Alicia Lena Lets It All Out
Alicia Lena is a Pop/R&B singer-songwriter who was born in San Diego, California in 1988, she was born into a troubled family but was adopted when she was born an arrangement was made between her birth parents and her future adoptive parents. She picked up a lot of musical influences from her adoptive parents, “They’d listen to different music like my father would listen to The Stones, Dylan, Marvin Gaye, The Beatles and my mom would listen to Motown and Soul music, the likes of Sam Cooke, James Brown and The Miracles. It was a good mix and little did I know that they would all heavily influence my musical style, I think the mix of Rock, Folk, Pop, R&B and Soul are all somewhere on my debut album.”
She’s still a relatively unknown worldwide, but in the US and UK she’s gaining a fan base and is becoming well known but South America unexpectedly is where she’s had the most success with her debut single New York Love Affair, it charted at No 26 in South America, “I’ve never actually been in South America before so it was a bit of a surprise, I’d love to tour in as many places as possible in the future but at the moment that would be a bit difficult because I’m just planning on being an opener for now, But I really want to do a headlining tour in the next couple of years.”
She’s generally a positive person who has a great outlook on life but she hasn’t got her head in the clouds, “I’m not completely naïve to think that there’s nothing bad happening in the world, there’s a lot of bad things happening in the world but I’m now in a position where I can do my bit to try and help people, and help make a difference.” she seems genuinely positive about the effect music can have for other people, “I’m not gonna say my job’s difficult, it’s the greatest job in the world, I’m not gonna complain about the media attention because that’s part of my job but I’m always aware that there are people all over the world who don’t have the life they dreamed of, and with fame comes a lot of responsibility and I’m in a position to make a difference whether it’s with my music or financially, I would love to be able to say when I get old that I actually made a difference to people’s lives and that’s my main goal in life.”
With Alicia it doesn’t seem to be about chart success, “If I have a number one record then that’s great obviously but it’s not really that important, you don’t need to have number one hits to make a difference.”
Her debut album is set to be released on May 10th and she’s not feeling the pressure at all, “It’s not like I don’t want it to be successful but I don’t want to get carried away, if it does well then it does well if not then I’ll try and figure out what went wrong and try to make the next record better.”
She’s also gonna be doing her first televised performances at the IMA’s “It’s a massive pressure for me because the IMAs are the biggest award show there is and I’m gonna be performing in a room full of people who have been doing this a lot longer than me, I feel like I’m gonna be like a nobody on stage and that feelings just gonna get worse as the event gets close.”
She’s been single for a while now but she has become close friends with Dan Richards of The Walls “I’m surprised we even hit it off, we’re completely different people but he’s incredible fun and he’s probably the most charming guy I’ve ever met.” I ask her if they’re romantically involved. “No, that’s the simple answer, we hang out together and we’ve performed together and we have lots of fun in each other company, I’m not blind he’s an attractive guy and maybe when we get to know each other better then maybe we’d start dating but at the moment we’re just good friends having fun.” I then ask her if anything has happened between them, “We’ve kissed before, we spent a night out at a club and we both had a little bit to drink, I wasn’t drunk but we were dancing, and we shared a kiss but that’s the most that’s happened.” She’s became friends with three big names in music, Tisha Jackson, Stephanie Fierce and Ryan Ross Hernandez, “They’re all great, I’ve worked with them all in the studio and I’ve spent some time with them away from work, with Stephanie we just had lunch together after finishing our song together, with Ryan I went to LA and we spent almost a day together in the studio and then later I joined him onstage at a small gig and with Tisha we became pretty close friends, we live quite close to each other and we’ve spent time together at a few party’s but man she can get wild when she’s had a couple of drinks, they’re all great fun though.”
She had written all of the songs which feature on her debut album and she had a lot of songs to choose from, “I write a lot of songs while I’m in my apartment and that’s mainly because when I look out of my window I’m inspired, New York City is definitely the most inspiring city in the world, I just love to write new songs and I had a lot of songs stored up from the past couple of years, I don’t write typical girl songs about heartbreak, I’m much tougher than that, I don’t fall in love enough to get my heartbroken, I’ve had difficult things happen in my life and I put that in my music and just deal with it, I’m not gonna cry over a guy.”
When she was growing up in San Diego she was a perfect child “I was a really talented child, I learned to play piano at the age of eight and I was really good at it, I was top of my classes in school but when I was about 13 things started to change, before that age I’d spend my evenings in my room, playing the piano or doing my homework and I wasn’t happy, people my age we’re having fun with there friends, so I started to change things a bit, I started staying out longer than I was meant to and at the age of 15 I started going to party’s almost every night, my parents just couldn’t stop me, I lost my virginity at 15 and that was weird, I had sex for the first time and then pretty much every weekend I continued having sex with random strangers, I’m not proud of it but it happened and at first I thought I should just keep it quiet but I decided that it’s best for me to just tell things the way they are.” I ask her how her first time was looking back, “It was pretty weird, obviously there was a lot of alcohol flowing, and I think there was about 6 people in the room watching, it didn’t last awfully long to say the least, but I’m not gonna say I didn’t enjoy it, I was wild back then and I’m certainly not like that now.”
She finally seems comfortable talking about her past, when she first started doing interviews she didn’t like to talk about her past “I’m more used to it now and I just thought people are gonna find out about things sooner rather than later, so I’m just gonna tell it how it is.”
She seems more confident now than she’s ever been and she was more than happy to answer any questions we asked her.
