On the occasion, LP gave an interview to RTL’s Linda Marlen Runge.  The original length of the interview was 45 minutes, but the published material is only 9-minutes long. The part that we love the most is the first few seconds of the interview, which capture the general mood of the conversation.

✶ Video – the interview by the RTL 

TRANSCRIPT

Linda Marlen Runge: Welcome, dear viewers, I would like to introduce and warmly welcome an artist – LP. Yes, I am so happy that today I can get you to know such a musician. Welcome to the show, LP!

LP: Thank you!

LMR: Is that your real name?

LP: It is. It’s my real initials, that’s for sure.

LMR: Ok, so you wanna be called LP or you wanna be called…?

LP: I do. I do. I mean, my name is Laura Pergolizzi, but Laura is just not my name anymore, ’cause I’ve been called LP for so long. Feels right.

LMR: Cool. Okay, let’s talk about music a little bit.

LP: All right, let’s do it!

LMR: When did you … that’s like a pretty ordinary question, but when did you notice that you wanted to write music?

LP: I don’t know. It came upon me in such a weird way. I came from a family that was primarily an academic family, it’s just what we were raised to do, so songwriting… I didn’t have any clue I was ever gonna do that. My mom passed away when I was a teenager, and she was a singer, an opera singer, and I was really into singing, and songwriting was just like a mystery to me.

LMR: Okay…

LP: This was like one of those things that seem so mysterious. When I talk to people now who don’t do it, they have a similar thing – they don’t understand how you can just sit down and write a song. And I think I felt like that too, but I just started singing, started playing guitar, and I still don’t really know how it’s done, to be honest.

LMR: So it’s like a self-teaching process, something like that, you just… you wanna do it, you start to do it, all the time.

LP: Yeah, autodidactic.

LMR: So did you get a kind of musical education then, or did you just…

LP: I studied voice. I started studying voice. My mother… I think she saw from an early age that I was very loud. I just needed to know how to control my voice.

LMR: So you studied classical voice?

LP: I studied opera for a couple of years, and it really all came down to scales. We sang some arias and stuff like that, but it was more about doing scales, and I wanted studying with other rock teachers, really. They never told me how to sing, they just kept giving me very cool scales and I did them like a guitar player, basically.

LMR: You have to learn your instrument, right?

LP: I just did it, so I could. My first band… I was felt like I was screaming a lot. Not screaming, but really wailing up rock-wise. It helped me to keep my voice and then, as a result of doing them, I was really disciplined about it for some reason, just ‘cause otherwise I couldn’t really sing, and as a result I just kept making me better and I was like, “Oh, I can get higher and higher and stronger,” so I think that was the best thing I’ve ever done, really.

LMR: Was there a certain plan, when you were, like,“Ok, now I found my voice, that’s it, that’s how I wanna sound like” Because I’m a singer too, and I still have the thing, when I listen to my songs and I’m very critical with myself, all the time.

LP: I think you can change it. I call it like a “channel on.” Do you play guitar at all?

LMR: Yeah.

LP: Okay, so, an electric guitar, you go through an amp, but there’s different channels you can go through. And you go play through pedals and dirty channels and stuff. I feel like that is something I do vocally. Like, sometimes I’ve changed a song that I thought I’d like pitched to someone else, I’d be like, “Let me just change how I sing that.” ‘Cause I’ll do this thing, I put on this pop filter on my voice, and it just sounds like… I doesn’t sound like me, really. And because I do a lot of writing for other people, I sometimes can get in that mode, but I figured out that a song can be saved. It’s the way you sing it, and you have different sounds inside of you and I think that you can get into that song, that’s what I do.

LMR: I gotta be honest, when the people here told me there was this singer coming to this show, I didn’t know who LP was, but then I found something on Facebook, there was like a big advert, of like, okay, this is the new smash. I never watched it, because usually I don’t watch the mainstream stuff which is promoted there. Then they told me that I was gonna meet you and you gonna be here, I was like okay, I have to watch it, and I was so amazed. I was like, finally, there’s a girl, there’s a woman who is not wrapped up in a bunch of glitter and makeup and stuff and it’s flying over at the crowd, all that stuff that I really cannot connect with, and then I ended up watching your stuff all night and I was like: “What? This is really, I’m sorry, but it’s something new and it’s something different…”

LP: Oh, thanks. It’s cool. Nice. It must have been weird, ‘cause I do the same thing, when you see something that’s mainstream, and you’re, like: “eeeeh.” You breeze over it.

LMR: Yeah. Sometimes you might be surprised, but most of the times, unfortunately, you’re not… It’s great to have you here ’cause there’s a lot of girls that are actually still thinking that when you wanna be a successful girl, you have to do certain things and you have to look a certain way, and… I’m so…

LP: I think we all have that, you know what I mean? And, hopefully, it’s getting more and more diverse, but there’s examples before us, and I can’t stress it enough, that the most important thing you can give the world is to be exactly who you are.

LMR: Yeah, exactly.

LP: I love me a good pop star!

LMR: Of course, and you’re a great pop star so far…

LP: You know, sometimes it’s really fun to see this confectionary kind of “wow!” Like, you know, “What is that?!”, almost like this cartoonish example of perfection, and you’re like, “hah.” Because one of the things I think I’ve learned in doing this, up to what I have, is that none of these people are an accident, they’re all working insanely hard. Even the most sugary perfect little button of… whatever… of pop, is… They have to do ALL. THIS. STUFF. to get there. The thing that I feel worse about are the people that don’t make it, that are molded and prodded and then told, “You know what, you’re not original” or “you’re not enough.” I’ve let that happen to myself musically a few times, and… Because you’re really at the mercy of some of these people that are like… I don’t wanna vilify them, but they’re just trying to get their bottom line in there, their thing, but ultimately it’s your responsibility to get yourself out there intact. And I hope that myself and a bunch of other people can give people hope.

LMR: I’m sure you do! Do you think that the Internet and other technique stuff and all the possibilities are making it harder or easier for artists to…?

LP: It’s a really good question, I think every age brings its difficulties. It’s quite amazing that anybody could make a video of them and make a song and chuck it out there. That brings us back to what we were just talking about – people can get through more unscathed and more true to themselves when they can do it themselves and just throw it on Youtube. I think it’s gonna go even flow always. There’s good aspects about it and there’s bad…

LMR: Always the same. Cool. So now, let’s talk about this EP and the two songs you’re gonna perform today.

LP: Yeah, it’s a five songs EP, and I’m gonna do “Lost On You” and another song, and I actually have a record coming out, it’s the five songs from the EP and then new five songs, so that should be fun. But I’m not gonna play any of those yet today.

LMR: Okay, what’s the name of the other song?

LP: “Death Valley”, it’s the name of the EP.

LMR: Well, you guys enjoy her on stage, and…

LP: What do you do, do you just get up and leave the scene?

LMR: Well. We could do that, I can say goodbye to people! [LP walks out] She already left me here, but…

LP: So long! No, just kidding, I’ll come back.

LMR: You can say “Auf Wiedersehen alle Leute!”

LP: Wiedesen! Auf Wiedersehen!

LMR: In a perfect German!

LP: Goodnight.

LMR: Au revoir!

[LP whistling]

LMR: Oh, the whistling! We didn’t talk about the whistling!

LP: What do we need talk about, it’s whistling.

LMR: But you whistle so nice!

LP: How do you… So, you’re like: “How do you whistle?” – “I don’t know!” How do you do an armpit sound?

LMR: I whistle… When I whistle on my record it sounds like shit, we need to put a lot of effects on it…

LP: You know what happens? Too much air! [whistles] You gotta do both, in and out, and you gotta turn your head to this side, ’cause the mike picks up all that air.

LMR: Yeah, I know, but still…

LP: There you go.

LMR: Okay, thank you for that!

LP: Thank you!

LMR: Okay, that was fun. Thank you!

LP: Thank you!