Singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Lau Noah reached the finals of the 2023 American Songwriter Song Contest with her song “If a Tree Falls in Love with a River.” Since reaching the final round of the contest, she has released an album, embarked on a tour, and more.
Earlier this week, Noah sat down with American Songwriter to talk about what she has been doing lately, her career, and more.
[RELATED: American Songwriter 2023 Song Contest Finalists Announced]
Lau Noah on Life Since the Song Contest
“A lot of touring,” Lau Noah said of what she had been doing since the song contest. “I had a whole tour in Spain this summer. Then, I toured in Greece and then I started this tour doing support for Jacob Collier at the beginning of November. There’s a lot of touring until the end of January,” she added. “It will be a whole winter of touring.”
Noah on Her Unique Guitar Style
Lau Noah has garnered recognition for her unique guitar style. The way she weaves her voice together with that unique style gives her music a mesmerizing and almost magical quality.
“My style might be something like if you don’t know what you’re doing, you might as well make it up,” she said half-jokingly when asked to describe her playing style. “I’m self-taught on guitar,” she added, more seriously. “The way I approach it is note-by-note, one note at a time. Harmonization between the voice and guitar. I find it very visual. So, I’ll see a guitar melody and, rhythmically, there will be some holes, some gaps to which I will add some voice notes. I guess they call it counterpoint, right? Just two voices dancing with each other,” she explained.
Lau Noah on Selecting Collaborators for A Dos
Lau Noah’s album A Dos features an impressive and diverse group of collaborators. The long list includes artists like Jacob Collier, Chris Thile, Gaby Moreno, Shai Maestro, Jorge Drexler, and more.
“That’s a bit of a magical thing,” Noah said when asked how she chose her collaborators. “Some of those songs, I already had but most of them, I wrote between those recordings. So, every time I had a song that I was proud of, that I liked, it was pretty clear to me which voice out of the group of musicians I had met recently I heard for each song,” she explained.
“Usually, these are dreams and scenarios and possibilities. But I got so lucky because every time I asked someone if they wanted to collaborate and perform that particular song, all I received was a yes which was so strange and so beautiful,” she added. “It almost kind of appeared to me. Like, ‘If I could share this song with somebody what is the voice I hear?’ and I heard exactly the people that are the record today.”
Taking Chances
“Every time someone said yes it was amazing,” Lau Noah said. “I will say that when you work with artists with careers like the ones I worked with, their schedules are crazy. And it’s usually not a priority to record a song for somebody else’s project. Some of the sessions, like the one with Jorge Drexler and the one with Silvia Pérez Cruz, I didn’t even know it was going to happen on the same day of the recording,” she said.
“I would take chances,” Noah said of lining up the collaborations. “I would book a flight or book a train ride and get there and just hang around until they confirmed. Then, I would go up to their apartments or go to the studio and we would record. There was so much blind faith in the process for sure.”
Lau Noah Reflects on “If a Tree Falls in Love with a River”
“If a Tree Falls in Love with a River” put Lau Noah in the final round of the 2023 American Songwriter Song Contest. It is also on her most recent album.
“It’s a song about impossible love,” she said. “I have been lucky enough to reach people through that song, I think, because it’s relatable. In shows, I’ll always say, ‘I’ll be at the merch table afterward if you guys want to come tell me if you feel like a tree or you feel like a river, in terms of love or relationships.’ I love to hear that,” she added.
“So, people come with the most amazing and most heartbreaking stories. They’ll come to me and tell me about their spouses who were rivers and they were trees and that’s why it didn’t work. Some couples will come to me and say ‘We are a river and a tree and we’ve been together 16 years and it works for us.’ So, I feel like it’s a song that has given me more than I could have ever expected because it’s relatable to people.”
A Dos is available to stream everywhere now.
Featured Image by Sergione Infuso/Corbis via Getty Images
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