve just been obsessed my entire life with storytelling through music, with musical theater, and that was a big part of my artistic journey. I was in musical theater for about 10 years. I still am here and there, but I got the bug to write my own stuff, and that has taken me all over the world.”

And now, it’s taken her to releasing new music, including a full EP,  Sorry I’m Human, due out this August. 

“I don’t know that anyone has the same answer of where creativity comes from,” she says of her writing process. “All I know is that sometimes I’ll be walking down the street and something will hit me like a lightning bolt. I’ll just be reflecting and asking myself those questions, and then it will hit me out of the blue. Or sometimes I’ll be meditating, and I can kind of tap into that divine place where I can clear my head and be a receptor for something new to come in.”

That meditative channeling led her to “Antidote,” a song that not only came fast (three days from idea to vocals) but came from a place of healing.

“I always try to write from the future. I do not write in the present,” she explains. “I always try to write from a place where I’ve already figured it out. So I think, for this particular song, ‘Antidote,’ I’m writing from that superhero spot of being like, ‘I’m bulletproof.’” 

The track’s origin came with a lightning-bolt of its own, courtesy of another pop powerhouse. “I was inspired by a Madison Beer song that I heard, and I took little seeds from that chord progression and turned it into ‘Antidote.’”

It’s no surprise that Love draws inspiration from bold, theatrical artists. When asked which artists shaped her vision, she doesn’t hesitate: “I’m a huge [Lady] Gaga fan, she was the one for me. She plays keys with the nails, and she plays a character, and she’s always making new genres of music for herself. That’s something that I really want to do in the storytelling and the theatrical aspect I really had hoped to bring into my own work, and I think I do in my own way.”

That flair for dramatics is backed by formal training. “It bleeds over into any genre that you choose to do,” she says, reflecting on her classical music background. But even that, she says, had to be peeled back to find her truth: “I became so technical that I lost my essence of my voice. So I spent many years almost un-training. The mic picks up the truth. It does not pick up a masked vocal or a filtered vocal.”

That truth, as it turns out, is where Love’s music lives. “I really hope that listeners feel empowered listening to this,” she says of her upcoming EP. “I hope that people learn to love their dark parts and accept them because they’re beautiful, and that’s what makes us human.” 

Sorry I’m Human is out August 22.

Listen to Lana Love’s new track “LOST BOYZ” feat. Ghostface Killah here.