Lola Blanc is a renaissance woman: a writer, a director, a podcaster, and, with the upcoming release of her debut album, a rising pop star. Most recently, she directed the music video for her latest single, “Dear Sara”, a pop anthem Blanc wrote to her younger self about embracing the time she has and not worrying so much about the future. “Dear Sara” is the latest single from her debut album, Crowd Pleaser, the culmination of a decade of work from Blanc.
We spoke with Lola Blanc about finally releasing her first album, tackling hagsploitation, and channeling Eartha Kitt in the music video’s choreography.
Dread Central: Last time we spoke, we talked about Pruning, which was your short film. Now we’re talking about a music video you directed for your new album. How excited are you about this new album?
Lola Blanc: Oh my God, I’m so excited. I’ve been putting music out for 10 years or something and never released an album somehow.
DC: Wait, really?
LB: Yeah, I did an EP, but it was only five songs, and that was so long ago. So I am very excited to finally have a complete body of work that I’m releasing for people.
DC: That’s so exciting, though. That is so cool. And you’ve directed a music video for your new single called “Dear Sara”. Is this your first time directing a music video?
LB: No, I’ve directed a number of music videos, actually, and videos for other people as well. That’s actually how I started directing.
DC: So, how did you pick this song? I’m rather ignorant when it comes to the music world, so how do you pick your singles?
LB: Great question, Mary Beth. [Laughs] I’m doing this all by myself, I’m releasing completely independently.
DC: Hell yeah, dude. I mean, terrifying. And also, hell yeah.
LB: Thank you! I was in a record deal for a long time, which is why I didn’t put an album out. I didn’t have an album deal with them. So I got out of that, and now I’m doing everything myself.
I actually gathered a bunch of people into my living room and listened to everything with them and pulled them on all of it because I get so, I lose, what is the word? What is the word that I want? I lose perspective when it’s all just me in my own brain all the time. So I basically outsourced my a and r to everyone I know, and that’s how I decided
DC: To compare it to the first music video and this one, they’re so different, but I love how it also shows the range of the album and the different kinds of music and vibes that we can expect.
I also would love to hear about how you chose the choreo. You have one dancer in this small space. So what was the choreography process like to figure out the best movements that would work for the song and the ideas you wanted to portray in the video?
LB: Picking the choreographer was the most important piece. I mean, obviously, as well as the dancer. So I asked this amazing choreographer I know, Teresa “Toogie” Barcelo, to do it for me. So much of her movement is this sort of unhinged, raw, very strange choreography that almost doesn’t feel like dance. It feels like someone’s a little possessed sometimes. She can also do very polished, straightforward dancing. But I really wanted something that felt just a little bit more wild and cool.
Her style of choreography is such that, rather than coming up with it by herself and then bringing it to the dancer, the three of us all got together in the space, and I moved around the space with them to show them where I wanted her to land and the type of feeling that I wanted there. Then she worked with Paula’s [the dancer] body to see what felt good in her body. So it was this really collaborative process. It was amazing.
DC: That’s so cool to get to be a part of. I feel like something I learned when I directed is how much you are there to help with the coordination of movements as a director, even though you’re not a choreographer necessarily. Being part of that movement process is so cool. And to see how they take your very janky vision and make it the most cool thing, beautiful thing you’ve ever seen is just so gratifying.
LB: It was very janky, actually. [Laughs] I filmed myself before I brought Toogie onto the project going through this space, and it is the stupidest thing you have ever seen. But they expanded upon that and made it beautiful.
DC: How did you pick your dancer? And I also love that you have a dancer who is an older woman. We’re not using old woman as a bad word here. She is just an older woman, and she’s using her body in beautiful ways. And I know that’s part of the whole vibe of the music video. So was it difficult to find someone of her age to dance like that, or is it much easier than I would’ve thought?
LB: I just got really lucky. It was important to me to have a dancer who was older because it just felt wrong to have someone in their twenties or thirties in old woman makeup for this.
DC: We see that all the time, too. No offense to people who’ve done it, I know it has its place, but sometimes it feels very disingenuous. Why are we scared of casting a real older person?
LB: And it looks weird, too. It looks uncanny. But we did age her up a bit more because obviously [her character] looks older than 62, her actual age. So, first, I posted on a casting site, and we didn’t find anyone who was right. But I just posted on Instagram asking, and I got one DM, and it was Paula and she was perfect.
DC: I love it. I love how the universe works sometimes. Sometimes it just plops something right in your lap, and it’s so lovely.
LB: And she’s amazing. The most energetic, she has more energy than I do. I don’t even understand.
DC: So cool. Well, and was the choreographer, there’s parts where she does a funny kid’s face or sticks her tongue out. Was that something that you wanted or was that something that she and the choreographer did together? How did those quick little movements pop in? Because I really love those touches of showing youth, not just through body movement, but through silly facial expressions and things like that.
Yeah, it was not originally in the choreography. We all went away after the first rehearsal and I was like, “I think we need something to make it a little more playful. What if we use this line, ‘We all feel the terror’?” Because it repeats several times. What if we have her make fun of the terror? And then we worked together to figure out what those expressions would be and what those movements would be. Very much inspired by Eartha Kitt, who was the queen of expression.
DC: Oh my God, Eartha Kitt. She’s the queen of not caring what people think about her, and I just love that so much.
LB: I know. She was such an icon.
DC: I really love the ending. The music ends, and you have this beautiful shot of her in the mirror, breathing heavily, and it’s so heartbreaking. And so I wanted to hear about the song and where the song came from for you. What inspired it as a piece of art?
LB: “Dear Sara” is me talking to myself as a younger person. I’m in my thirties and there’s a recurring theme for me and many women I know where we are starting to think a lot about our age and our place in society and our mortality. And the thing is, we’ve been, particularly with a couple of my best friends, we’ve been having these same worries since we were so young. And I feel like we were missing out on the time that we had because we were so worried about getting older and didn’t appreciate where we were.
DC: I think about it all the time. I look at pictures of myself when I was younger, and I was so worried about being fat back then. It’s so sad for us as kids.
LB: I know. When I was 17, I was like, “If I’m not a pop star by age 25, I’m going to quit.” And I’m 37 now.
But there’s also an existential piece in there, the way we fit into society and the way women become erased and everyone becomes erased as they get older, honestly, but women in particular. But also it’s just like, ‘Oh, time just keeps marching and I’m going to die.” So this song is sort of a letter to myself and to the women I love about how to love where we’re at right now and allow life to be what it is without worrying so much about what comes next, because we’re here now, which sounds so cheesy to say. It does, but it’s
DC: But it’s so true, especially now with the world’s on fire. Everything feels terrible all the time, and it’s just very hard to hold everything at once. Pivoting slighting, but I wanted to talk about how you’re playing with hagsploitation expectations in this music video!
LB: I have a group chat of friends who love horror, and we see a lot of horror movies together, and the thread is called Old Lady Tits because we realized it is a recurring trope. It’s a trope that really, really bothers me. And I had not seen that really turned on its head before. So when I wrote this song, it was important to me to take that trope and explore it because of who I am and the fact that I am a horror person. If I’m going to do a song talking about age and talking about facing the future and facing death, it felt important to me to play with that trope specifically.
DC: Then you also collaborated with Nick Matthews, who’s your cinematographer. How did the two of you collaborate to figure out the look and feel, because that basement is perfect?
LB: Nick is an angel genius. I loved working with him, and I feel so blessed that he wanted to do this project because we had no money. Again, I’m completely independent. I don’t have money for this shit, but he just really connected with the concept, and I wanted someone who could achieve the classic horror look of an old lady in a basement. And he really nailed that. Honestly, it’s all shot in one take.
DC: I was going to ask about that!
LB: So he had to program with the gaffer every single lighting cue to happen in real time with the song. So as she’s going through, Nick is on his walkie being like, “Cue this, cue this, cue this, cue this, cue this.”
DC: It’s like a theatrical production more than anything else.
LB: It was honestly so exciting creatively. Yeah, it’s thrilling. And it was important to me that the verses be spooky and dark, with the more traditional horror look. Then, when the chorus hits, it should feel more ethereal and alive. I think we pulled it off
DC: The way that y’all do that all in one take. That’s really cool as a filmmaker to get to experience that and watch people figure it out in real time.
LB: It’s neat. It was my first oner and I loved it. I was like, “I want to do more. Let’s just have everything oners.” [Laughs]
DC: But my last question about the music video is, what is the significance of the spirals that she’s drawing in the video? What is that visual, or is that something you want to talk about, or is that something you want to keep secret?
LB: It connects to a couple of the lyrics, and I want to keep it mysterious because I’m really curious to hear what people think it is. But yeah, maybe it will recur in other imagery. We’ll see.
DC: Tell me more about the album as a whole. What can people expect from your first full-length album??
LB: It is called Crowd Pleaser because there are themes in the songs of hucksters and billionaires and people who really, really want and need attention. There are political allusions, and there are also some really personal heartbreak songs, as well.
DC: You proved to your 17-year-old self that you are a pop star, and it didn’t have to be when you were 25.
LB: Thank you. I do feel really, really proud of all of the songs. And I feel proud that I, with obviously the help of incredible friends and producers and collaborators, have been just putting this shit together myself. It feels really authentic to me. And there are a couple of different sounds that represent these two different sides of me musically. And hopefully it all works well together. But yeah, I’m just super excited to finally release a full collection of myself.
DC: Are there any more horror connections planned, or are we keeping it mysterious until the album comes out?
LB: We’ll keep it mysterious.
DC: I like the mystery because it’s releasing in September, right? So it’s not too far away.
LB: There might be a sneaky featured composer who’s connected to the horror world somewhere in there.
DC: Well, is there anything else before we wrap up that you want to share, Lola, about the album, about what people can expect, what you want people to get out of it, anything like that?
LB: I would like to add that I think it is a very cinematic collection of songs, and it feels very tied to my filmmaker self in that way. So each song kind of feels like its own little cinematic world to me. So, hopefully that will be something people will appreciate.
Lola Blanc’s debut album, Crowd Pleaser, releases this September.
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