A CONVERSATION WITH... LUSAINT
Singer-songwriter Lusaint walks us through the steps of her artist journey, all the way up to her latest single ‘Joking’.
Credit: Vedant Bodas
Everyone who’s lived in London will explain, or complain, about how the city has changed. Sometimes, the local councils put in gardens, parks, and bike paths. Sometimes, it’s impossible to find anything open after 10 pm, even the local pub. Especially mentioning Camden will rile up any Londoner for the rest of the conversation.
Because it’s catering to the tourists, the soul has disappeared, and where the hell has the music gone?
Even with the splattering of venues across Camden, it can be hard to find the original Camden soul. The streets that felt the heels of Amy Winehouse, The Clash, and Massive Attack are feeling the stomps of gentrifiers looking to make a quick buck off the culture they’re rushing to remove.
But hope isn’t lost for this city or any other city like it.
Each time an artist plays a venue like Roundhouse, Dingwallis, or Camden Assembly, the spirit of Camden is alive for one more night. So when Lusaint performed at Camden Assembly in March, the audience was resuscitated by the hope Lusaint and her band provided.
With whispers of how beautifully similar her voice is to Amy Winehouse’s, the audience was hypnotised into moving without a care to her jazzy vocals and charmingly sincere lyrics. No one will claim it was like a time machine to 2006, but it was a salve for the world happening outside that room.
Only a few hours earlier, Lusaint was upstairs from that room explaining how her love for jazz and desire to get out of her comfort zone has led her all around the world, including performing for the Pope with no rehearsal.
“I’ll never forget the feeling of falling in love with someone’s voice.” She smiled, the soundproofed room softly filling with her voice. “I’ve followed that ever since my first time hearing Sarah Vaughan’s voice for the first time on vinyl. I love pop, I love pop music, but there is something about Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone. How they performed on stage, their overall aura, and demeanor… there's just something so powerful about them.”
That power was one that Lusaint had to discover and learn how to harness, but she was never alone with it.
“Oh, like my first song I wrote for my own project, ‘Dark Horse.’ I wrote it with an incredible writer called Ed White, who understood my passion for jazz from the very beginning. He understood how my voice would work well with that kind of style that I wanted.”
It was the first step in the right direction for her, and with every step, it’s a direction that’s becoming more comfortable to explore.
Beyond an adoration for jazz and pop, Lusaint was spending her time crafting ballads with a lot of other writers and producers. “I didn’t really know my sense of identity as an artist, and that went on for about a year and a half. One day, I just thought to myself:
‘I need to do this for myself and not for somebody else.’”
She started compiling the voice notes she collected in her phone, notes from her inspirations and other music she liked, to put in the effort to be and have her own project.
That’s how the first two songs written for her first EP, Self Sabotage, were born. “Those were the first two songs that made perfect sense for who I was as an artist. It’s been a process, but it’s a sense of relief. Before, I was struggling to find that love for music again. Now, it’s worked out. I work from the heart and from who I am.”
“My true sense of identity always comes from a voice note. Something that has no music and my producer, Bjorn, assembles everything to make it come alive. He takes voice notes that are so differently melodically and pitch-wise and puts it all together!”
‘Joking’, her latest single, followed the same pattern behind the scenes, but was complicated by the question of how to bring the song to the stage from the studio. “Each time we performed it on stage, it was an acoustic track. Always. But we wanted to experiment with bringing in the band. Hearing the masters, I’m so happy with how it turned out. The track fits perfectly with the rest of the EP, and it feels so right. Another confirmation that I’m going in the right direction.”
Photo Credit: Vedant Bodas
‘Joking’ fits into Lusaint’s upcoming EP, The Apothecary — an EP she describes as a self-healing meditation. “It’s difficult to explain, but it’s a very calming way of explaining what you’re going through and how you can help yourself get through it. In this transition from Self Sabotage to The Apothecary, my life has had quite a lot of change. I recently moved from Manchester, and most of my music is associated with that move without me knowing it.”
“So, writing ‘Joking’, it was about living a sort of mundane, pain-free, lifestyle that you want to get out of. Because as much as I loved my life in Manchester, and always will, I think there was a part of me that felt stuck. I really was living a normal life and I wanted something more from it. It was so beautiful, so comfortable, but I knew I needed something more. It was a euphoric feeling. I feel like a new chapter of my life started when I got out of my comfort zone.”
The move down south has been taking over Lusaint’s mind for months, but it’s also given her outlets to express herself beyond her music. Interior design has been calling her name, as the new place is a fresh canvas to express herself. “It’s great to take myself away from the music and do other things to compartmentalise what I actually want to write about. I’m trying to get out of my comfort zone even more and be in other creative processes. I have to remind myself I have free will and I can do things that bring me a sense of euphoria, even if it’s as simple as eating breakfast alone.”
That sense of euphoria doesn’t just come from breakfasts alone or songwriting. The stage is where Lusaint is meant to be. She shines on stage, and clearly crowds across Europe and the UK love her on it. “From ‘Sweet Tooth’ to now, the support has been incredible, especially over in France and Italy. Doing radio, television, everything, and it’s still ongoing. It’s so special to be doing all of this. Whether it’s a show with a 60-piece orchestra for an Italian Christmas special, blessed by the Pope, or a sold-out show in the UK or Europe, I’m so grateful for all of it. It’s been so special being a part of all of these music communities.”
It’s been said a million times that the best way to support live music venues is to go to them. It’s also one of the best ways to connect with the local community and feel hope that the gentrifiers and high-rises can’t take away the spirit of what makes a city a city. A Lusaint show is the perfect setting for that, but any good live show will have that — the hope that radiates in the room and the feeling that the weight of the world has disappeared for the night. Let the weight be lifted off, you and your city’s Camden need it.