I Want the Door to Open: Lala Lala on Puzzles, Plans and Touching the Universe
Written by Sarai Warner
Photo by Hannah Sellers
Awash in pink fluorescent lights, wearing a sleek suit and her signature braids and top-knot, Lillie West of Lala Lala greets her audience with a monotone question: “Is this the plan or is this the other?” The opening lyrics to “Lava”, propelled by layers of small gasps and spliced breaths of melody, stirred together by bleats of brass, sustained saxophone, produced glitches, creaks, and piano tones, are a fitting invitation into her third record, I Want the Door to Open, which was performed live for the first time on Friday, October 8th, 2021.
It was not “the plan” for their sold-out release show at Thalia Hall to be the first one Lala Lala had played in two years --- still West and her team have managed to craft a visual and sonic dreamscape with the IWTDTO experience. Behind the musicians, there is an ongoing animated POV tour through shining candied tulips and spiked daisies, neon lotuses, and luminous rocks in a jelly pond. It shifts from a bucolic perspective to one that feels too big and over your head, intimidating and curious
The visuals of early build-your-own-world CGI computer games mixed with lyrical storytelling of conquering perceived threats and building sanctuary spaces is part of what makes IWTDTO diverge so provocatively from Lala Lala’s debut and sophomore records, Sleepyhead (2016) and The Lamb (2018). Each of the twelve tracks lives as its own planet, without your stereotypical seamless transitions song-to-song or a unifying sonic gloss over the collection. Instead, going from one track to the next is like exiting one portal and stepping through another -- familiar but fresh, and introducing a whole new crop of questions about how we live authentically while our bodies remember past personas, counterparts, and mistakes.
Photo by Miwah Lee
On a phone call on a sleepy Tuesday morning a few weeks prior to the record’s release, I asked Lillie West if she could choose a printing technique to describe each of her albums. She suggested that we expand the question to include all art mediums, and decided that Sleepyhead was child art. She said, “I love child art, but it’s very much like, [Sleepyhead is] recorded live, and it was the only thing I could do at the time, it was the only way I knew how to make music,” She continued, “The Lamb was a painting -- it’s a little more like what’s on its face is what it is... I Want the Door to Open is an immersive installation. I just feel what it’s saying, it’s saying to you in a lot of different ways musically.”
Even before delving into the variety of sounds and streams of consciousness that color the dark dream pop record, the album art is a striking installation itself. Featuring a West-like avatar poised over an L-shaped-pool of lush aquatic greenery, flanked by concrete walls on which a window reveals a doomist orange smoke sky outside; a set of metallic scissors opening in anticipation; and a mirror gleaming mischievously, daring the looker to see what looks back. The journey to open the door begins with a map. West explained, “As the album was coming together I was starting to think of it as this quest with many clues and this is very much just a visual representation of that. It’s thinking a lot about reality or perception and the avatars that we create of ourselves. I just wanted to essentially make an avatar of me, or could be me, is it me? We don’t know. It definitely has a lot of similar tattoos, it has blonde hair, it could be me, but who is it? And where are they in this dream world that I was trying to create for the album? I was trying to create this immersive experience — journey, if you will —and this is an avatar in the middle of that journey.”
The musical and lyrical journey through IWTDTO is far from straightforward. Like the album art suggests, the record is a labyrinth of riddles and ciphers to decode to get to the unlocking of the door. West gave some insight to the enigmatic writing process with a confession that she does enjoy burying clues to be solved. She explained, “A lot of people have said that my lyrics are really straightforward or really honest, and I do like to be honest but I also really like to create a puzzle. What excites me about other people’s music and other people’s art in general like movies, novels and poems is when it’s an exploration of the self or an exploration of humanity in a bigger way.” The messages that pour out of her aren’t even always clear to her -- She continued, “Sometimes I think I’m writing about nonsense and then it fits perfectly with something that I’m talking about.”
In an intentionally huge shift from the stripped-down setup of past records, the sound of IWTDTO is made by endless musical contributions. Lillie said bluntly, “Yeah, it really took a village.” The titanic scale of the project’s collaborators characterizes the endless moving parts of the human experience that West intends to capture, as does the diversity in atmosphere and texture each song holds. The track “Color of the Pool”, which opens with arpeggiated Pocket Piano by Yoni Wolf (Why?), finds West’s voice humming, rasping, and breaking with desperation over a desire to become and achieve the untouchables and the impossibles, like holding the core color of flame or being the exact shimmering cerulean colors of open water. She sings, “The moment before the crash / the sound of breaking glass,” her voice vibrating against the near silence before the track finales with a siren of unhinged saxophone by Adam Schatz (Landlady).
The vocals on the album are truly magical, and the singing that join West’s voice in her compositions melt with and abrase her own without erasing the intensity. Macie Stewart and Sima Cunningham of inventive indie rock duo Ohmme join West on the vocals of “Photo Photo”, anchored by a droning organ to build a singsong trance sound, pulled out with a short, capped breath before the cycle runs too deep. “Straight & Narrow” brings visions and unwrapped memories by poet and musician Kara Jackson, whose voice bounces around like light fractals, backed by gentle strings and peppered drums. Taking a breath from the heavier pop production of most tracks, Death Cab For Cutie’s own Ben Gibbard meets West to sing on a lovelorn, Sufjan Stevens-esque revelation titled “Plates”, with a handmade human feel of nylon guitar strums and cello by Christian Lee Hutson and Grace Weir. The avatar here is projected through memories of something that is no more, but as Gibbard sings ruefully, ‘I know we tried.”
Sometimes a track that feels grounding and air-smooth is followed by one that lifts off, pieces of the puzzle swirling around. The tight vocoder-esque buzz harmonies of “Utopia Planet” bring with them the feeling of floating through a formidable cosmic brain space of reality/fantasy, where West sings assuredly, “Everything is here” before dissolving into Sen Morimoto’s slightly atonal saxophone stylings. There is a playful and touching sample of West’s delightful Grandma Beth, giving her review of a self portrait West had painted. She sends the listener of IWTDTO out from the chaos of everything the record wrestles with and into the present moment with a small sung ditty and a jovial laugh. It’s a moment that’s personal and comforting and heavy all at once, thinking of how the way family and loved ones perceive us may clash against how we see ourselves. Here, it is with the clearest love. When I asked about that charming addition, West laughed, “That was just like, the song told me to do that. I record Grandma Beth all the time, she is an amazing, hilarious, genius person, and with a unique perspective that I don’t encounter really anywhere else in my life. And I’ve been wanting to put her in something for a while, and it just fit. We put that sample of her talking about me looking like an alien exactly where it was first try, we didn’t even have to move it at all. It just was right.”
The impact of working with styles from many different musicians and loved ones on the record reaches the core of IWTDTO, mastering the lifelong labor of grappling with representations of the self through the eyes of others. West explained the magic that such collaboration allows for the record thematically and sonically, “I think the more people that you bring [into a project], the more places something can go because it’s so many different perspectives and different ideas. And I wasn’t super conscious of that conceptually as I was collaborating but in retrospect it makes a lot of sense to me. I just wanted the album to be huge and go to sonic places that I couldn’t or didn’t want to go by myself...When other people come into a space with me musically, it’s very exciting for me; it’s a lot more engaging sometimes than it would be by myself…and I feel like this record is a lot less about me. It was much less important to me to tell my story and express my feelings as it was to touch on things that felt universal. It sounds really corny, but I wanted to touch the universe and having a ton of different people do that with me made it a lot easier.”
The task of condensing a shining product of a forty person collaboration to be performed live by four musicians on tour was welcomed by West, who, again, embraced the nonlinear and creative potential of new music. She said, “It’s exciting to work on music that isn’t so straightforward. The Lamb and Sleepyhead is guitar, drums, bass, and we just play it straight; it makes sense. For this one, it’s been really exciting to figure out what is the most important part of the song. We would ask each other, ‘since we’re not going to have a violin player -- how do we make that sound on guitar?’ That kind of thing has been really fun and engaging in a way that I didn’t feel in the past.“
IWTDTO is an abstract and existential take on how we could approach cycles of habit, but it isn’t messy or self-doubting. West mused, “I think that this record was me accepting these things don’t break all the way, or it takes your whole life to break them. I’m just an extremely reckless person who is desperate for intensity, and the ways that I get there are not always safe or healthy, whether that be non-sobriety or other things. I think that we’re all just trying to escape pain, our own pain, our own trauma. This record was me accepting that the battle is never done even when I thought that it was. I thought that it was very simple: a before time and after time... you learn something, it’s learned. And now I don’t think that at all; it’s your whole life.” IWTDTO cleanses the idea that we only exist in isolation with our faults and fears, and encourages a total acceptance of life’s path, though it may hurt like hell. West has a mission looking for the key to living in the now and freeing oneself from the past, though memories and perceptions are complicated to unravel and confront.
Revealing the story behind ‘Lava’, a triumphant moment on a night hike in Montana to find hot springs, West recalled “...the moment that the flashlight hit the middle of the pool of water was very powerful, and I actually took a picture of it, then wrote that lyric. So to me that is looking directly at something but with the mirror, the light hitting the mirror hits before looking directly in the camera. It’s trying not to be the light hitting the mirror even though that’s inevitable. To me, that’s the ultimate knowing. There’s this place that I’m trying to get the whole record that’s a really extreme feeling of being totally present and self-aware, which I’m not even sure is possible. Which is opening the door, another thing that I’m like ‘I don’t know if that’s possible, we just have to try forever.’ Just thinking, like, Truman Show. I wanna look in the camera! The way that I’m suspicious of my environment and the way that I’m walking around and things don’t make sense, looking in the camera represents everything falling into place and I want that to happen. I don’t know if it can, but that’s freedom to me.” West admits, “Some of these things I don’t really know yet. It’s just asking the question hoping that I’ll figure it out.” Returning to the way she often writes lyrics that feel nonsensical, but click later down the line after some time to process, she noted, “It’s like your subconscious is looking out for you. Or is noticing things that you can’t or you’re not ready for.”
On being able to exchange energy with an audience for the first time in ages, West confided, “I was desperate to connect with people in that way because performing was such a big part of my life for so long, and that’s really how I feel I experience my music; when you’re touring and performing for people that’s when you really connect. I feel like I don’t so much make music for isolation anymore. I want to experience it with other people. So I’m desperate for that, I’m so so desperate and excited for that.”
As I saw West perform I Want the Door to Open live, hearing the ragged emotion in her voice as she sang of swimming to the edge of all she knew to find something she had no guarantee of being possible, was all the more epic and emotional. Grandma Beth was not in attendance, but her parents were, waving proudly. Everyone danced, perceived each other dancing, and contributed to the avatars we build every day. IWTDTO has more questions than answers, and unfurls into newness every moment, accepting that this is not the plan, and maybe there doesn’t need to be one in order to unlock a door. West certainly doesn’t know what’s next, reflecting on all she’d learned in the process of building the record and predicting, “Maybe I’m gonna make a piano record! Maybe I’m gonna make a full techno album! Or maybe somewhere in between, this record ended up being all over the place. I’m generally very excited about what is possible in the future.”
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