Please introduce yourself. What do you do? Why? What do you want people to know about you?
Hey you, yes you, LA Note, my name is Lucille Opazo, but I go by Lucy. My story with music really begins as a small girl sitting on stage criss-cross applesauce watching my dad rhythmically drum Latin-Folk sounds into his Congas. I grew up the daughter of a Latin immigrant that came to the United States to pursue a life of music. Sound was as present as the low hum of vibrations coming from an amp through the garage door when my dad would have a jam session in his DIY music room, to writing shitty Christmas songs on the piano as a kid and seeing where my very tiny, very one-inch fingers could take me musically.
My dad bought me my first guitar in my teenage years and that is where I really started to explore song-writing. All of my emotions, and you know at that age they are raging, would find their way into a melody or scribbled songs on the back of a journal page. Music was very personal to me, as it is to most people, that I rarely even shared this passion with friends or family. It seemed counterintuitive, my father left his family and home to pursue his dream of music, yet my dream felt so out of reach not realizing I had already arrived at the best place to pursue it, but things changed when I unexpectedly lost my father to Liver Cancer. I was just 17, and my relationship to music changed in many ways after that. It was a point of pain and grief for a long time but slowly became a place of healing and connection to spirit and the divine. I started to share more of my original music online, and saw the way that people connected to it.
This led me to want to share more, and continue to write and finish songs. I find that the medium in which I connect with an audience more is through an online presence. I love the aspects of music like recording, writing, and the imagery of recording a video. I am still growing a relationship with live performance, but the cool thing about the world we live in today is that most things can be streamed from anywhere in the world and you feel like you are there! I just want to connect with people through spirit and sound and grow a friendship with an audience where it feels like we are on this journey together. I feel incredibly lucky to have this creative outlet where emotions are tangible and we can all feel seen in something.
What qualities make you different and unique from everyone else in the industry?
A quality that I feel makes me unique in the industry is my relationship to live performance. To be frank, I just don’t like it. I don’t find that it’s the way I feel most connected to my music or to the people enjoying my music. You may think that’s unusual, but I am sure there are so many artists out there that feel similarly. It would be nice to hear or see more artists speak openly about their fear or anxieties around being a performer, and to see an artist pursue a career that doesn’t consist of that.
A career that may consist of only recording music and doing online releases or music video work, but that still has a flourishing career. Touring and live performance used to be the major way people spread their music, but with technology today, it’s amazing how many people you can reach from the inside of your home or bedroom.
Describe THAT moment when you realized you’re doing what you were born to do.
The moment I realized music was what I was born to do was when I was tracking vocals with my amazing Producer, Vanessa Silberman, in her home studio. We had been working for a couple months on this track titled ‘Isolation Station,’ and it came time to record the singing parts. I remember us running through it a few times just to work out the kinks in my voice.
She was holding space for me to find my footing, as being in a recording studio setting and working on turning a demo song into something larger was new territory for me. I came up to the bridge of the piece where I really had to push my voice, and I was shocked when I started to have an emotional response. It felt like this intense moment of presence and gratitude. I was emotional because it felt like I finally believed in my music and myself enough to admit that music is what I have to do. To share that moment with someone that encourages and believes in you too, was pretty cool. I had never worked my voice that hard before either, Vanessa described it as ‘finding the colors of your voice.’ I was exploring the limits I had previously put on my voice, but more than that, the limits I was putting on my life.
I always knew music was a passion of mine, but being in this space, with another human, creating these sounds and working on something for hours, felt like alignment. It felt like this, THIS is what I’m meant to do and share and experience. Not to mention, the way I met Vanessa, my producer, was such a chance encounter. I had been journaling about finding someone in the city to get serious with and finally work on getting music recorded, and later that month, Vanessa approached me outside of a random supermarket, just to say hi and ask me to tea. Little did we both know, the musical magic that would come from our blossoming friendship. It really felt like fate!
What’s been the biggest challenge you’ve had to go through and how did you grow through it?
Oof biggest challenge? There have been a few along my journey. But since I already briefly talked about losing my dad, I would like to share more of that story. My relationship to my dad was really polarizing, as he was a very polarizing person. He was an all or nothing type, and his emotions were very loud and very colorful. Growing up he had Hepatitis C, but eventually this turned into Cirrhosis of the Liver, as many know, substance abuse can play a huge role in the music industry and music scene, and my father did struggle with alcohol usage. He later found out that his Cirrhosis had progressed into Liver Cancer.
His battle with cancer was short and after a year or so he was hospitalized and never made it out. The grief felt as large as the ocean most days, and the life I had dreamed up of sharing our passion for music together, quickly faded into black. Through growth and healing I now cherish the parts of him that still live on through my music journey. Music was his life, and it means the world that I get to continue that extension in our lineage. I also, within the last year, decided to live an alcohol free life, not because I had a problem with it, but because I realized how much I value presence over feeling comfortable in social situations, and I’ve seen first hand what addiction can do to a person.
If you had to pick the TOP 3 people you’d want to meet that could take your career (or business) to the next level…who would those 3 people be?
Right now, I am obsessed with Lizzie Mcalpine and Orla Gartland, I love how they built their fanbase on YouTube, through sharing their song writing processes and personal stories. I am a sucker for personal stories. I’d love to just sit down and have tea with the both of them and pick their brains or read their diaries ( with consent of course) about their journey to where they are now. They are both killing it! And my dream is to one day meet Chris Martin. Coldplay has been my favorite band since middle school and such an inspiration musically. I know he loves to collaborate with other artists, and singing on a track with him would be a peak moment in life and my career.
How can I reply to Lucy privately?