“Hi, I’m so sorry, I actually just fell into a TikTok hole”, Lauren, aka renforshort laughs when she joins our Zoom call, and I just have to say, is there anything more relatable than that these days? It’s only morning in her time zone when I catch up with her, but she’s already in the studio working on music. “I’m just writing. Writing every day”, she tells me. It’s been a couple eventful years for the Toronto-raised singer-songwriter - when she was only a teenager she already started making music, whether it was playing the piano, guitar, or drums, and performing at gigs with her music which gained her an ever-growing fan base.

Ever since the release of her debut EP teenage angst, a mesmerizing project highlighting her versatile artistry and relatable coming-of-age lyrics, her career has been rising. The follow-up, off saint dominique has only cemented her further into the spotlight. Artists such as Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda, Yungblud and MGK are fans of hers and her Spotify streams go up by the minute - the songstress is a force to be reckoned with, without a doubt.

Last year, she finally unveiled her long-awaited debut album, dear amelia. “It’s been great. It’s exciting. Obviously it’s my debut album so you learn a lot from it, or I did at least. And it’s been cool to learn about making a project. Like, what is the best way for me to do it? You know, what is going to work best for me when trying to create? Where am I going to be?”, she reflects when I ask her how life has been since its success. “I like seeing how people resonate with the music. I think it’s very exciting. These songs are basically all my babies in a way.”

“I’d love to talk to Fiona Apple. I’d love to sit in a room with her and watch her create…. ”

- RENFORSHORT

The project is stacked with spellbinding and vulnerable tracks that tackle depression, anxiety and self-erasure. “It’s scary”, she admits when we speak about putting herself out there in such a vulnerable way. “It’s scary because at the end of the day, you create this for other people in a way. A lot of it is for myself, for that catharsis. I love making music, but a lot of it too is that I want to make something for my fans that is going to resonate with them.” And her fans have clearly responded well to it - although dear amelia has already been released in July 2022, the album still receives so much momentum to this date, something that is quite rare in an incredibly fast-paced industry. But who is amelia? “amelia is anybody, it’s yourself, it could be someone you’ve lost, someone you loved, someone you haven’t met yet. It’s those who are bottling up their feelings.”, she explains. As part of the release, Lauren has set up ‘Letters to Amelia’, a brilliant initiative that allows fans, or anyone really, to write letters to a PO box - letters about sorrows, joys and everything in-between. “I never open the letters so the letters just come to a PO box. They’ve been coming for a while so that’s really cool. I think it’s a fun exercise and I think it’s helpful, you know.”

The stigma of mental health has thankfully reduced immensely over the past few years. As an outspoken mental health advocate, the songstress mentions that “I think you’re made to focus on it a lot to draw from the experiences you have from suffering with your mental health in a way. So you always come back and you put yourself in that place that you were when you felt either really bad or really great or, you know, really anxious or stressed to write. And I think that that’s a challenging part. But at the end of the day, it’s like a form of catharsis, you’re releasing that you have to really feel everything. So I think that that’s definitely a challenge, but I think it’s good. I also think there’s a lot of pressure,” and we both agree that being in the creative industries can mess with your head sometimes.

renforshort transfers those feelings into her songs so beautifully though, and even painful revelations sound soothing with her stunning vocal abilities. We go on to speak about her creative process when creating a new track. “Some days it’ll take me 20 minutes to write a song but there’s some days where it’ll take me like four or five hours to write a song, you know? It really varies”, she contemplates. “I don’t necessarily stick to one process. It goes all over the place. I like testing structures and concepts. I like trying different things all the time. It makes it very exciting and very fun and you end up with really cool shit sometimes”, she laughs, and I couldn’t agree more!

dear amelia includes co-writing credits from David Pramik, Alexander 23, Andy Seltzer, John Ryan, Tia Scola, Nick Long and Y2K, as well as long-time collaborator Jeff Hazin, but also features collaborations with the likes of Travis Barker and Jake Bugg - artists who complement renforshort’s style amazingly well. “I was doing sessions with Travis and we had this song and we needed live drums and we were just like, who better to do it than Travis Barker”, the artist recalls. But the story of how the collaboration with Jake Bugg, one of her favourite artists, came about, is pure manifesting power. “I’ve always been a fan of his for as long as I can remember. I wrote the song and I was like, I’m not writing a second verse because Jake Bugg is going to be on it. I manifested it and my manager was like, okay, and then six months later he sent me an updated version with Jake Bugg on it and I just bawled my eyes out. I freaked out, like it’s crazy.”

In terms of other artists that renforshort would like to collaborate with, Fiona Apple and Dave Grohl are high in place. “There’s a lot of people I’d love to just talk to. I’d love to talk to Fiona Apple and Dave Grohl. With Fiona, I’d love to sit in a room with her and watch her create and just understand what it was like to be like a young female artist in the 90s to 2000s, and being such an influential person and obviously with Dave Grohl, it’s like, you’re Dave Grohl, like I obviously want to talk to you forever. I just want to understand how you’re so awesome.”

Apart from her album release, the artist has been busy touring headline shows, after she had been a support artist previously, and has documented her experience in vlogs on YouTube. “It’s so different”, she says about headlining vs. supporting. “To have people singing back to you and knowing your words and wanting to be there, it’s bizarre. It’s bizarre in the best way possible. It’s unbelievable and the best feeling in the world”. Two shows that stood out for her were undoubtedly Toronto and London. “Toronto, it’s my hometown. And then I came back to London a year after my first headline show and I went from 300 attendees to 2000. That was awesome for me.” Performing can be nerve-wracking but renforshort and her band have got the perfect routine: “Me and the band take a tequila shot and we give each other a three-way fist bump. We listen to Nirvana and get pumped up”, she laughs, whereas after a show, she makes sure to interact with her fans. “It’s the best part of the night for me”, the singer admits.

It’s an exciting time for the artist without a doubt, and in terms of what the future holds? “I’m just writing a lot. I want to write for a new project. I’m gonna go to London, write for a bit and you know, just really focus on that”, Lauren says, so fans can be prepared for more music to come very soon.

Stream ‘dear amelia’ -

Follow renforshort : @renforshort

Credits:

Photographer: Jack Alexander

Styling: Self styled

Art Design: Lazy Goat Club

Words: Antonia Kuenzel