Episode 1: Making yourself a priority with attorney and singer/songwriter Lara Lavi
Join your host Betsy Bush as she speaks with attorney and singer/songwriter Lara Lavi. They discuss how Lara began her legal career, why she decided to make her artistic pursuits a priority, and how her creative outlet helped her overcome her life's obstacles. Lara's music can be found on Apple Music and her new album, Mermaid Over a Desert Moon, is coming this month!
“Like many people…[I’ve dealt with] that feeling of never enough. I’ve amassed a ridiculous amount of degrees and accomplishments…really what they were was ‘is this enough? Is this good enough?’ [I finally got] to a point at sixty years old…to say ‘okay, no. I’m just gonna be me, thanks.’”
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Transcript:
Betsy Bush (00:02):
I'm so happy to have my guest with me today. Lara Lavi, who is such a multi-talented, multi-tasking person. But I want to start with Lara's first single in 20 years, we're going to hear her cover of Joni Mitchell's The River.
Betsy Bush (00:27):
Lara, that is such a great single. I love the arrangement. Do you want to talk about the fact that you -- your husband and your son -- are playing guitar in that [song]. That is really incredible.
Betsy Bush (00:45):
Well we're, you know, we're very musical family. That would be an understatement. I, um, I've always been a right and left brain person music and now film, but also, you know, academics and, you know, all the different things that go into becoming an attorney. But the greatest joy in my life is that I married my base player from my band, the Lara Lavi band, and we produced one child, Cameron -- Cameron Lavi Jones -- who is an extraordinary talent, both as a musical artist, but also as a singer-songwriter, as a producer, as an engineer. He's 22, he's already top in his field, working nationally and just an incredible talent. He plays many, many instruments. My husband was his first teacher, but then he went on to work with some amazing people and I had taken such a long break from my career.
Betsy Bush (01:41):
The fellow playing cello in the music video is Phil Peterson, who is a multi-Grammy, multi-platinum, multi- gold record Producer and string arranger -- [for] everyone from Pink to Taylor Swift to Portugal, ASAP, Rocky, just a long list of people, Macintosh, all these people. And, in the course of... I started out as the attorney for film. Then he did some production work for Cameron's band King Youngblood, and then there was sort of an intervention of those three. And they came to me, and it was very tearful and emotional, and said "you can't sit on this anymore. You have put your life on hold for too long. So figure it out, let us know what you're doing and we will support you."
Betsy Bush (02:30):
So I thought about it. And growing up, Joni Mitchell for any female singer-songwriter is sort of the quintessential artist, right?
Betsy Bush (02:39):
Absolutely.
Lara Lavi (02:40):
Well, I've got hundreds of songs that I've written and recorded over the years. Some I've released and many I have not. And I thought before I start putting out original material, I should put out something that people know, you know, know the song and [for] women, in particular, it's kind of a theme song. And we put it out during the holidays. We recorded it -- me, Phil, Maurice my husband, Cameron my son -- the audio and the video with Matt Clifford, the video director, all at the same time in Phil's theater studio. So, that scene that you see in the back with the snow and if you look at the video -- the four of us sitting and standing -- and then we threw a blue filter over the whole thing. It's having that ability in production and in music to be able to look at a piece and quickly create something and then feel as a big believer in it don't think about it, just get it out -- go, go, go.
Lara Lavi (03:38):
And, you know, I used to ponder everything and belabor and have fear. And these guys have just, absolutely just said, "go do it". And the result was this song and video. And I was scared that at my age I wasn't going to be able to hit the high notes, you know, and we did crack it down a half a step just to give me a little safety zone, but those high notes in the chorus are not easy. And I had to brace myself for them. And, oh my God, Joni Mitchell was such an incredible talent. And to be able to honor her with singing that particular song, which is how we've all been feeling during COVID, I think at one point or another, just wishing we could just skate away on a river, you know, I just thought this was the story of that song.
Betsy Bush (04:24):
That's great. And so you're doing that now after taking a break from recording, because you're actually an attorney who has a law practice that works with musicians and filmmakers and the creatives in this business. And I picture you when I was going through all of your social media stuff, I thought "this must be someone who has like 20 tabs open on her computer." You know, there's just so much going on there. Right and left brain, as you say, right?
Lara Lavi (05:01):
Yeah. I mean, first of all, I'm always getting yelled at by my husband that I have too many tabs open on my computer and that it's going to crash. I've already spent money to just, like, make this computer fit my life versus the other way around, you know, just get it rehalled so it would do what I want. And yeah, I mean, at the end of a 2:00 AM day, most days, because there is so much work involved in managing a law firm and trying to put not just my career together, but my son's career with King Youngblood and also I manage Macintosh, Keisha de, Caprice, Jayden, Blake. I manage like seven other projects. And I'm the General Head of Business Affairs for Pink House Production, Lawryn LaCroix's company ,who's an incredible tour de force. She's kind of like a young Octavia Spencer Viola Davis, and I'm sort of the wind beneath her young wings and just, there's like a flurry of talented people and incredible projects. And then the straight legal work that helps pay for a lot of things and it is exhausting.
Betsy Bush (06:09):
But at some point you decided "I need to do something for myself. Like I need to re I need to return back to that singer-songwriter thing. You have this great thing on your Twitter feed -- "if someone told me when I was in my early thirties, that I would be in this place now I just want to climb down off the volcano and sing, write, record, play, and simply focus on everything I need to express musically." I think that's so incredible.
Lara Lavi (06:43):
Well, I will tell you, um, that over the years, I mean, we've had, I don't know if people know -- they should know, they better know -- who Brandy Carlisle is. She's an incredible Americana singer-songwriter who came up as a teenager and is a tour de force in both the Americana and the Country market. She's incredible multi Grammy winner. She's from our region. As a young, young woman in her teens, her first recording studio was ours -- with my husband. And I remember back in the day, and at that point I had definitely put myself on hold because I was the attorney for the Muckleshoot tribe, and then I had my own practice and then I was serving the needs of other artists and everything felt like, you know, I was looking at the world through the filter of "that's for them now and not for me." I'd let go of what is authentic to me.
Lara Lavi (07:35):
And I remember especially looking through the studio window at Brandy and Maurice working and thinking "I'm just like on another planet now. Like I can see them, but I can't get through this glass to be where I belong." And I had that feeling for so long. And then, you know, there's a movie Dante's Inferno [Dante's Peak, 1997]. That's about these people that have to rescue the grandma. And they're all up on this blowing up volcano. And they're up there and they eventually come to the realization that they have to leave her there. And she says that -- leave me here to die in the fumes of the toxic volcano and go save yourselves. And honestly, that metaphor has stuck with me for so long, go save yourselves -- and [I] even have it in a lyric, where there's a line in Solace that goes, "I am lost, go and save yourself."
Lara Lavi (08:26):
It's like that prominent in my psyche. And eventually, I got to a point, especially as my son got older and his career takes up a tremendous amount of time because he's being produced by the same people who produce the Foo Fighters, and it's a big deal, you know? And there's not a moment where there's not something to do for him. But eventually I got to a point where I kept looking at these piles of hard drives that I have, you know --here's another one right here. There's just like tons of them. And this collection of music was just like burning a hole in my brain. And I started to feel like "I'm not walking the talk of what I tell my artists." You know, I tell my artists to go do it, go be in it, you know, and I know I'm talented. I don't walk around going "I don't have any talent." Of course I have talent, but talent is like 1% of this, you know. It's drive and determination and confidence and ability and focus. And you have to make it a priority. And I had always let everybody else be the priority while I waited on the volcano.
Betsy Bush (09:30):
Oh, isn't that the truth! I mean, you started, you know, music has been such a big part of your life since you were tiny, right? You are one of these musical prodigies... is that right?
Lara Lavi (09:44):
Yeah, I guess so. You know, I mean, there were young people, men and women who I think were more the traditional prodigy, they were like immersed in violin or piano. And I was playing a very serious classical piano and then very serious classical violin. I played in the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony and all that kind of stuff. My main teacher was a professor at Carnegie Mellon, Ralph Center Bart, I got performance coaching from at the time the Pittsburgh Symphony's Artistic Director Andre Prevon. Just these incredible things. And I competed and I did well. I had a fear of memorizing music, which I think, the solution was for me to sit on a manuscript while I was competing, which sounds ridiculous, but it worked!
Betsy Bush (10:35):
What you absorbed it through your body or something?
Lara Lavi (10:38):
But I was a poet actually. And so my strength as a singer-songwriter wasn't really that I could play guitar prolifically or something. It was, um...I had a very painful childhood that nobody knew about because we were very quiet about what I was dealing with. And I would translate in lyric melody, the environment, which I still do. I live in a duality of that all the time, but that translation lent itself to some really great poetry and that poetry then translated into what we now know as an Americana genre.
Betsy Bush (11:18):
Wow. You know, another thing you mentioned in one of your Twitter... In a blog post or a Twitter post that really, uh, struck me was your remark that "I've spent way too much time trying to be, uh, trying to be enough for, for ghosts no more."
Betsy Bush (11:38):
Yeah. Well, I grew up in a household with an abusive father and nobody knew it, how bad it was. And I was determined, as I emerged from that, not to let it define, um, but to be able to comment on it with my music. But like many people, I'm not unique in this, and many people have dealt with that feeling of never enough, nothing is ever enough. I've amassed a ridiculous amount of degrees and accomplishments, and I could go "woo-hoo that makes me awesome" but really what they were was -- "is this enough, is this good enough?". And when you're dealing with a father who eventually disowned me, you know, then he no longer existed actually. He was a ghost at that point. He finally disowned me fully, I guess, didn't get me at all. I married my husband who's African-American, we had a beautiful, mixed race child.
Lara Lavi (12:34):
My father said this child is an abomination. You know, that was sort of the end because a child is like the most precious, amazing, beautiful existence on the planet for me. And so that was just the end of it. But there's still this voice in the head, that the ghost is saying "never enough, never enough". And that's the voice that lots of years of therapy and lots of songwriting, and just finally getting to a point at 60 years old, which is a long time to take to figure it out, you know, to say, "okay, now I'm just going to be me. Thanks."
Betsy Bush (13:09):
I, you know, I think that's true for a lot of people. I've talked to people who finally, when their parents, you know, pass that they finally feel like, "oh, I can talk about this. I can acknowledge it. I can write about this." I talked to writers who don't want to write certain things because they're afraid their mother, their 90 year old mother, will read something. Even though if you write something, you don't have to share it. But it's the fact that that person could have some criticism of it or would not be pleased by it. That's very inhibiting.
Lara Lavi (13:44):
Yeah. I agree. You know, and what's interesting is that in the last month I was digging around in the back of the hall closet, you know, the place where everything goes that you don't want to throw away but you're just not looking at. And I found the eight millimeter projector and camera and a bunch of reels of eight millimeter film that my father must've taken when I was one years old. And my son and I set it all up. We were so excited. And I started watching this film, which was really documenting my first year that my father must've taken. And at that time he seemed so incredibly loving towards me and my mother and, and just his life as a young father. And just, I mean, the camera, just like social media now, lies about reality, but there was this, this love that seemed real.
Lara Lavi (14:36):
And I must've thought as a baby that this was real, right? And maybe it was real then but it struck me just incredibly, like, what you think is happening in your very little beginning and where the world goes as you grow up, it's had a profound effect on me looking at this video. Well, they're not videos, they're actually eight millimeter film. And in fact, you can, on February 19th, you'll be able to see a little bit of it because my son used some of it for a lyric video for his new song Too Late, Too Soon. And the lyric video behind it, we just took the camera and the projector and we projected it on one of those old school pull up screens, and then we filmed it. So it looks like you're just watching eight millimeter film.
Lara Lavi (15:26):
We didn't even have to process it -- nothing. And it was just profound. When we were doing it -- my husband was there, my son, his girlfriend, -- and four of us just did this cause it's COVID, so we're doing as much as we can at home. And it was a cool project and worth checking out. Um, but it was profound to watch that video and realize, what evolved from that time of hope and love. And I can either let the negative parts of it taint me forever and I walk around bitter, or I can translate it into art. And whatever timing that is because it's now, I mean, it was back when I was doing this in the late eighties and nineties too, but it's really, now. I'm a way better writer and singer than I was then, in my view. I definitely found my voice that's just an incredible feeling to emerge from all that. And, there were some interesting loving origins. They went bad, but put it in a song, like, translate it into some art. That's kind of how my brain goes.
Betsy Bush (16:40):
How do you feel that you approach songwriting now at 60, than you might've done it 30? I mean, it sounds like the processing that you're just describing is a big part of that. Do you think your songs are deeper or better at 60 now?
Lara Lavi (16:57):
I think that, well, there's an interesting thing going on because this first album that I'm going to start releasing singles in the beginning of March is called Mermaid Under A Desert Moon. And it's the lost session. So it's 1987 to 2001 I think, and except that I did throw in a couple of new ones just cause I couldn't help myself. But in any event I think that I'm a better writer now, but there were some gems that never got out. And I think that the difference between how I'm creating now and then was, first of all, I think I understand the craft of songwriting now. I've like done it. I've been coaching other people. I can listen. I'm part of the commercial market. I could get, you know, what you need to do to a song commercially successful. But lyrically, I lived enough to be, you know, introspective without [being] self-indulgent, you know, to stay poetic more. And I think I was more self-indulgent when I was younger. But I also think that youth is wasted on the young.
Betsy Bush (18:06):
Oh I know it.
Lara Lavi (18:06):
Who knows what you know now compared to then, you know. So I was still processing when I was younger and I'm still processing now, but I'm processing in a more proficient way.
Betsy Bush (18:23):
And also I think when you're a parent, you are in the position of what maybe your parents were going through as, as adults with young children. So, right?
Lara Lavi (18:36):
I agree. It's also parenting is the most selfless thing you can do if you're doing it right. But it's wrong if you do it so selfless[ly] that you lose yourself, you know, where you just start living your life through your child. So it's always a balancing act. But for me, I have, it's sort of like, I forgive my parents for their extremely bad behavior, both of them, but I can't forget. I can't carry it around with me, like a big bucket of pain because that's just counterproductive and it's too heavy to carry around. But I definitely feel that I've been able to translate it in a way, like [in] the song Mermaid Under a Desert Moon, the chorus goes:
Lara Lavi (19:16):
"why must we fix what never was broken / yet resist what is shattered and stands on the edge / promises made /We still leave unspoken as we listen for the unwritten tune / It's the song of the mermaid under a desert moon"
Lara Lavi (19:30):
So it's that feeling of displaced and why do we keep trying to pack it, our pain, and what we think we need to fix? We need to, honestly, we just need to get on with it.
Betsy Bush (19:45):
Listen on, on kind of a different note, you and I grew up in the analog years and we're now in the digital years. And for some of us who have not been as maybe professionally engaged as you have been all these decades, some of us come up and like come up out of the tunnel and it's like, everything is different. How do you think, um, the music business, the recording business, what you're trying to do now has changed from when you first started? I mean, I think of the gatekeepers that aren't around anymore. You don't have to, you can produce something independently. You don't have to, you know, convince some guy at a record label to, you know, produce your record or something like that. But how do you think things have changed in your lifetime?
Lara Lavi (20:39):
Well, you know, I think some things have changed and some things haven't. Like, you're sitting there with a microphone and alaptop and a flat screen and a mixer and a Producer, and you've got a bunch of technology that's taking your voice and sending it through a system to record it and then send it out to the universe. That has not really changed. The medium and the technology has changed to make it easier. But at that part hasn't changed. In the music industry, fundamentally, I don't care what anyone says, and I know this is true -- I will stand by this in any panel, any discussion -- a great song rules, a great song with a great delivery rules even more. So at the end of the day, whether it's film, music, whatever, but let's, we're focused on music here, music has to be good. Or its disposable.
Lara Lavi (21:32):
So what's happened in this dawn of digital distribution and encoding music and streaming it, is that distribution is becoming accessible to anyone. So you can make a song of people clapping their hands and grunting for 35 minutes and you can put it out there. Now who's going to buy that, I don't know, but you can do it without a filter. But if you want to actually get to an audience, the filters are actually weirder now because we're dependent on, for example, Spotify's editorial team to put your song in a playlist to get to millions of people. You can't get that unless you have the right distributor or label to access that company. So the rules haven't really changed, the gatekeepers have changed. And you know, we spend an inordinate amount of time trying to sort algorithms, and how's the best way to get the numbers up.
Lara Lavi (22:29):
We're always talking about the numbers, you know. For me personally, at this stage,sure I would like more people to listen to these songs, but honestly, at this point, for me personally, if I don't get them out, I'm not going to have closure. So I have to do that. But I'm still doing marketing. There's some great companies like rise.la that helped with organic reach and all that. But for my son, who's a better example, at 22 years old, we have a 12 person team working his record independently. We may as well be a label. And that sophistication of having come up in the industry allows us to harness the tools that are available now, but fundamentally the rules of the road are -- if you can play, you can stay, and a great song should win if you can get it to the right people. That's my view.
Betsy Bush (23:14):
Are you frustrated that the oldies kind of dominate? You know, wherever I go, I hear the music hat we heard in high school that there seems to be less new music out there, maybe because we don't have the radio stations that are always kind of, you know, looking for the next new sound, that there's always this dependence on music from the seventies and eighties that you don't get the newer artists out there in the popular culture.
Betsy Bush (23:51):
I would say that we do, we just get them in a different place. You have to discover them in different ways. YouTube is where a lot of new music is discovered. To some degree, you know, the streaming places like Pandora and Apple Music and stuff. Um, there's an incredible amount of curation going on. But yet on the radio --radio is an antiquated medium. I mean, it's still used. And in particularly in urban music, it's funneling through a lot of, music, but if an older audiences is flicking on the actual FM dial when they're driving, then the music is going to serve that audience -- and that purpose is to sell ads, right? So you can see the targeting demographic, but if you go to a hip hop station like Power 90 in New York, or something, you're going to hear what's going on in hip hop.
Lara Lavi (24:41):
Now people would break an arm and give it to you, if you're in hip hop, to get on some of these stations. So it really depends on the genre and the demographic, but like in middle America and in different places in the country, you know, we've seen more Hispanic music come up into the FM dial because we have a larger population of Latinos. And so, and, you know, music that's sung in Spanish. And so the FM dial is a reflection of who would actually turn the radio on. It's not a reflection of what music is out there. I would say that Spotify and Apple, their playlists, which are diverse and gigantic, it's sort of like, I mean, there's no shortage of music. And that's why these playlists are so important because they lump in genres or moods or music to work out to, or music to contemplate your life to, or music to pull your socks up with or whatever.
Lara Lavi (25:34):
There's like something for everyone. And that's where the discovery process is. So if you're not paying attention to those streaming services, you're actually -- unfortunately, because I've just literally in the last couple of years, forced myself to embrace it. I've discovered a lot of music, like I'm a huge fan of this recent Taylor Swift album. I loved her as a country artist. Um, I didn't quite get the youth driven pop thing she was doing, although I understood what she needed to do to express herself that way. She is an incredible lyricist. She's a great vocalist and she's a magnificent lyricist and she's just turned 30. So she's looking at the world through this Americana eye now. And when I play that album,, Spotify will turn me on to similar albums. And to my shock the other day, Lara Lavi singing The River popped up on the playlist. I almost ran into a telephone pole, but that's power of this digital discovery process now. It's there. It's just, you have to learn how to use it.
Betsy Bush (26:42):
Interesting. I want to ask you with your whole, you know, we've been talking about your going back to the your y recording career and getting back into creating music and recording music. What do you have some advice for, for people who are in their own self-discovery journeys to reinvention or rediscovering old passions or things like that? I know you have a lot of wisdom to share. I'd love to know what you think.
Lara Lavi (27:13):
Sure. Well, first of all, different areas of expression are more forgiving with age. So, the visual media of painting and sculpture really doesn't care how old you are. So just do it, right. Thhe visual presentation of acting, for example, there are parts of all ages because film, TV and live theater reflect us, and we are all ages, right? If you want to be a director, if you want to be an editor, you may need to go take, get some education, just to learn how to do some of the technical things of it. But if you want to do it, you can do it. If you want to be a musician, it depends on the genre. Like if you wanted to do gangster hip hop, you know, at 60, you might look a little pathetic. That's a fairly youth driven market, but what I've been told by my publicity team is that Americana music really doesn't care how old you are.
Lara Lavi (28:11):
You know, it cares what you're talking about. And you're going to have a lot more to say as you get older. I think that the advice that I would give is to look deeply into what is it that, as corny as this sounds, what is it that makes you authentic? And what is it that's holding you back from allowing that authenticity? Usually it's fear. Usually it's competing with ghosts. Usually it's some excuse you gave all through all those years of why you didn't do it. And if you come to the conclusion that you didn't do it for very good reasons, a you had to feed your family or mabye you loved it, but you didn't love it that much, or, or whatever it is. That's okay, too. But if you find yourself feeling compelled to do what you meant to do, whether it's starting a new business, which certainly during COVID people are doing right and left these days.
Lara Lavi (29:04):
Or start painting or writing or whatever it is, the world is your oyster, because the digital distribution world has allowed us an easier way to take expression and convey it to others. So you don't need to worry about a grand scale. Um, you do need to worry about whether or not you're actually serious or not. And I do believe that no matter what age you are, if you're going to take on something that you actually want other people to pay attention to you, you have to do it with intent. And, and for me, the thing for me is everybody else's agendas get in the way, and I love them all, and I want them to succeed. And that's where I feel like I have to fight the feeling of being left on the volcano.
Betsy Bush (29:57):
I think that's a great way to kind of wrap this up because that's perfect. And, you know, I, I love the message that there are so many different ways we can express ourselves that are not age dependent. I was very inspired by The 40 Year Old Version [2020]. I don't know if you've seen that, that film by Radha Blank. Yes. Where, she plays herself as a 40 year old, you know, kind of failing playwright who turns herself into a hip hop artist who has something to say, because she's 40. And yet the meta version of that is she's now a filmmaker and an actor. So it was incredibly inspiring if you haven't seen that yet. It's amazing.
Lara Lavi (30:49):
Yeah I hear you. You know, years ago, when I was running Wide Awake in Toronto, I realized that the visual medium of music video was essential to market artists. And so I had to dive in initially as a producer and eventually as a director, having no background in film whatsoever, like none, but having a good understanding of what things need to look [like] because I had always been a photographer, even in high school, I was doing black and white photography and printing myself and all that. And now I'm a producer director, I actually shot a video for Cameron's, my son's, band in May due to COVID. We actually shot it on my iPhone 10 X. It came out incredible. It won awards. It was awesome. And it was sort of like to answer your question even further. I could have said, "I don't do that."
Lara Lavi (31:43):
I could have defined myself by "I don't, I don't, I can't". And at some point I just looked up and I went, well, yeah, I can, you know, it's going to be a little hard. I might have to figure some stuff out and get the right people around me. But once you get to that place in your head where you're saying, "I can", then it's about walking that talk and getting to the place of action. And I am the biggest believer in "visualize, Actualize". And I think that's at any age essential to keep us vibrant. And I encourage that to anyone listening to this right now.
Betsy Bush (32:17):
That's amazing. You are so inspiring . Lara, Lavi, you can check out The River. You know what, we will edit this in and I'll get the right credits and the right link and everything. And it's going to be on my social media and my webpage and stuff like that. So people can, can link , and see the river because we've talked so much about it. And I hope you get like a zillion links. We'll see.
Lara Lavi (32:52):
Betsy, I wanted to mention something. You had asked me about the song Terri's Garden.That is, actually, we didn't talk about it but Terri's Garden is actually the song that was the mental breakthrough for me years and years ago, because when I was growing up, my mother who raised us speaking in metaphors, it took a while to figure out what the hell she was talking about. But she always used to say to me and my little sister, Terri, you have to go in your own garden and cultivate it. And I didn't fully understand what that meant until my sister had a huge mental health crisis right after law school, right after clerking in the Second Circuit and getting this big fancy job with this big fancy law firm. And she was working a gillion hours a week and she just had a complete breakdown from it.
Lara Lavi (33:40):
And while she was recovering from that, I wrote the song Terri's Garden. And that song actually is about going opening the gate and walking into your own garden and living in it -- the books, the poems, the birds singing, the cats hiding behind the trees, whatever it is -- but "there's only one thing missing from Terri's garden, open the gate little sister and walk on in." And honestly, that's what I hope for everyone. I hope for everyone to open their gate and walk in their own garden, because we're only here for a minute and your garden is waiting for you. You just have to open the gate.
Betsy Bush (34:16):
Amazing, amazing. And we're going to go out with Terri's Garden.