Name |
Lola |
Height |
5' 6" |
Naionality |
American |
Date of Birth |
24 July 1969, |
Place of Birth |
The Bronx, New York, USA |
Famous for |
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Preceded by her sizzling and suggestive debut single, “No Strings” – which is already tearing up radio at major playlists around the country - Lola’s SoBe/Warner Bros. debut Take It Like I Give It, blasts through conventional genres by reflecting this 24-year-old singer/songwriter’s boundless upbringing across three continents and her refusal to conform to any conventional musical plots. “It’s more about the content of a song than a particular style,” she says of her musical modus operandi. “I never think before I start writing a song if it will be rock, R&B, or whatever, it just comes out of me the way it comes out.”
Born and raised by hippie parents in Paris’ gritty and multicultural Belleville district via layovers in Brazil, Los Angeles, and now Brooklyn, what comes out could be called any number of things -- soul-fueled rock, lounge-fed R&B, jazz-soaked pop, and blues-sopped hip-hop – but the one adjective that truly does the music justice is attention-grabbing.
Reared on a diverse musical tapestry (tenacious hip-hop, hardscrabble Delta blues, peace-loving ‘60s rock and soul) and counting Prince, Aretha Franklin, Joni Mitchell, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Michel Jackson among her mentors, Lola felt the fever from the age of two. “One of my first memories was hearing Off the Wall for the first time,” she says. “I remember almost going into convulsions – it was my first musical slap in the face.”
Backed by Midas-touch knob turners like House of Tre, (Alicia Keys), Toby Gad (Enrique Iglesias), and Fanatik (Beyonce, Michael Jackson, Will Smith, Notorious B.I.G.), Take It Like I Give It is a polished, candle-lit abandonment of caution that Lola describes as a record to enjoy to “your lover’s saliva.” No disagreements here. Carved from a similar mold as Alicia Keys and Joss Stone, it is an intensely personal coming-of-age romp set to a soundtrack of rip-roaring soul not out of place on the kind of sweltering nights where sweat and whiskey blend into one whopper of a love cocktail.
“No Strings,” an overtly honest fantasy (though not an endorsement of) casual relations, sets the sexy if not somewhat startling tone with lines like, “I don’t even know you / And I don’t care / ‘Cause you’ve got what I want and I want all you’ve got / Come on baby let’s do it right here” all sung up in a towering hymn not entirely out of place between a sermon and a cathouse call to order. You’ll find yourself genuflecting to Lola’s liberating free spirit before the last soaring high D note.
“It’s so liberating to acknowledge that these feelings happen,” she says of the song’s cavalier attitude toward sex – feelings usually reserved for the male persuasion. “It’s not a call to behave promiscuously. It’s just a particular feeling I’m sure everybody has at some point. I ended up feeling like I was doing a public service and providing catharsis to everybody, especially women. We are culturally robbed of desires and lust and it felt really good to reclaim that.”