There’s a quote in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that reads “curiouser and curiouser” after Alice drinks from a mysterious bottle. It feels fitting for Erin LeCount, whose curiosity seems to touch almost everything she does. Creating music has always been a way of giving shape to whatever she’s feeling. Since she was a kid, reading books like Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and weaving her own stories together has helped her escape, while also giving her a place to experiment and make sense of the world around her.
As a self-taught producer, her process has been intimate and internal — a space where she’s had to learn not only how to shape the sounds around her, but how to be more honest with herself in the process. Recently, that process has meant letting go of appearing cool or clever and not hiding her vulnerability. “There’s a David Bowie interview where he talks about how you should always feel like you can’t quite touch the bottom of the pool,” she reflects. “That’s where you want to be. If you’re too comfortable, you probably haven’t been honest with yourself.”
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Her work and visuals are all-encompassing — swirling, moody synths are juxtaposed with dreamy imagery, while the songs move between intimate confessionals and expansive, cinematic moments. It’s a world that feels both carefully constructed and deeply instinctive, reflecting the same tension at the heart of her music: the desire to shape every detail while still leaving room for something unexpected to emerge.
Following her curiosity is at the heart of the work. This year’s Pareidolia EP is named after the human tendency to see or hear familiar shapes, faces, or patterns in random objects or background noise. “The Cinema” took two years to come together and explores a recurring pattern LeCount struggles with: impostor syndrome, comparison, and the anxieties that accompany making art. No longer at war with herself, LeCount is learning to trust her instincts and embrace the uncertainty that comes with making art.
When you think back over the last few years, how would you describe your growth as a songwriter and as a producer?
I got into production and writing as a place to put all the emotions I was feeling, and I’m lucky that hasn’t changed at all over the last few years. It’s still just as playful, experimental, and deeply personal to me as it was when I started. The growth has been in saying what I really mean, being less afraid of that, and taking risks in production and in what I share and what I admit to in the music.
At the beginning, I was very cautious about maintaining a level of coolness in the production choices I make and coolness in toning lyrics down and trying to engineer what kind of artist I should be — a level that I’ve since figured out doesn’t serve the craft whatsoever and is pointless. I think, in many ways, we don’t choose what we make. We’re a channel for something. I don’t think we have as much power over what we make as we think we do. I’ve just come to be more accepting of whatever comes out of me.
Some songwriters dress up lyrics to avoid admitting anything that would leave them vulnerable. Do you feel like you used to do that in your songwriting, whether through metaphors or using more complicated language?
I was consumed by this idea of what was cool and what was clever, and that would dictate choices that I made with the music. I don’t think you should be trying to convince yourself or anyone else that you are clever and cool whilst you’re writing a song. I think that makes for bad choices, and it makes for dishonest choices. I know all of the music I connect to most did not come out of trying to be clever or cool. You get a little bit braver in what you’re writing, and then some life-altering event will happen to you, and suddenly it’s uncontrollable, and you have no choice but to write entirely honestly and brutally.
You were a big reader growing up. Could you tell me about the stories that you found in books, or even films and other mediums, that you gravitated toward that inspired you to become a storyteller yourself?
I remember reading [English children’s writer] Enid Blyton a lot when I was younger. It was The Magic Faraway Tree. I remember reading Malory Towers, too. I loved reading all kinds of things, but I definitely veered toward escapist fantasy stories. That was very much the world I was in. I wanted to be an author when I was younger — I wrote a lot of stories, and everything was very, very fantastical and in its own little world.
As creatives, I always think we’re trying to reconnect with that childlike sense of wonder. How often do you look back to that version of yourself?
I actually think everything in my career comes back to what I felt or what I wanted to do as a child now that, as a 23-year-old, I have autonomy to do. From down to the way I dress, the way I perform — all of it is just an amalgamation of things I loved as a child, which were reading, storytelling, coding. It was like my entire artist project is the summary of my 8-year-old self’s mind. I feel really lucky to be able to actualize that.
I’ve never been more sensitive or emotional than in my late childhood and early teens. There’s a simplicity when I read old songs and old emails that I wrote when I was younger — an earnest honesty and bluntness that I’m really trying to put into songwriting without trying to be clever or impressive or cool.
How has your relationship with these songs changed, specifically when you are performing them live and seeing people sing your lyrics back to you?
It changes so much. It’s been a really freeing thing for me because usually I’ll make a song that comes from a very honest place, and just before it’s out, I realize the gravity or the heaviness of it. I feel self-conscious that other people are going to hear it. I’ve learned it’s a lived experience, and you know exactly when and where you felt that. Putting songs out like “Alice,” and getting to see other people apply their life experiences is so special.
When I go and perform it onstage, I feel slightly lighter because it’s not like I’m reliving my experience and retelling that. I am sharing a song that everyone in that room has experienced differently, and it lessens the pressure or heaviness on me. If I were going onstage and thinking about myself and about who I wrote that song about and when I felt those things, I think that would be really emotionally difficult. I’m so grateful to be able to see people experiencing it in real time and reliving their emotions because I can empathize, but it doesn’t exhaust me.
“The Cinema” took about two years to come to fruition, and the lyric “I turn on the radio, and I grieve when I hear it/The song I wish I’d written, but I could have, but I didn’t” captures such a universal feeling. How have you worked through those feelings of comparison and perfectionism?
We will always have to be doing work to not compare. Maybe there are people who don’t, but I think for women and women who make music, the way the scene is set up is to pit us against each other. It’s the same whether you are in music or not in music, in every profession, in every age, every stage of life — we are constantly comparing ourselves, and we are taught to and conditioned to.
If anything, actually knowing that is what people want from us, and what people benefit from or take satisfaction in, is competing. To see us compete makes me not want to compete. I am a competitive person, I am a perfectionist, and I’ve learned that everyone that I would instinctively compare myself to is probably someone that I have so much in common with. There’s probably something about them that I really admire that I wish I was doing. I’ve learned to take that approach of community or collaborating and reaching out rather than getting in my head and competing and theorizing, and it just makes people not very human. Collaboration, community, and connection over competition wherever possible.
You dropped the in-session video for the song with director Becky Garner, who worked with Justin Bieber on his Coachella set. In the video, there’s this juxtaposition of you literally confronting yourself on the screen and singing, “It goes on, it goes on.” What was that experience like?
It was so important to both of us to have that huge screen and to have that moment of confrontation with myself. Most of the video is me completely in my world, and it’s playing on the synths and rushing between machines and microphones, which is literally what I look like at home when I’m making music.
I’m surrounded by cameras watching me do the most intensely personal thing that I do, and interrogating it, and being confronted with this awareness that I’m being watched. I think it tapped into a version of that song that’s about so much more than creative insecurity or fears, but on a human level — just admitting something to yourself and way more personal insecurities of my own that come out in the music.
As a perfectionist, how do you know when it’s time to let the work exist on its own?
I have to figure that out every time I make a song because, as I said, I write really honestly. When I’m the one producing that as well, there are personal feelings and insecurities that come into the song. I will write an intensely personal verse, and then I’ll drown my voice out in vocoder so that you can’t hear a word I’m saying. I’ll crank the reverb up so it just sounds like a mess, and I’ll defend it, and I’ll say that’s a production choice.
Because I’ve been honest, I somehow want to take it back. I’m trying to claw it back with production and by dressing it up as something else. It’s like therapy — most of making a song is writing and producing it out, and then reducing it straight back to how it was at the beginning. As much as I want to be objective about what I make, I am hung up on fears about what I’m saying. I’m hung up on insecurities that I might have about my own voice and how I sound. It’s such a constant, trying to second-guess your own mind and what’s coming from the heart versus the head. I know when something’s done when I feel slightly scared by it — when it just makes me feel indescribable discomfort.
You’ve been hosting free all-day songwriting and production masterclasses. Why is it important for you to do that for budding producers?
So many people I meet, predominantly young women, will come up to me and say, “I’m making songs, beats, backing tracks, but I do it for free on GarageBand or my phone — how do you get into production?” They don’t consider themselves producers, and I relate to that so much. I relate to this impostor syndrome that still comes up for me every time I walk into a studio, feeling like I’m about to be quizzed on why I’m there.
There’s so much talk about how there’s not enough female producers and not enough discussion about the structure surrounding them in the industry that doesn’t ever allow them to be in the room where it happens. So many labels and managers and everyone has spoken to me and said, sometimes patronizingly, how great and how rare it is. Every time I just want to say, “It’s not rare.” You just aren’t telling your artists, “You have to go in the room with this girl. She’s not got much experience, but I think you should meet her.” If we can just reassure and reaffirm to people whilst they’re in those early potential stages that what they’re doing is a skill, I hope it saves them time and self-doubt.
When you release a body of work, does it feel like a chapter ending or a chapter beginning, or a little bit of both?
It’s like when a relationship comes to an end — I feel like I grieve something in the weeks before it comes out. I’m always quite emotional or stressed, and I go through a period before it comes out where I grieve that it’s done. I obsess over all the details that I wish I changed, and now it’s too late, and I get super in my head.
Then it’s out, and there is this complete relief and release. It feels like the songs don’t belong to me in that way we talked about, like with “Alice.” I’ve lived my experiences, I’ve documented them, and now people will hear them through their own lenses. It has nothing to do with me anymore. It’s a funny cycle, and I go through it every single time.
It must be freeing to let these songs go and to think, “These existed in my universe, and now they’re going to soundtrack all of yours.”
It’s beautiful. You always fear that somehow no one in the world is going to like it, and you’re the only person who thinks these are any good. I’ve done my part, and I believe that if I really love something and connect to something, that will be of value to someone else.
