Lillie West has always made her music in response to an itchiness to always be moving, but as she developed a burgeoning desire to settle, she found the surprise realization that steadiness can beget creativity. That evolutionary tension is what fuels much of her new album as Lala Lala, Heaven 2. For many years, West lived in Chicago, where she established her project Lala Lala as part of that city’s indie scene, releasing several records on the Sub Pop imprint Hardly Art. Those albums, The Lamb and I Want the Door to Open, were powerful statements from a curious artist: catchy guitar-pop songs about being stuck in the ups and downs of life, the struggle to stay sober, to leave town, to blow up your life. West left Chicago to search for more and, in the process, wrote her new album, Heaven 2. On her journey, she landed in New Mexico, where she lived off the grid in Taos. “It was very challenging, freezing, infested with poisonous animals. But it’s still the most beautiful and magical place I’ve ever been and I dream about it all the time,” West says. “I worked on organic vegetable farms and hiked in the mountains a lot, looked for staurolites, and sometimes rode horses. Cut off the top of my thumb at work. Those are just some things that happened.” She then made her way to Iceland, where she lived for two years on and off, with the off being in London, where she grew up. In Iceland, she was in “a residency at LunGa school in a tiny town called Seydisfjordur, where the sun never rose in the winter.” Eventually, she made her way to Reykjavik and settled in with the music community and released an instrumental album (If I Were A Real Man I Would Be Able To Break The Neck Of A Suffering Bird) before heading to Los Angeles, where she has, almost surprisingly, fallen in love and found herself settled. It’s been a good place to live, not specifically because she likes L.A. or because she doesn’t like L.A., but because she’s discovered that, “wherever you go, there you are,” she says. “I wish there was a cooler way to say that.” Mother Soki is among a generation of new artists forging their paths and creating music that attracts fans seeking a soul connection. That creativity led her to sign with independent label Mom+Pop early in 2025. A bit farther back in her trajectory, Mother Soki wasn’t even clear about how to pursue music. Carving her way through adolescence with a fierce artistic drive, though, the Minneapolis-based musician discovered her passion for making music while attending college in Chicago. Attempting to pursue other forms of art and avoiding what was her true calling, Mother Soki says, “I realized it was far more fulfilling than any art medium I had tried (and I’ve tried a lot), from beginning to end, and even after. Something about the process of music felt so natural to me, even when I did not know how I was doing it, I was just doing it.”
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