• Interviews

• All
• Music
• Cinema
• TV
• Comic Books

Oct 10, 2018 By Lillie West Photography by Lillie West Web Exclusive

For our recurring Self-Portrait feature we ask a musician to take a self-portrait photo (or paint/draw a self-portrait) and write a list of personal things about themselves, things that their fans might not already know about them. This Self-Portrait is by Lala Lala, which is the project of Chicago-based singer/songwriter Lillie West.

West’s new album, The Lamb, came out a couple of weeks ago via Hardly Art. The Lamb is the follow up to Lala Lala’s 2016 album, Sleepyhead. “Whereas Sleepyhead was relative to a scrapbook of ideas, loosely connected and quite sporadic, the arrangements that accompany The Lamb are much cleaner, sparser, less predictable,” our writer Timothy Michalik wrote in his review of The Lamb for Under the Radar.

The Lamb was our Album of the Week and Michalik declared it “perhaps one of this year’s finest indie rock records to come out of Chicago, if not the country.”

West had this to say about the album in a press release announcing it: “The Lamb was written during a time of intense paranoia after a home invasion, deaths of loved ones and general violence around me and my friends. I started to frequently and vividly imagine the end of the world, often becoming too frightened to leave my house. This led me to spend a lot of time examining my relationships and the choices I’d made, often wondering if they were correct and/or kind.”

As Michalik observed in his review: “What stands out most about The Lamb isn’t necessarily the back-story, though. It’s the humanity, the realism—the inevitable truth that we are more alone than we think we are. West speaks of experiences that we all have felt, or at least will eventually deal with at some point in our life.”

Read on as West tells us about her sleep patterns, dental routine, a childhood illness, and balloons.

1. I brush my teeth an average of four times a day.

2. I can drive a tractor. My dad has a couple. I started when I was probably 10 years old.

3. Yesterday I bought three balloons shaped like butterflies. The person at the store said they will last three days.

4. Before I fall asleep every night I think about everything I said in the day and if it was possibly rude.

5. I am extremely good at the claw machine. I love toys and games. I have many prizes. However recently I am stepping back from the claw and refocusing my energy.

6. When I was a kid I had an allergic reaction to a virus and all the liquid drained from my joints and I couldn’t move. It only lasted 24 hours.

7. I have a lot of nightmares where I’m trying to convince someone not to do something bad. Many variations. Also apocalyptic dreams a lot. I like thinking about my dreams and try to write them down as much as possible. The other day I dreamt I had to hide weed from a little kid in a hall of mirrors. I don’t smoke weed but sometimes I eat CBD gummies.

8. In 2015 I slept on my friend Eric’s couch every day. It snowed a lot. He taught me one drumbeat I played over and over. I had my own house I just liked it better there. Shout out Eric.

9. Not good at naps.

10. My mum’s first name is my middle name. It’s Amadea.

www.lalabandlala.com

Support Under the Radar on Patreon.