Photo courtesy of Canada International Marketing
For most of us after a breakup, we eat copious amounts of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, rewatch all of Nora Ephron’s romantic comedies and sing Taylor Swift’s music into the abyss. Emerging pop-rock star Laraw, however, prefers screaming her own lyrics, blood dripping from her lips, into the lens of a camera.
Montréal based singer-songwriter Laraw (Lara Rawadi) has released six songs over the past four years, with themes ranging from heartbreak to fallen friendship to money’s impact on societal systems. Her pop, rock and indie songs resonate with her 37,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. She recently released her sixth song “Scissors,” and is set to perform at a number of venues and festivals throughout Canada in the coming months.
Laraw is the face of a new kind of pop music, one which is a culmination of different cultures, musical influences and languages, all working in conjunction to share one visceral, universal sentiment.
“My mom is from Morocco and my dad is from Lebanon,” Laraw said. “I grew up in a very immigrant part of Montréal, with a bunch of Arab kids. I loved it.”
Laraw spent her childhood speaking two Arabic dialects and French, not learning English until her later schooling years. This myriad of languages and dialects sparked her interest in the human voice. “I’ve always been fascinated with sounds,” she said.
Her childhood home was a lively one, filled with upbeat Arabic melodies and the songs of French-Canadian sensation Céline Dion. “My mom was always a big Céline Dion fan, so as a child I put up shows for my family, belting Dion. None of my parents are musicians. Nobody can really sing. It’s a bunch of loud people yelling in our house,” she said with a chuckle. “So, it was just me.”
From the outside looking in, her music does not directly reflect Dion or traditional Arabic styles. But don’t be fooled, she warned, as her music would not be what it is today without the inspiration of these soundscapes, laying the foundation for her twenty-first century, pop-rock performances.
“Arabic music is very loud and fun, with party music. There’s also a lot of romantic and sweet songs,” she said. “It doesn’t really translate in my music, but I always say the sassiness of it comes into me and my songs.”
In addition to her family’s music, Laraw discovered many of her own musical influences early on. “When I was younger, I was really into Florence + the Machine, for all her storytelling skills,” she said. “ I was also really into Paramore. It was my first love. Hayley Williams was my first crush; she molded me. As a songwriter, I love her work.”
Indeed, looking at Laraw’s latest release “Scissors,” it is easy to see the resemblance in tendencies between herself and Williams, from their lyrics about heartbreak, to their rock instrumentation and affection for the slightly gory-grunge music video. While Laraw has blood dripping from her lips thinking about her former lovers’ “scissors in her heart,” Williams is smashing records, welcoming listeners to “living in the real world.” It is easy to see how, with an air of sassiness from her formative Arabic lyrics and the stylistic charm of Williams’ Paramore, Laraw’s cross-cultural influences have accumulated to where she is today in her own artistic identity.
She is very adamant, however, that she is not the only musician for whom this is the case. She noted that her influences “don’t make my music any different than anyone else.” For her, they are simply “a fun thing that I have in my life. There’s a bunch of artists that I keep seeing growing and thriving, and I’m inspired by that.”
Just as her music does not stick to one lingual or cultural component, it does not stick to one genre either. “You know, in a movie, there’s different scenes,” she said. “In a sad scene, the music will use piano. When there’s an action scene, it’s going to be rock and indie. I feel like my music is like that, because it represents my life. So if I’m in a very bad, shitty mood, it’s always gonna sound a bit more rock and indie. This year was a weird, rough year. All of my music is going to translate more indie, rock and funk, because I’ve had to let it out.”
On May 26th, the world got to hear Laraw “letting it out” with her sixth song release, “Scissors.” This pop-rock anthem chronicles “the worst breakup of my fucking life,” she said. A music video accompanied the song’s streaming release. In it we see Laraw singing the lyrics,
“Stuck your scissors in my heart / now it’s tearing me apart / oh you cut me into pieces”
as she switches between scenes of difficult conversations with her lover, to yelling with blood dripping from her lips.
Laraw laughed at the contradiction between her persona in the music video and her everyday life. “It’s kind of interesting to look very intense and crazy in the video, but I’m very common everyday,” she said. “ I’m pretty boring. Honestly, I just walk my dog, drive around town with my friends, eat McDonalds and make music.”
The “making music” aspect of her life has recently become more interesting. As her career took off during the COVID-19 pandemic, Laraw had the strange experience of working remotely, solo, until this past year.
For “Scissors,” “I had a week of sessions that were in Toronto. It was my first time making music in real life with people,” she said. “I was just going on and on about being in love with someone and you know, latching on to nothing. So we made this song, and I was sobbing, yelling — it was just a mess. But, they fixed it, made it clean and sent it to me,” she said.
After pouring herself into this song in the studio, the next week she traveled back to Montréal “and broke up with my ex. I was like ‘Oh shit! The song came true,’” she said. “But I feel like putting the words into a song made me realize that it was a bad relationship. So this whole year has been a whole process of getting over this and getting better.”
Her music is always this personal, Laraw said. For everything she creates, she begins with a melody. “I’ll always have a nice view of the song right away,” she said. “I’ll only hear the chorus and be like, ‘Oh! This is about this guy who broke my heart this day.’ I’ll bring my journal and share with the group about that. It’s a pretty physical, fast process.”
“I feel like music is my only way of communicating in a healthy way,” she said. “I make it because it makes me feel alive. Surely there is no other explanation. Maybe it kind of sounds like a selfish way to make something, but it makes me feel good. Every song I make I’m really proud of. It’s my art, and it’s my baby, but I share that with people, and it becomes theirs.”
“Scissors” already has 200,000 views on YouTube and 50,000 streams on Spotify, with no sign of stopping. It was added to Apple Music’s “Made in Canada” Editorial Playlist, which has garnered the song further attention. Listeners seem to be drawn to Laraw’s extremely personal message of a lost love, emboldened by the vast cultural, musical and linguistic worlds her work is immersed in.
“Heartbreak is universal,” she said. “It’s always a good subject to write about, because we’ve all experienced it in different ways. This year has been fun, just sharing my heartbreak to people — which sounds sad, but it truly was amazing. For me, it was a way for me to heal, but also a way for me to help people.”
“I just hope people find comfort in “Scissors” and are like, ‘Okay, I’m not the only one who went through hell and back in the name of love,’” she said. “It’s really important to find ways to release your emotions and talk about things that make you sad in a healthy way. I feel like art is the ultimate form of feeling better. So, I hope people take that away.”