When you’re hot: LA soul star Liv.e set to smoulder at RISING

By Michael Dwyer

Credit:Barrington Darius

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Music is all heady extremes for Liv.e, the 24-year-old Los Angeles soul star who is being touted as one of the must-see performers of this year’s RISING festival. The video clip for Wild Animals, from this year’s album Girl In The Half Pearl, is high glamour on the brink of danger.

“They always wanna bite when they see me,” she smoulders over sultry cocktail bar piano, smoking in her studded leather catsuit as a massive Doberman salivates at her high heels. It’s a video worthy of Grace Jones at her haughtiest.

HowTheyLikeMe! offers a more challenging vision. Shot in unforgiving close-up, we find her bleeding from her close-cropped head in the cold glare of a bathroom mirror. She rolls her eyes and cackles, apparently high on post-brawl adrenalin as the harsh electro heartbeat races. “Damn, I guess I’m really living the life,” she sings.

“That’s the same person; there’s different sides of the coin,” says Hailee Olivia Williams via Zoom from her home in LA. Today she looks like another woman again, a Texan girl-next-door in a sweatshirt under soft tresses and baseball cap.

“Like, OK, we in there, we finally realise we’re hot, that’s great, a great time,” she says. “And then you know, once you realise you hot, everybody either really likes you or everybody really hates you.” She laughs at the absurdity of it all. Two albums down. A lifetime to go on the rollercoaster of love and fame.

Liv.e (pronounced “Liv”) got hot fast. Three years ago, after just a couple of indie EPs made in Dallas and New York, she was already one of the neo-soul artists “pushing the sound forward” according to Okayplayer, the r’n’b connoisseur’s webzine established by legendary musician and producer Questlove and author Angela R. Nissel.

Hayley Percy, RISING’s head of music, was spellbound by Liv.e’s YouTube concert in early 2021, with her smooth, harmony-heavy band including her brother TaRon Lockett on drums. “I thought she and her band sounded and looked super cool and buzzy,” Percy says. “When Wild Animals came out as a single in 2022 I became proper obsessed. It’s such a mad song. The entire album has incredible production.”

Liv.e’s Forum show with Nigerian-English Afrobeat artist Obongjayar “is going to be a festival highlight,” Percy says. “Both are exciting contemporary artists with massive buzz around their first time to Australia … It’s a double bill not happening anywhere else on this tour and a pairing that will most definitely leave an impression.”

Inevitably, Liv.e’s barrier-pushing sound had been a long time brewing. She “stopped singing in church choir, like, hella early,” she says like a born rebel, though she credits those pew-rocking rhythms at her mother’s side on Sunday mornings with her soul awakening.

Her father is a jazz pianist and her brother was playing drums for Snoop Dogg, Snarky Puppy and Prince while his sister was still at Booker T. Washington High School for Performing Arts. But “family shit” almost deterred her from a life in music.

“People that are good at instruments like to practice. I don’t. I’m kinda lazy sometimes,” says Liv.e.Credit:Devin Williams

“My dad plays keys and my brother plays drums,” she says. “I didn’t want to be like, in the middle. Especially being in this age right now, I can tell as a kid, I was probably so annoyed by people stating the obvious. ‘Oh, so if you do music then y’all do music…’ I just did not want to hear none of that shit.”

She did more than dabble, though, before leaving home, falling in with Dallas hip-hop, jazz and soul collective Dolfin Records, working with left field rappers such as Pink Siifu and Lord Byron before heading north to pursue “the total opposite”: studying object design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Away from familial expectations, and disenchanted by college, her muse lured her back into the studio on a visit to New York in 2018. “I realised overall, it was really just because I was afraid to be good at it,” she says now. “I tried to play a lot of instruments … and I think people that are good at instruments like to practice. I don’t. I’m kinda lazy sometimes.”

The staggered beats and woozy textures of her Hoopdreams EP of 2018 caught the ear of Chicago rapper Earl Sweatshirt. He invited her on tour, which helped to stoke critical acclaim and frequent comparisons to neo-soul icons Erykah Badu and Jill Scott. Comparisons which, for the record, make Liv.e’s rebel spirit bristle.

To that end, perhaps, her second album, Girl In The Half Pearl, seems bent on forging a unique path through the lapping rhythms, disorienting structures and generally trippy vibes of the new soul movement. Its 40 minutes of white-knuckle experimentation is a psychedelic adventure in the true sense. “Oh no,” she pants repeatedly as the first track descends from head spins to rhythmic chaos.

“You could run me over, flat as hell and I’d still, like, bounce back right after.”Credit:Robb Klassen

“It’s like falling down the LSD hole,” she says. “Like, I’m trying to make you feel like I’m starting off on drugs that I’ve probably never done before. I’m scared. And this is also exciting. Like, ‘All right, cool. I don’t think I have anything to worry about’.” She giggles. “But it is scary. I feel like the intention is just to take you through a trip, honestly.

“After a while, I kind of realised that the drug I technically was on was like, the drug of infatuation, or the drug of love; being in love. I don’t know if that’s what I would classify it as. Because love is not really supposed to make you feel like that …

“But yeah, that shit is pretty much the same shit. Like, having a love addiction is a real addiction … It’s hard to beat unless that’s really your intention, to be like, ‘All right, I’m done with this’. But even then, you still have withdrawals, you still, like, have moments where you think about getting high again … It’s kind of ridiculous,” she says, laughing.

As for the thematic extremes of glamour and violence encapsulated by the aforementioned videos, “I definitely felt beat up by a couple of experiences that have happened over the past four years,” she says.

“But in a funny way, it’s cool. That was a great experience. Thank you. I’m glad that I got through that. I’m healthy. I’m OK. I’m healing my mind. I feel like I’m a Looney Tunes character,” she says, laughing again. “Like, you could run me over, flat as hell and I’d still, like, bounce back right after.

“I feel blessed more than anything. I’m just like, ‘This is great. I can cater to other people now via my music and not feel like I’m being drained’. That’s as of right now, because I’m about to go out and do, like, 20 shows. I don’t know. We’ll see then.”

Liv.e performs at the Forum on June 15 for RISING; rising.melbourne.

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