Madeliné Lauer was a girl with a dream. She was a girl with a dream and drawers upon drawers of notebooks saturated with ideas and a ton of feelings. She was a girl with a dream and a notebook and Aaliyah’s “One in a Million” playing on repeat. Madeliné Lauer is still that girl, but now she has a new album and her very own sound.
After leaving home– one flooded with an interesting mix of James Taylor, Cat Stevens, Mariah Carey and Celine Dion– Madeliné moved to Hollywood with the objective of recording an album. Like many successful artists of today, Madeliné’s hurried entrance into the music industry didn’t quite lead her to the Billboard charts.
“It’s a complicated industry. I started making an album and before it was completed, the producer said that I didn’t have enough life experience yet to make it a deep, moving album. Soul music has always been what clicked with me, and I somehow came out of the studio with a Pop album. When you’re a teenager and you are introduced to Hollywood, it’s easy to get mixed up in its shiny demeanor. It was really difficult for a kid, and even more difficult for a female. How do you know if you are working with someone whose expectations in return are far from what you had in mind?”
Madeliné took the next step in the right direction and enrolled in the Los Angeles Recording School, where she cleaned up her act and began to really pick up the pieces. While in a few cases this seems a necessity, her motivation behind learning the ins-and-outs of recording was driven by independence. She was fed up with depending on others to get an album moving. A year into school, she got a job at a little recording studio in Burbank, California as a runner. Madeliné found herself taking care of the errands, cleaning up after messy musicians and eventually, helping out with the clients.
One of the clients– some know him as Wiz Khalifa– brought his engineer into the studio, and as fate would have it, Madeliné Lauer and engineer and producer, Drew Drucker, fell in love.
“He saved my life, in a way. There was a huge transition for me to make. I wanted to get back in the studio, I wanted to be recording, myself. He pushed me in that direction. I started working with other producers and began tackling the struggle of really finding my own unique voice and sound. Drew was experimental like that– he would suggest small adjustments and even though I was skeptical at first, I knew it would sound fabulous.”
Madeliné and Drew spent 3 years making the album, gradually interweaving their intimacy through each song. The album, Open Book, is a blend of R&B, Pop and Jazz. It is a sensual, personal documentation of what was in those notebooks, and what she is writing in them today. You can learn about and hear more from Madeliné Lauer by listening on her website, Soundcloud and YouTube.
All images courtesy of Madeliné Lauer