Getting to Know... Laura Izibor

She’s only 21, but it took Dublin diva Laura Izibor a full five years to perfect Let The Truth Be Told, her steamy Celtic-soul debut. At 15, she casually entered a sultry number in Ireland’s prestigious RTE 2fm Song Contest, and was dumbfounded when she won; by 16, she’d signed a publishing deal and began to work in earnest on her album. It finally hit stores this summer via Atlantic Records, but not before Izibor landed tracks on the soundtracks of TV shows like The Hills and Grey's Anatomy, and films including The Nanny Diaries and Step Up 2: The Streets. Now, as her first single "Don’t Stay" begins its chart climb, Izibor comes off as a seasoned pro much older and wiser than her years. She recently spoke with Paste about the delicate arts of songwriting and basketball.

Paste: Songs on Truth, like “If Tonight Was My Last,” explore the serious subject of death, mortality. Have you experienced death in your family?
Laura Izibor: Not death, but close. There have been a lot of painful periods in my life. But I’ve been close to it, yeah. But I really try and keep personal things to myself, and I don’t wanna go into details. But vaguely, I mean somebody very, very close to me being faced with death. And it’s very eye-opening, I think, when you’re put in that point of your life where its like “Oh, shit—this person could die! This person could be dead, right at this moment!” And it’s affected my writing. Even now, my writing is even more in the present. So the album has a strength in it, but now I’m not as afraid to be... vulnerable, if you like. I’m much more in the moment.

Paste: Well, writing songs is a tough profession. Ideally, you want to be as honest as possible, without revealing too much...
Izibor: Yeah. And for me, I’ve never once thought, as I was writing, about trying to be contrived. It’s always been this free thing, where I just sit behind the piano and it just happens, it just comes out. Whenever I’ve tried to write an angled song, like “This is what’s going on in my life,” the song’s just crap. So I don’t write lyrics—I just play and I record. And even if what I’m singing is such a throwaway, a lot of times when I listen back I go “Oh, shit! Yeah! I get it!” So half of this album has been me understanding my own way that I write. Plus, it’s never been something that I worked on. It’s been something that just kept happening.

Paste: Artists who attend music schools always say it sucks all the life out of the craft for ‘em.
Izibor: It does! It’s not fun. Not fun to write. I collaborated with a lot of writers, although what we did didn’t make the record. But it was these people’s jobs—they’d get up in the morning and go “What structure should we do? Verse-chorus-bridge? Or would you like to maybe go for bridge first?” There was this one writer, and we had this perfectly good line. It was one line. And I’m really all about, if a lyric feels good, then that’s 50% of what it means. It’s just like body language—if you convey something that feels right, it doesn’t necessarily have to be definite all the time. So we had this one great line, something like “You did me wrong,” which to me was this soulful Aretha kinda line. And he said “No, we need to make that double the length of time and double the depth.” And at that point, I was like “Uhh… okay, this is not a good artistic relationship.”

Paste: You seem to be laying out a lot of your life philosophies on the record, too.
Izibor: This is the way that I look at it. In a sense, the older I get, the less I know. I don’t claim to know everything or have all the answers. But when I was younger, I used to think that. And then when things don’t go the way you want, you think, “How did this happen?” So I’m very much trying to live in the now, because I used to get really anxious and think way down the line. But I’ve finally come to that center—right here, right now, this is all I have.

Paste: A basic principle of Buddhism, right? Do you have any rituals that keep you centered?
Izibor: I do a little tai chi. I’m not majorly into it—maybe 15 minutes every day. But my mother had four different religions going—Mormon, Protestant, Catholic, Jehovah’s Witness. So we went through them all. And at the end of it, I took some things from each. So I feel very spiritual, but I don’t practice any one religion. Although I do pray.

Paste: Do you feel like an old soul?
Izibor: I don’t believe in the past-life thing, so I don’t feel that I am. But when I was younger, I did more so, because when I was 14, 15, I had friends, but I never felt comfortable around ‘em. But when I’d be in adult company, I felt more at home, so I always felt kinda older than I was. And I felt bad about that—I felt that it was a bad thing. Because I wasn’t hanging out with this crew or kissing boys. I mean, I liked guys, but I wasn’t that typical teenage girl going, “Do you like Johnny? Do you like this and that?”

Paste: You were at home composing songs instead?
Izibor: Yeah, pretty much. And I signed to Zomba Publishing at the end of my 16th year, but I’d already started recording the album before then. So I was actually about 16 when I left school.

Paste: And you never had any other career options?
Izibor: I wanted to play basketball. I was even MVP one year—it wasn’t a big Dublin thing, but it was a proper league, for real. My sister-in-law played for the same team, and she invited me down one day when the team was just messing around. So I signed on when I was 11 and I played for two or three years. Until I got a really bad hip injury—I tore a ligament and some tissue, because I was overworked by a coach. I had to go to the hospital, and they said ‘You’re not playing for at least three months.’ And the big games were coming up—I was so depressed. And through that time, I really fell out of it. I started high school, it was a new flow, new friends, and I just drifted. And then I started singing. I never sang until I was 13, because I was busy playing basketball. But in drama class, everybody stood up and sang. And I was like “No, no, noooo! I’ll act for ya, I’ll jump up and down! Just don’t make me sing!” But I got up and sang, and nobody reacted at first. But throughout the day, like in geography class, kids were like “Hey—sing! Sing for us again!” And I became known as the good singer at school. So then I really liked it—I got voice lessons, piano lessons, I started writing, and it all started flowing.

Paste: And now, five years later, your album is finally out. How does it feel?
Izibor: It’s weird. Because it’s my baby and now I have to let go. But I’ve done everything that I can, I’ve truly done my best. So now what will be, will be.

Listen to "Don't Stay" from Laura Izibor's Let The Truth Be Told: