Empress Of Knows She’s a Star. Do You?

Before we get started, Empress Of needs her lip balm. She steps out of her Zoom frame to go searching for it, her shuffles echoing off-screen in her L.A. home. Our video call won’t be published online, but she clarifies, while moisturizing her lips back on-camera: “Oh my God, no, it’s for me to feel like a person. I need to give pop star.”

Empress Of, born Lorely Rodriguez, has in fact been giving us pop star for over a decade, but the rest of the world is still catching up. After dropping songs anonymously on YouTube in the early 2010s, she released her debut album, Me, in 2015 to critical praise. Her fanbase only continued to grow—like the artist herself—as she followed up with 2018’s Us, revealing another side of herself (“I was able to tell my story of L.A. on Us in being Latinx”); and then 2020’s I’m Your Empress Of. There have been singles and EPs in between all of them, but her fourth full-length album, For Your Consideration, out today, is a wake-up call. To new listeners, it says: Look at what you’ve been missing. But to the OGs: Look how far we’ve come.

While she wrote I’m Your Empress Of on the road between tour stops, she wrote For Your Consideration in a variety of places, from steamy Miami, to freezing Montreal, to her home turf in L.A, with different collaborators (like MUNA and Rina Sawayama) and songwriters. After self-producing her past albums, Empress Of worked with a variety of producers on this album (including one named Billboard, whose credits include Kylie Minogue, Britney Spears, and Ariana Grande) and served as an executive producer instead. “It’s different, but it still sounds like me very much,” she says.

The result is arguably her greatest work yet, an examination of love, sex, relationships, and herself. With a title like For Your Consideration, the famous phrase used in award campaigns, she plays with themes of Hollywood and celebrity—and how both can rise and fall as fast as a starlet’s career. And while her mother doesn’t appear on this record like she did on the last album, Empress Of still honors her Honduran roots with a bilingual track list. “Fácil” and “Sucia” express a hot and urgent desire, while “Femenine” flips gender roles and “Preciosa” is about wanting to be loved and coddled. All of it is tied together with her voice (literally—she beatboxes and uses her breath as percussion in some tracks).

Here, Empress Of chats with ELLE.com about writing the album and feeling like a rookie and a veteran at the same time.

The album artwork for Empress Of’s For Your Consideration.

What is the story of this album, to you?

“For Your Consideration” is something that I saw everywhere in L.A. on every billboard. It is such a part of the industry, and I’m from L.A. … That’s one side of it. The other side of it is I fell in love with a director, and he kind of screwed me over, classic. He basically love-bombed me and told me all this beautiful stuff and then was like, “Hey, I’m actually not emotionally available,” and I was like, “Boring!” But, like any songwriter, I wrote a song about it. And I was sort of saying to him, “You’re doing your For Your Consideration [campaign] for the Oscars, but you couldn’t consider me.” So I sent it to him the day that he announced his Oscars FYC. And he was shook.

I love that.

But anyways, he’s out of the picture now, and a lot of the inspirations for the songs on this album, those people aren’t around anymore. It’s amazing to have a moment that feels hurtful and then just taking it and empowering myself. That’s part of For Your Consideration. I took that theme of prizes, esteem, glam, Hollywood, and I teamed up with Bethany Vargas, who was the photographer, and she was like, “This is your camp Hollywood moment. You’re going to ride a shooting star over a backdrop.”

Do you feel like you challenged yourself in any new ways while you were working on this album?

Yeah, just sort of laying myself out more, but vulnerability does require confidence. I say things in this album in ways that I would’ve not said, and I think it’s because I worked with some songwriters that helped me uncover that. Like, “What’s Love,” when I wrote that song, I was like, this is too on the nose.

It’s too obvious, but it also works.

No, it’s too obvious in the best way. Those lyrics, “If a love can’t make you, break you, shape you,” it’s like a heartbreak nursery rhyme. And I would’ve found some poetic, over-metaphorized, I don’t even know if that’s a word, way to say it in the past, and the fact that I said it so in-plain-sight is very different for me. And some of the sexy songs, like in Spanish, there’s a lyric, “mi boca está abierta y no pa’ cantar,” I’m saying, “my mouth is open, but I’m not singing,” and I’m talking about oral. I would’ve never sang a lyric like that, because it would’ve been too in-your-face. There are many lyrics like that on this album that really make me giggle.

That is really cool though. It seems like that’s an example of you exerting your confidence more, saying the thing point-blank.

With every album, I get more confident, just passion, with every opportunity I get to assemble a look, understand my body more, grow into my body more, get older and give less of a fuck. Age is also an incredible confidence booster. So I don’t know, I just feel like this album is very much Lorely, Empress Of Prime.

It’s funny that you mentioned getting older and maturing, because you’ve been releasing music for over a decade; if you look back at some of the earliest releases, like in 2012 to 2015, how are you different now as an artist than you were back then?

I know. You know what’s crazy is, yes, it’s 10 years ago but there are still people discovering my music. And that to me is so inspiring because, like, a fan from Brazil will post something on Twitter, and then in the comments someone will be like, “Who’s this mother?” and then they’ll analyze stuff in the comments. They’ll be like, “Oh, I don’t know her that well either, but she’s put out four singles and I love them, blah, blah, blah.” And I don’t know, in ways I feel like a veteran and in ways I feel like a rookie.

And I love that. I also love that this record doesn’t sound like any of my records, but it also sounds like my music. There are so many examples of artists that have records like that. Toro Y Moi, he’ll have folk records and he’ll have dance records. Or, if we’re going to talk pop, Britney Spears has made so many different types of records. I have not lost the mode of self-discovery. So that’s what makes 10 years into this exciting.

That’s really cool to see, because I’m sure other artists would feel frustrated at the 10-year mark…

I’m not saying I don’t feel tired. I mean, it’s 10 years in and I’m on a shooting star. It’s like, let’s get this thing going. [Laughs]

It’s like, for everyone else’s consideration.

Yeah, I’m ready. I’m ready to be at the stage I want to be at. And in my mind, I’m there.

I want to talk about some of the songs individually too. In “For Your Consideration,” how did you come to use your breath in the very beginning?

I think the voice is the most important instrument in music. And I was listening to some artists, like Caroline Shaw. She’s like a contemporary, new music artist, and I was very inspired by her. I was very inspired by The Neptunes and Pharrell. Every session I went into for songs on this album, I was like, “I don’t care what ends up happening to this song, but can we start with my voice?” Even in “Preciosa,” a lot of those sounds are my voice, like beatboxing. And I think that helps this record sound cohesive, even though there’s all these different types of producers on the album, just having the voice be the focus, because no one else has your voice. Everyone has the same sounds on their computers, the same synthesizers, but no one has your voice. So if I beatbox a hi-hat or a snare, it’s going to sound like my voice.

You were talking about some of the sexier songs, too, and I wanted to ask you about how you explored sensuality with this record.

[While working on] this album, I was on Raya, and I was just dating different people and sort of, I don’t know, just exploring, whether those experiences were great or not. Like I said, I’m a songwriter. Anything that happens to me, I go and it ends up on a song. I mean, maybe those people aren’t in my life anymore, but those experiences, the way I felt in the moment is in those songs, it’s hot. It’s like, being in Miami, being in the humidity definitely helped have that sort of sexy energy. I’m trying to think of some lines. Like “Femenine,” I also wrote that one in Miami after going to a strip club and seeing guys throw money at [women, dancers].

And I kind of went into the studio and was like, I want to write about a guy that dances for me. I want to be dom, I want to write about a sub guy who’s like… I’m the cowboy and, I don’t know, that’s kind of how the lyrics came about for that. And obviously I felt it was sexy to use the word femenine, you know?

I do like how you’re subverting gender roles there.

Oh, yeah, for sure. I think it’s a bit all over the place because in “Femenine,” I definitely want to be a dom, but on “Preciosa,” I want to be babied. I want to be babygirl. On “Baby Boy,” there’s a lyric, “You’re not my love for life / Love for now.” And that definitely came from just trying to feel something and trying to just understand the quickness, the exchange of dating. We all go through it.

And also, I was talking to my other friends about dating and trying to be okay with someone not being the love of your life, you know? And I’m a Libra, I’m a romantic.

Womanhood is integral to the themes that you explore in your music.

It’s a growing process throughout the years, but what I noticed is femmehood transcends more than just being a woman. I was thinking about this for ages with “Woman Is a Word,” and I feel like with all the dialogue with my mother on I’m your Empress Of, that’s sort of the wanting to define yourself. I think we all experience it. Just wanting to be outside of the binary and the multifaceted-ness of being femme. And I think that’s my life, that’s what I relate to. That’s part of my storytelling as a singer.

There’s just so many sides of it, the sensuality, the strength, the wanting to be weak without being punished for it. I feel really grateful to be a woman making music, cause I just feel like [my lyrics] are universal. And it’s not just that, a lot of my fans are queer, and I feel like a lot of people can relate to wanting to have the strength and the perseverance and the acceptance. The self-love. It definitely is a through line in my songwriting.

That reminds me of the line that your mother says in “I’m Your Empress Of,” about transforming yourself a thousand times over.

It’s so cool she said that. She said, “I only have one girl, but it’s like having thousands of girls.” It’s cool because I can see my stories in other people, whether it’s like, “oh, your song helped me come out,” or “that got me through a heartbreak,” or someone in London was like, “I listened to your album all pandemic walking around.” And I was just like, oh my God, that’s what I did too! We were both walking around on our little breaks to my album. It’s nice to share something universal with people.

This is a bilingual album. Is there a difference between writing music in English and Spanish for you, or does it come from the same place?

The themes are the same, but I think this is the most Spanish, bilingual album I’ve done. It’s like once you make 10 years in music, and this is my fourth album, I just wanted to be inspired. I was very inspired by working with co-writers. I love the way my voice sounds and sits in Spanish, but I think that the lyricism is very much Empress Of. I have such a way with words where I can say something very simple but direct, and I feel like I do that in Spanish as well as English.

What are you hoping people take away from this record?

I’m hoping they take the vinyl. [Laughs] But, I don’t know. It’s always nice to give someone a vehicle for their own experiences, you know? It’s like a cup [she brings a mug on-camera], whatever you want to fill in this cup, I don’t want to have to decide what’s in the cup, but the album is the cup. I’m happy to provide the vehicle for whatever you’re going through.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.