Laura Pergolizzi, the singer-songwriter known by the initials LP, has made a name for herself by putting honesty at the forefront of her work. With what she describes as “a propensity to be prolific” in an interview with The Daily Californian, LP’s inimitable vocal ability and artistry have made her music the subject of continuous buzz. This success, however plentiful, has not allowed her to give her own history short shrift. LP spoke candidly on record deals, failure, success and her fifth studio album, Heart to Mouth, released this past December.
With a songwriting career spanning over a decade, LP has written hits for stars such as Christina Aguilera and Rihanna — her songs featured anywhere from film to television. As an artist, she’s been lauded for her unique vocal talent and stylistic bridging of pop and rock and roll. Her music lands somewhere between the sounds of Fleetwood Mac and Gwen Stefani, but even with such comparisons the power of her artistry makes her music distinct in its own right.
Her music has been long in the making, and her success was never a given. On tracking her own evolution as a musician, LP stated, “For a while I had to do tunnel vision, I had to forget.”
Speaking on the span of her career, LP described the ability to gauge in retrospect as a gift: “After I’d written “Lost on You,” by the time it became a big hit in Europe, I’d already written like 35 more songs. I got dropped from Warner Bros. playing them that song. It’s one of the greatest things that ever happened to me.”
Having navigated seven record deals, LP has come to appreciate the grand catalog of experience she now has.
“With my perspective, I wouldn’t change anything for the world because the combination of all the things that have happened over the years — I look at it from such a place of gratitude.”
And now as the artist prepares to go back on the road, gearing up for the Heart to Mouth album tour, which kicks off in Orange County, California on Friday, LP mused about the reciprocity found in seeing a crowd respond to her music.
“I don’t envy painters. I guess, yeah, sometimes people pay millions of dollars, but like, just on the daily basis seeing a person’s soul kind of enjoying and reacting to a piece of work is just one of the most incredible feelings in the world.”
LP’s enchanting and irrefutable talent is just as evident in her live performances as it is on her records. Her “Heart to Mouth” tour is bound to be an incredible one.
Heart to Mouth, which LP described as a darker album than her past work in an interview with Wonderland Magazine, comes only a year after the release of Lost on You. The new album tackles themes of mortality and loss knit with triumphant pop anthems to create a delicious kind of diversity. The album, oscillating between light and heavy themes, manages to be cohesive, its emotional range almost begging to put the record on repeat.
And this is no coincidence — LP affirmed, “My range of emotions can go from zero to a hundred and all the things in between in a full day.”
This chameleonic emotional ability is tangible, she continued: “In my music, I tap in to something like acting. Like, it’s all actual stuff that I’ve gone through and felt, but I’m just able to access it.”
During her upcoming tour, LP will be touring alongside fiancée Lauren Ruth Ward. Though LP is a member of the queer community, she does not want that to define her as an artist.
“If you can’t tell that I’m fucking gay as fuck in the first three minutes you meet me, then you need to get out of the house, like, go see a movie, go to a bar, go have some life experience, for fuck’s sake,” she said.
That isn’t to say that she feels removed from the community, but rather wants her queerness to be a nonissue: “I want to feel diversity and practice inclusion and let it be in my life in general, which I think is necessary for everybody.”
