Sydney-based indie pop artist Lola Scott released her second EP, Breakfast For Dinner, on Friday, 6th October. The new release covers a spectrum of emotions, including nostalgia (‘it’s not how it used to be’) self-doubt (‘Can’t Be Enough’) ambivalence (‘We Don’t Make Sense’) and inner conflict (‘DELETE MY HISTORY’).
Lola Scott will launch the EP with headline shows in Sydney and Wollongong this month, as well as an appearance at Bathurst’s Vanfest in early December. Here, Scott shares details of the experiences that inspired Breakfast For Dinner.
Lola Scott: Breakfast For Dinner
1. would she understand how i’ve aged
Lola Scott: Throughout the interludes, we’ve sampled parts of the instrumentation from the rest of the EP to use as recurring melodic motifs. We have also sampled some of my favourite lyrics. I started out in music as a classical guitarist so I wanted to sprinkle my classical nylon guitar throughout the EP. It’s the instrument that has been with me through everything and the sound of nylon guitar will always have a sense of nostalgia to me.
2. it’s not how it used to be
Lola: I wrote this song when I was feeling nostalgic driving past the house we’d been kicked out of in ‘The Eviction Song’. Moving out of that party house forced us all to grow up suddenly and stop avoiding adulthood. It was also when the pandemic first hit, so it felt like a lifetime ago when I was driving past looking at the house with so many memories from when I was a different person.
It hit me that as much as we tried to recreate those times, it would never be the same as it once was and my relationships and friendships grew apart in different ways and weren’t like they used to be.
3. We Don’t Make Sense
Lola: I wrote ‘We Don’t Make Sense’ at the start of my last relationship. I was trying to navigate having a relationship while keeping independent lives. My impulsivity always makes me want to go all in, all at once instead of taking things slow, but I wanted to make sure that I didn’t fall into old patterns of becoming codependent in relationships.
I kept looking for flaws and reasons we wouldn’t make sense together. I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to give it a shot. But a couple months later, I came back to this song and added the section that says, “Why don’t we try turn this into something?” I’m glad I let myself follow my feelings and I learnt a lot from the relationship we had.
I learnt to love sharing silence instead of seeing it as awkward silence. I’ve always admired people who don’t need to fill every silence. Further into the EP – on the track ‘Can’t Be Enough’ – I belt, “Can we sit in silence?” I learnt how to keep parts of my own life seperate and in doing so, keep my independence. I was very conscious of not wanting to ever lose myself in someone else’s life again.
Lola Scott – ‘We Don’t Make Sense’
4. this interlude makes no sense
Lola: This interlude track was made from a voice memo of Oscar [Sharah] and I writing in the studio. We found it in our graveyard of unfinished and unreleased songs and decided we wanted to incorporate it into the EP. It’s about only valuing one person’s opinion because they understand everything you have been through. I find this lyric calming: “I don’t need everybody to like me as long as you do.”
5. DELETE MY HISTORY (ctrl+alt+delete)
Lola: I wrote this EP when I was going through the different stages of falling in love. I doubted myself and my worth and whether I deserved to be loved by this guy that was ready to go all in with me. When we were falling in love, I didn’t value myself very highly and didn’t understand why he did.
I’d had a string of bad relationships that tore down pieces of my self esteem and I was still rebuilding. Looking back, I probably wasn’t ready to be in a relationship because I still had a lot of personal growth to get back to liking myself let alone loving myself.
Anyways, it was my first healthy, mature relationship and I still love this guy a lot but we recently made a mutual decision to part ways so we could work on ourselves more. The time apart let us find the better versions of ourselves and focus on finding confidence in independence again.
6. feeling feelings
Lola: Catching feelings can feel out of your control. I just had to choose whether to lean into those feelings or run away. I decided to let myself get consumed. I wasn’t used to being treated as well as this so I didn’t trust it. I was late to come around and let myself lean into the feelings, thus the lyric, “She knows she’s late.”
7. – – – – demo
Lola: This feels like a meditative part of the EP where we bring back the nylon guitar motif. I get to explore my love for harmony as I introduce more chord changes to help move us from ‘feeling feelings’ to ‘Can’t Be Enough’.
Lola Scott – ‘DELETE MY HISTORY’
8. Can’t Be Enough
Lola: I wrote ‘Can’t Be Enough’ about the fear that I wouldn’t be enough for my partner at the time. I have a fear that people will fall out of love with me once they get to know me better and the honeymoon period is over. I compare how other people can trust quickly and how it’s my instinct is to shut people out to try to protect myself.
9. Brinner
Lola Scott: This song is about how my ex partner’s schedule was opposite to mine: “You sleep all day, I sleep all night”. It’s also about how we seemed like an odd match for each other, but we both didn’t care if anyone told us we wouldn’t work.
I wrote it at the start of our relationship when we thought we’d find ways to make it work no matter what. The last line of the song is “Falling out of sync, but for you I’d keep losing all my sleep.”
The opposing schedules eventually lead to the demise of our relationship, but I like listening back to this track to hear my optimism. Lots of sleepless nights eventually catch up to you.
Further Reading
Hilltop Hoods, Tash Sultana, Tones And I Lead Vanfest 2022 Lineup
Track By Track: Allday Releases Surprise Mixtape ‘Excuse Me’
Track By Track: BIRDEE王煒 Breaks Down Her Debut EP ‘Can’t Be Loved’
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