Olivia Lane sits down for a One On One Garden Session during The Underwater Sunshine Festival in City Winery New York on October 11th, 2018. For more info visit: https://www.olivialane.com & https://underwatersunshinefest.com Audio & Video by: Ehud Lazin
Setlist:
You Got Me
Friends Don't
Hey 3AM
Olivia started writing songs at age 16. She got so serious about it that she managed to persuade her mother to move with her to Los Angeles, which at the time seemed to be the Emerald City where all dreams might be realized. She finished her last two years of high school in Los Angeles, where she studied voice, dance, acting and guitar. Then, during her sophomore year at the University of Southern California, she signed up for a songwriting class.
“We analyzed all the great songs, beginning with a Beatles song on our first day,” she remembers. “I fell in love with it because it helped me remember how exciting the idea of telling stories through music could be. I wasn’t being fulfilled in my acting classes because I wasn’t telling my own story. As a songwriter, I could have much more creative control.”
By this time, it was becoming clear that Nashville was where Olivia needed to be. For two summers she interned there, the first with a publishing company and the second with an agency. Then, after her graduation in 2013, she impulsively joined two friends on a road trip that ended five days later at her first place in Music City. Along the way she documented their adventures, which she posted online with the title Long Way To Go. The very next day, they all headed out to Bonnaroo. And on the day she returned, Olivia went to work writing new songs. One of the first was “Long Way To Go.”
“As the months went by I got more confident and willing to stick up for myself. It got to the point where one writer called my manager after a writing session and said, ‘You know, Olivia really needs to keep her mouth shut,’” she says, whooping with delight at the memory. “Eventually I found a happy medium of trusting and learning from people who believe in you while also staying true to and believing in yourself.”
Her self-titled debut EP stirred interest throughout and beyond Music Row in 2016. She earned opening slots with Gary Allan, Easton Corbin, Kip Moore and Wynonna, and booked her own ‘She Fits’ house tour doing dates in private homes throughout the country.
From stages and writing rooms, from youthful passions for music as diverse as Blondie and Patsy Cline, Michael Jackson and Alan Jackson, Olivia Lane has already achieved an uncanny self-awareness, artistically and personally. “I’m a musical melting pot,” she declares. “If I have to categorize myself I’d have to say I’m pop country because I identify with the country lifestyle but pop music is stylistically all over the map, just like me, and that peaks my interest.”
“It’s not really a genre; it’s just what people like. It’s popular music. And I’ve played in pretty much every crevice and corner of America, doing two-hour sets and then going to the bar and talking with the customers and locals, I learned a lot that way. I learned a lot about myself from understanding what people saw when they watched me onstage.”
