Getting to know LA. Faithfull
LA. Faithfull recently released her new single, Heart Back. We asked her to tell us about herself:
I am… LA. Faithfull (Lisa Anne Faithfull) a singer, songwriter… I’m emotional, so much more than my anxiety, tattooed, honest, from Melbourne and currently calling St Kilda home. Terrible at sports apart from snowboarding, not very funny and I love good dad jokes! I am colourful, teaching my puppy to longboard, drawn to the stage, a wannabe beach babe who gets sunburnt even when it’s cloudy, into writing sad songs, scared of moths, also sharks… also chilli seeds because they make me hiccup, but I named my dog Chilli? I am currently looking at my wall which has really cool painting of otters holding hands, they do that so they don’t float away when they sleep and it makes me smile!
Heart Back is… the most honest and real thing I’ve ever created. It is vey close to my heart and really means everything to me. It is about the moment you fall apart and when you feel like your heart is in pieces that may never go back together. I wrote it the night my dad told me he had prostate cancer and I guess it was my way of processing it. I feel like the pain I’m singing about is something that is a universal type pain though, it’s a pain you feel in a breakup or any tragic event really, so Heart Back is for everyone.
The video clip for Heart Back is… exactly how I wanted it! I wanted it to be raw and honest and directly from me to the audience. I wrote the storyboard and helped edit the final thing – I just wanted it to be me and not have outside influences affect the product. I asked one of my best friends Connor Dalton to film it for me because he is so amazingly talented and has such a good eye! He also puts up with my crazy visions for things, haha. So the idea of the video was the white space represents the inside of my mind – we covered the walls and floor with the lyrics of the song over and over again because this is how it feels in my head going over the emotions; like I’m trapped in there with them. And then we added my amazing friend Luca Deller to dance the pain I was feeling and, when I watched it back I was like wow guys, this is cool!
Home is… my parents, my partner, my puppy, stage and singing. You wouldn’t believe but I’m actually a huge homebody! I love being onstage and performing and touring but I also LOVE oversize T’s and staying home all weekend! To me home is my parent’s place on the Mornington Peninsula so I have to visit them as often as I can because nothing feels more like home than their place! I’m there ALL the time, sometimes they ask if I still live there hahaha! When I think of the word home I also feel like it’s the place you feel the most yourself, and for me that’s always been onstage! It’s an incredible thing to suffer anxiety so bad as a kid that you can’t even look adults in the eye, but then to have someone hand you a mic and put you in-front of an audience and you feel free. It’s literally the only moment of my life that my mind isn’t flooded with overthinking and it’s just silence, for that moment I get to be free and just sing, that’s why its home to me, it’s the only place I’ve ever had that feeling!
I spend too much time… watching 90’s movies, eating peanut butter, and washing my pillow cases because they always go purple from my hair!!
I’ve never… had a feeling about a song like I do about Heart Back. I’ve always written music but I’ve never ever felt this way about a song. It sounds so cheesy but when I first heard it back in the studio the only way I can describe it is like meeting yourself or hearing your true, real voice for the first time ever and that’s just crazy because I’ve been making music for so long. But never come across it before – it’s so special to me!
It might surprise people to learn that… I recently was cleaning out a cupboard at Mum and Dad’s (surprise surprise I was at their house again! Haha!). Anyway, cleaning out the cupboard and I found this newsletter from my high school Battle Of The Bands when I was really young! So it had the winner’s names on it and it said, 2nd place Lisa Faithfull, 1st place Michael Paynter… So Paynter is one of the boys from Msquared Productions who years later just produced Heart Back with me! What a small world! I love finding things like that!
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Interview by Bobby Townsend.
