“If the world is bearing witness, we have to make the most out of it.” Lauren Auder in conversation with Thomas Clausen

Lauren Auder: The main thing I discovered was that I am part of much more than justmyself. I learned that no matter how much you search for a definition of yourself, you cannever be just one thing. You can find yourself and you can keep searching for identity, butultimately, you cannot be defined by just one aspect to the world. Everything isinterconnected and comes together as one big whole. All the lessons I’ve ever learnedwere quite theoretical. But it’s another thing entirely to actually feel them in your gut. That’sthe difficulty in life

In fact, it has very much to do with how the inside world is always going to reflect theoutside world. It’s about finding a meeting point and how one could look too far inside andignore the rest of the world, I guess. It feels like the record is about that meeting point between the self and the other.

It’s part of the lyrics in one of the songs, “Candles.” I just knew as I wrote it down that itwould define the whole record and it was going to be the album title. The world bearswitness and you have to bear witness back to it. The whole world can be a place that looksat you, and you look back at it. The album ends on the lines, “There’s no place that doesnot see you. You must change your life.” I think that’s the big message: If the world isbearing witness to us, we have to make the most out of it.

I don’t think so. I think there’s an inevitability of being looked at and looking back on things.There is definitely an uncomfortable aspect to that. But I don’t think it’s voyeuristic. It’smore about the responsibility to be true and to live fully when you’re being looked at. It’snot about voyeurism, at least not for me.

No. I think my day-to-day life is very peaceful and calm. However, the album was createdduring a very dramatic period in my life. It’s about a romance that couldn’t live. That isdramatic on a personal scale, but it’s also a part of life that everyone experiences. We allshare these experiences in some way. We all feel that our personal experiences are likebig odysseys. But I do have a dramatic side, though, when I’m switching off. I am verypartial to police procedurals. I love watching TV shows like Columbo. It’s my guiltypleasure on the screen.

That’s very simply what it’s about. It feels very easy to talk about the lows, but it’s a verydifferent thing to feel it on a visceral level. And I really was feeling it when I was writing. I’mdealing with those difficult moments and have even begun to accept them. By the time I’mputting things into records, they have already been metastasized. I very rarely write in themoment of turmoil. I have at least internalized my emotions on a certain level. The onlysong that was written quite immediately is the very last track on the record, “Say Nothing.”I’d woken up at 4 a.m. in the middle of the night and I had a really terrible migraine. I waslooking out of the window and it was stormy. I was living in a really broken-down house atthe time, with old single-pane windows, so they were rattling very loud… That’s the onlysong where I wrote the lyrics in one go. It feels like the most cathartic moment on therecord.

I can be. But I think that this one is like a bit of an anti-romantic record on some level. It’sall about not fetishizing romance. The clearest romantic track would be the break-up song,which is “No Outline.” A lot of the track is actually more reckoning with the fact that aromance can end, but you can still carry on. It’s not the end of the world and you can’tcapture those feelings forever. I wanted it to be anti-fetishistic of romance as a notion.Know that you can take it into the world, the things you learn in romantic relationships;they exist with or without them and through them. To me, a lot of romance seems to be tiedto nostalgia. And I’m very much not a nostalgic person. I want to move forward and I wantto keep moving.

With this record, when I came to digging into the arrangements and production, I wanted tobe outside of my home and I wanted to be somewhere else. But I also wanted to besomewhere I knew very well. So it was a perfect opportunity for me to go to Paris. I stayedthere for a month or two and really dug in. I rented an apartment, set up a studio there,and completely locked myself away to pretty much work nonstop. It was about being awayfrom home, but still in a place where I spoke the language and was able to get along.

Everything has a flipside, you know? Because there is obviously a level of romance to it.It’s like taking romance and then writing a love letter to the world with it, as opposed to justthat romantic relationship. Most of the lyrics have been written based on voice notes I tookduring late-night walks with my phone in London. I was out at night walking withoutdirection and humming to myself in a loop

More than anything, they serve as an aspirational text for me. A lot of the time, I’m writingwhat I want to get through and the place I want to get to. A lot of the record is quite mantra-like. The lyrics are more like ways of working through things. So I guess on some level,they are diaristic, but I don’t really tend to be very explicit with what I’m talking about. Iwant to create a space that those feelings can inhabit, rather than work through them insome metaphorical way.

Yes! The greed in question is to let yourself experience all the joyous feelings. Let yourselfexperience more in abundance. More than you deserve. I am very invested in taking thelistener on a journey with the record, switching from euphoria to melancholia and backagain. I’m an album fan. I love LPs. I want to see all the different facets of an artist andwhere they’re coming from. When I write music, I do so first and foremost as a fan ofmusic. And as a fan of singer-songwriters and the worlds they’ve been able to create. As alistener, I’d want that kind of emotional rollercoaster.

Absolutely. I knew that I wanted to end on that moment, which felt like a true liberation andthe possibility of a joyous life. To have gone through this journey and to know that at theend of it, there’s a whole new world opening up to you, was the most important thing aboutit. A lot on the album is about manifestation and practicing the things you’re manifesting.How do you go through ecstatic, enclosing, or annihilating experiences and come back toa shared world without fortifying what you saw? That’s what this record is about. That wasthe question I was asking myself and that’s the journey I wanted to take people on.

I am always writing. I write a lot of fiction and a lot of poetry. The written word is really mymedium. Music feels like a good vessel for that; like a container for my words. You caninject words with so much meaning and feeling by marrying them to music. When I’mworking through my feelings, it’s always through writing. Even if it is not connected tomusic

I can definitely try… So, what do you think?