Lala Lala

Lillie West has always made her music in response to an itchiness to always be moving, but as she developed a burgeoning desire to settle, she found the surprise realization that steadiness can beget creativity. That evolutionary tension is what fuels much of her new album as Lala Lala, Heaven 2. 

For many years, West lived in Chicago, where she established her project Lala Lala as part of that city’s indie scene, releasing several records on the Sub Pop imprint Hardly Art. Those albums, The Lamb and I Want the Door to Open, were powerful statements from a curious artist: catchy guitar-pop songs about being stuck in the ups and downs of life, the struggle to stay sober, to leave town, to blow up your life. 

West left Chicago to search for more and, in the process, wrote her new album, Heaven 2. On her journey, she landed in New Mexico, where she lived off the grid in Taos. “It was very challenging, freezing, infested with poisonous animals. But it’s still the most beautiful and magical place I’ve ever been and I dream about it all the time,” West says. “I worked on organic vegetable farms and hiked in the mountains a lot, looked for staurolites, and sometimes rode horses. Cut off the top of my thumb at work. Those are just some things that happened.” She then made her way to Iceland, where she lived for two years on and off, with the off being in London, where she grew up. In Iceland, she was in “a residency at LunGa school in a tiny town called Seydisfjordur, where the sun never rose in the winter.” Eventually, she made her way to Reykjavik and settled in with the music community and released an instrumental album (If I Were A Real Man I Would Be Able To Break The Neck Of A Suffering Bird) before heading to Los Angeles, where she has, almost surprisingly, fallen in love and found herself settled. It’s been a good place to live, not specifically because she likes L.A. or because she doesn’t like L.A., but because she’s discovered that, “wherever you go, there you are,” she says. “I wish there was a cooler way to say that.”

Fortunately, there is, and, again and again, on Heaven 2, she says it. On the single, “Even Mountains Erode,” West sings, “There are symbols and signs, you're missing your life,” which West says is about learning to slow down. To stop and smell the flowers. There are flowers wherever you live. She produced that song and the album, with Jay Som’s Melina Duterte, who provides a strong punchiness as a bed for West’s warm, rounded vocals. West says the relationship between the two of them was telepathic. It created a bold and confident album that West says would be perfectly appropriate to box to. Duterte and West performed almost all of the album’s instruments, with a few crucial guests, like Sen Morimoto on saxophone on the opening track, “Car Anymore,” and a bridge written by Porches’ Aaron Maine on the title track, “Heaven 2.” That song “is very melodramatic,” says West. “I was definitely feeling very doomed and defeated when I wrote it.” And the song does start with a bit of gloom. But it is lush, with West’s vocal building and building like a cloud swelling before a storm. The synths sweep across the song, the drums patter like raindrops on a car roof. And then the whole sky opens up, with a massive instrumental outro that feels like all your sins are being washed away. 

Catharsis is not only about the pain, but the escape that happens when you free yourself of it. And so there are moments of bold joy on the album, too. “Arrow,” which samples the French electro pop band La Femme, moves fast, and its swiftness and pleasure feel like running towards something, not away. “None of this was supposed to happen,” West sings, as the song races away from her. It wasn’t supposed to happen, but it did. “It’s such a basic spiritual thing,” West says, “Resistance is the root of all suffering, and I did not know that. I thought that I could dictate the course of my life.” Of course, like everyone else, she could not. Wherever you go, there you are.