Lila Rose: I was actually just in San Francisco, but by the time I realized I could’ve met you over there I figured you were probably on BART.
ThrdCoast: Yeah, probably better not to get my hopes up. What were you doing over there?
LR: I was doing some work for this guy, singing. It’s a really cool gig. It’s my longest-term job ever, actually.
TC: It’s a studio gig?
LR: Yeah. It’s really weird music, pretty freaky, but I love it. Kind of like circus-electronic-gothic, I don’t really know how else to describe it. But he writes everything and I just show up to sing various parts.
TC: Now, you’re from Toronto originally, right? What brought you out to the Bay Area?
LR: A small tour brought me out here actually, I guess it was 2008. It was a really weird, really small gig, just me on my guitar with a rack of loop pedals and everything. The whole tour was pretty horrible, but on the last day when I was out here I found myself thinking, “Wow, this is amazing!” It was everything I was looking for, and I was ready to move out of Toronto — it’s crazy cold, like, nine months out of the year there. But I had this list, because I’m a list-maker, of all the things I wanted in a new place and this checked all the boxes. Beaches, ocean, it’s creative, it’s supportive…
TC: It’s not hard to like. I guess that’s why rent’s so high.
LR: Yeah, sorry.
TC: Oh, don’t worry, I’m part of the problem. Too many of us trying to get out of the cold. Anyway, what’s your musical background? Do you have formal training?
LR: I do, actually. I started really young, but it was never really my plan to do music as a career. My parents put me in an Orff music class, so lots of recorder and percussion, that kind of thing, when I was about three. Then I moved on to violin, cello, viola, eventually guitar, vocal classes and choir. I was definitely in the thick of it, but theater was actually my first love. I ended up doing musical theater for a while, but then after I gave up acting there was this big, empty void. I was about nineteen when I discovered that I wanted music to be my path.
TC: How did you get together with Daniel Garcia? Did you guys work together back in Canada?
LR: No, he’s actually from Guatemala. I met him about three years ago now, he was a fan and he’d been following my music from Guatemala. He started hitting me up online, but I didn’t really know what he was up to. I started writing the album — or, rather, the songs that would become the album, I didn’t know they were going to be an album at the time — and when he came to the States he got his hands on them and we got to know each other and became friends. He just started working on it and I was like, actually, that’s pretty fucking tight! I like that better than what I was doing with it!
TC: Was this Heart Machine?
LR: No, this was for WE.ANIMALS. He heard Heart Machine before we met, that’s what led him to get in touch with me. But yeah, he started working on the song “WE. ANIMALS.,” and then the next one, and the next one, and we ended up renting a studio cottage in Santa Cruz together to record the rest of the album.