Video: Lila Drew, ‘Used To’

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Lila Drew (Photo by Vincent Haycock)

London-born, L.A-reared Lila Drew last week released her debut full-length, “All The Places I Could Be” — and shared the playful, lounge-y video for the lead track, “Used To.” The 22-year-old singer-songwriter explores themes of young adulthood through catchy pop tracks, charged with an electro twist. A third-year student at Yale studying audio and literary culture, Drew pictures the different paths she could follow, not dissimilar to the childlike wonder of Dr. Seuss’ “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!”

“All The Places I Could Be” is pop-forward, but layered with soulful, folk-y additions bringing charming acts like Clairo to mind. “‘All The Places I Could Be,’ for me, was (and is) centered around the intersection of aspiration and exploration,” Drew says. “Figuring out how to make an album, how to write music I’m proud of, how to laugh at myself a bit more, how to not beat myself up over it, were all part of it. So many elements of my life were changing in real-time while I was making this record, and writing through those changes exposed all of my insecurities and aspirations and things I wanted to explore.

“‘All The Places I Could Be’ isn’t about wanting to be somewhere else, but wanting to be someone else, embodying your younger self, exploring things you haven’t experienced but are too afraid to seek out, and embracing mistakes and discrepancies (both within the music and outside of it) in the process.”

Drew teamed up with producer Sachi DiSerafino (Joy Again) on “Used To.” “Before writing ‘Used To,’ I felt like I was too afraid to say things I wanted to say out of fear of being perceived negatively or something,” Drew explains. “I had written this super-long and heavy song the day before, and the first lines of that became the opening for ‘Used To’ (‘I don’t write like I used to / If I told you that I did then I was lying’). Sachi and I were inspired by Jamiroquai and Natasha Bedingfield (who both soundtracked our childhoods), and wanted to take this somber song I’d written and make it a bit funny and sarcastic — a serious song trying not to take itself so seriously.”

Vincent Haycock directed the video for the song as well as for the single “Lila’s Theme” that preceded it. This week, she also followed with a Haycock-directed live concert film that features five of the tracks.

||| Watch: The videos for “Used To” and “Lila’s Theme”

||| Also: Stream “All the Places I Could Be” in its entirety