Some artists seem to be pulling songs from a well. Music coming out and spilling over with emotion and vulnerability. Their croons and artistry dig deeper and deeper, pulling you into the water with them. Liza Lo does exactly that. With a tone and lyricism similar to Alice Phoebe Lou, Julia Jacklin, and Adrienne Lenker, Liza Lo brings in jumpy verses, smooth choruses, soft guitar riffs, and a relatability that seems to cover you in a warm light. On a sunny Chicago day, and a gloomy London afternoon, Liza Lo and I sat down over Zoom to discuss her debut album, Familiar.
Liza sat in a cafe, lights around her–making me feel like we were talking over coffee, catching up after a long week. Gearing up for her debut album, anxieties could be high, but Liza is ready to go as she expressed, “It feels way more like a full-blown child than any EP release. I'm excited.” There’s an ease to Liza the whole interview—confident, keeping everything in her pocket, until she slowly lets them out.

We started from the top, I asked about how she found herself as a musician, and her journey to where she is now. Listening to her music I wrongly assumed a steady background of folk behind her. But, when she was 16, Liza stumbled into a punk band. She giggled as she reminisced about her time covering the Black Keys, “It was really funny…I was like ‘Okay I’ll be punk?’ I was a front woman in a dress. I think people were rather confused. Maybe that’s what made it what it was.” Yet, she still holds the time fondly. Liza was with friends, making music, and realized she wanted to keep doing it, but left the punk days hanging behind her like a tattered poster on a telephone pole. She walked me through her 16-year-old epiphany with a smile on her face saying, “‘Oh my god, so songwriting can actually be a thing. You can write about what you want in a certain way.’ That kickstarted it, and then I decided to study music, and that was the beginning of it. I never really stopped studying in different ways.”
Listening to Liza’s music, her storytelling is crystal clear, her heart is on her sleeve waiting for the listener to see it too. Songwriting and music, are a release for Liza, getting the emotion, reaction, and comfort on paper. “I tend to always write out of a feeling that I'm like exactly in,” she explains. “Most of the music that I write is about my experiences in life, but not necessarily just mine–it’s also my experiences with friends, how they are going through things, or family, and how they are going through things.”
My favorite track in Familiar, “Catch the Door,” showcases her ability to quilt an image through song, keeping your foot in the door to prop it open, letting your sister in to take a sweatshirt you’ll never get back. But, at least she has it. When speaking about this track Liza explained, “It’s a song about family dynamics. It's all a metaphor for somebody who calms the fire when there's an argument in a family or relationship.” There’s a Nilüfer Yanya jumpy, emotion to Liza’s tone with a constant knocking thread through the track, signaling your sister coming back in for one more thing with an eye roll in tow. In the chorus, Liza delicately sings out, “I’ll keep an open heart for us.” A cracked door, an open heart, and water on the fire of conflict.

Familiar as a record, is a work of relationships big and small, its fragility and strength lying in every chord plucked, in every verse sung. Liza expressed, “Familiar to me was the only right name for it. The album is of all these different brackets that familiarity meant to me. Whether that is the family relationship I have with my brother or the grief I felt for my best friend losing her mom.” The album is a homage to these moments, big and small, love had and lost, it touches everything with grace and velvet gloves.
The recording of Familiar was a feat in itself. Loss of family surrounded Liza’s producer and mentor John as well as herself. Having her band surrounding her, learning and building off of each other kept Liza centered in this moment, knowing she had a team cheering her on. Liza candidly opened up about grief and the studio turned sanctuary. “I never knew whether it was the right thing that I was doing. But, I think life does just do that to you–where it just throws everything at you at once...I unfortunately had to watch the funeral. When it was finished, I just remember laughing, because I was like, ‘If she would have been here and she would have seen this, she wouldn't have wanted it any other way.’” In this moment of a downpour, Liza held an umbrella, pushing through and carrying on in an album that I would describe as a celebration and honoring of her community.
In the studio, Liza and her band recorded directly to tape in only three days. “It changed the whole way I looked at production…Some of the songs we played a few times, and then we stuck with the second take. None of the guys had played the songs before. We just went in,” Liza said. In the end, I feel that only makes Familiar more intimate. There’s no frills, no crazy production. In Liza’s words, “It got to be what it was, just because we were all in the room together.”
Following the release of Familiar, Liza will be doing a record shop tour stopping all over Europe. Liza is ready to go, the suitcase may even catch the door instead of her foot. “Touring is my favorite thing about the whole music thing…besides recording and writing the music. I love sharing it with people because, in the end, that's the main purpose of it.” Additionally, she gets to go back to her home turf, Amsterdam, and the record store where she spent hours flipping through vinyls. A full circle moment to tie up her album, it all comes back to what she holds dear, familiarity, music, and being surrounded by the community that got her here.
Liza Lo is an artist who asks you to dig deeper, to make you sit in the feeling, she’ll be there to hold your hand, maybe push you into the well a little further, or maybe both.
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