Lorely Rodriguez appears onscreen for our Zoom call from Los Angeles. She beams in from her home, which she claims is a mess. The singer, songwriter, and producer, who releases music as Empress Of, attended the Billboard Women in Music Awards the night before and hasn’t had a chance to tidy. “It looks like a hurricane came through here. I had hair and makeup and ring lights,” she explains. Rodriguez is bemused that showing up camera-ready on red carpets is part of her job now, but if performing the role of a star is in her job description these days, it may be because she is one.
Over the past decade, Rodriguez’s emotionally and musically intricate electronic music brought her a sizable underground following. As she’s passed career milestones, selling out dates in Paris and London, touring with Carly Rae Jepsen, that following has become much less underground.
On her fourth album For Your Consideration, Rodriguez approaches this moment with finely honed humor, starting with the album art. On the front cover, she rides a shooting star that seems to have escaped from a marquee while the lights of her native Los Angeles shine below. On the back, she’s coated in gold as she crawls across a plush carpet, looking exactly like an Oscar trophy. Both images are anarchic, erotic, and hyperreal. The visuals pair well with the feral, mischievous energy that pervades the record.
Call this her auteur era. With For Your Consideration, Rodriguez stepped fully into the role of executive producer, working with an array of songwriters and producers to create a pop-leaning album driven by protean dance beats. Though she wrote and produced 2020’s I’m Your Empress Of on her own, she started working with other producers and songwriters on 2018’s Us, where her collaborators included Devonté Hynes.
Collaboration has become a part of her creative process but, truth is, she’s more independent than ever. Having left XL Recordings, her new album will be the first released on her own label Major Arcana. She told Rolling Stone why it’s some of her best music.
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The title track to For Your Consideration is about a breakup. Could you tell me about writing it?
That song was the catalyst for the album. I’ve been telling this story about the song, about falling in love with a director and getting love bombed, and then them telling me they’re emotionally unavailable. The next day, they announced their FYC for the Oscars and I saw it all over the internet. I went into the studio and I told this story to my songwriter and my collaborators and we played into it. You wouldn’t have the album if I didn’t write this song. And I wouldn’t have written the song if this guy hadn’t told me what he told me.
How did that song become a catalyst for the rest of the album?
Thematically, it’s this idea of wanting to be wanted. This record has a lot of push and pull, a lot of “I want you to want me, and I want you to be out of the door tomorrow morning.” You know, quick thrills. I wrote this record while I was single. So, it’s very much like all these people, all these stories, all these moments, none of them are here now, but I’m kind of making myself the main character. I’m the star of the show. Maybe I did it to feel good about myself.
Was sexuality something you wanted to explore with this album?
I was not in the mood to write a break-up album. I’m Your Empress Of was a break-up album. Even the day that record came out, I was crying. I was happy at the same time, but it felt so emotional. And I just wasn’t in the mood. Every time I came into the studio, I was like, “I want to feel hot. I want to feel sexy.” I want to be on stage feeling the way I feel right now, fun and having a good time. I just remember telling songwriters, “How do we make it hot? How do we make it sexy? How do we make it flirty?” If we ever leaned into break-up territory, I’d be like, “No! No! No! No!”
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You toy a little with the idea of Hollywood on For Your Consideration. Do you feel you have a different view of Hollywood as someone who is from Los Angeles?
I saw For Your Consideration billboards my whole life. My mom was a house cleaner and nanny and we’d go into these big houses. It was always so distant from me, even as an adult. My friends were hanging out at Sunset Tower and Chateau Marmont and I’d never been there. I’d never been on that side. I’d never really been to West Hollywood in my growing up. So, I thought it was funny, now that I’m at this stage of my career, I was like, “Wouldn’t it be so funny if I had a billboard that said For Your Consideration: For Your Consideration.” It makes me giggle.
It also has that energy of being noteworthy and being prize-worthy. Like, I painted myself gold. The back cover of my record is me painted like a statue, like the Oscar or a Grammy. In a way, I’m choosing myself already. As in, I know this record is good.
The album has some pop tendencies. Were you deliberately tapping into your inner pop star?
The thing about pop music is, however you define it, it is actually really hard to write a pop song, to make something so poignant and concise and get the lyrics right. This record is some of the best songwriting I’ve ever done and I think part of that was having amazing songwriters, who write a lot of pop music, in the room.
Some of the first sessions I had for this album were with Nate Campany and I learned so much about songwriting. It was a challenge for me to not drown things in metaphor. I really love that, because I’m ten years in and I’m still learning things about myself as an artist.
When I wrote “What’s Love,” I was so embarrassed afterwards at the vulnerability that I had. I left the studio and said, “I can’t put this song out. It’s the worst song I’ve ever written.” Then after a day, I listened to it and I was like, “This is one of the best songs I’ve ever written.” But I would have never written that song by myself.
After producing yourself for a long time, has it been hard to relinquish some control?
It’s on the relationship with the other people in the room. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Everyone on this record gave me room to really co-create. I have been in rooms where I don’t feel that, and those songs don’t sound like my songs.
I’m really happy that everything on this record sounds cohesive, even though Nick León makes futuristic reggaeton and I have Kyle Shearer, who produced Carly Rae Jepsen and Caroline Polachek. But they’re all people that I’m an admirer of.
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Were there particular pop references you had in mind for songs like “Kiss Me?”
You wouldn’t even hear it in the songs, but I was listening to Dream. This was Puff Daddy’s first band that he made, early 2000s pop. I was listening to Tupac, “Changes.” My head was in nostalgia when I wrote “Kiss Me.”
How would you define pop stardom?
I think it’s having a song that reaches a universal state. To me, if someone is playing my song at a wedding, then I’m a pop star. I want that, for sure. I want to make a song that gets played at birthdays, weddings, funerals. That means that I made a song that is universally understood to some degree.