beabadoobee: Loving the Past, Present and Future With Her Whole Heart

beabadoobee Learned to Love the Past, Present and Future With Her Whole Heart

Over the last decade, we’ve seen a handful of musical wunderkinds become full-fledged adult knockouts. Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo sit at the top of the marquee, but this summer has belonged to Sabrina Carpenter. If your TikTok algorithm has been in the right place, you may have even seen that video of a then-19-year-old Chappell Roan singing “Pink Pony Club” in public. This is the case with every generation, but Gen-Z is currently reaping the rewards of especially burgeoning performers becoming crucial zeitgeist voices. This is true for Beatrice Laus, the Filipino-English singer-songwriter from London who performs as beabadoobee. After releasing her very first single, “Coffee,” in 2017 at the age of 17, she put out her debut EP Lice in March of the next year and, in early 2019, wound up on the NME 100 alongside Eilish.

Since then, Laus has been nominated for a Brit Award, signed with Dirty Hit and dropped three EPs and three full-length albums. Her first LP, Fake It Flowers, was a certifiably stunning alt-rock record that combed through textures of grunge, shoegaze and dream-pop, all done in service to Laus’s longtime infatuation with the Pavements and the Elliott Smiths of the world. In the company of artists like Soccer Mommy, beabadoobee left her bedroom sound behind in favor of wounded, polished, slackerish rock ‘n’ roll. Laus has sounded confident since the first note of Fake It Flowers, and the syrupy guitars, catchy persona and garage-massaged genre lines blurred by retro, kiss-off, sentimental aesthetics.

But Laus is not an imitator. Instead, she measures her work like a student with a Rolodex of entrypoints, whether it’s Y2K-inflected, Hilary Duff-esque pop animation or the serpentine vocal prowess of a Liz Phair or an Alanis Morissette. As beabadoobee, Laus’s songwriting feels well-suited for soundtracks of movies that were made 20 years ago. That may sound reductive, but there’s a reason why most of those films rarely ever go out of style: coming-of-age stories are their own world, and Laus infused her with reckonings about intimacy, visions of the self and romances both new and old. It’s all very plentiful and never a given. Just because you’ve chronicled your adolescence via a few-dozen tunes doesn’t mean what happens next will be some delicious detour into the complicated lore of adulthood.

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On Beatopia in 2022, Laus was living through her own growth as she was writing about it. The album’s title was taken from that of her childhood imaginary world, and songs like “See You Soon,” “Fairy Song” and “Cultsong” found her invigorated by the odyssey-like happenings of tripping on shrooms, drinking enough water, checking on your siblings and lamenting the clock’s pace. Cut to now, on her third LP This Is How Tomorrow Moves, and Laus is looking back on her past through the lens of retrospect rather than through the clear lid of some in-the-moment pressure cooker of nostalgia. Getting to this place “happened organically,” according to her. “I experienced a lot of things in the past year that made me grow into myself a lot more.”

After Beatopia, Laus put out the one-off singles “Glue Song” and “the way things go” without considering whether or not they would serve as a bridge between her sophomore project and something else just as major—even though the themes on both tracks do linger on This Is How Tomorrow Moves. “I needed to get things off my chest,” she says. “I needed to make music, and I hate waiting around.” There was no standing still for Laus after releasing “Glue Song” at the beginning of 2023, as beabadoobee was tapped to open for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour for a month across the American South. Suddenly, she wasn’t playing venues with caps of 1,000 people or less; she was traipsing across stadium stages in front of five-figure droves of Swifties.

Just as her Dirty Hit labelmates Been Stellar were joyously supported by the 1975’s fandom while touring Europe this spring, Laus’s music was welcomed by Taylor’s dedicated audiences. “It was a very different crowd from my usual shows, but I was very grateful that people stayed to listen to the music,” she says. “But it was a terrifying experience because, on top of playing in front of thousands and thousands of people, they’re also waiting for Taylor Swift. You’re trying to win them over and, at times, you don’t win everyone over. I was scared the entire time.” Laus remembers being told that, by her second song, she would be fine and the nerves would start to dissipate. She took that advice to heart, even though she “felt terrified up until the last show” she played. Even though it felt like the entire world was paying attention to her and her band, Laus saw the tour as a gateway to embracing an “it is what it is” attitude. “You’re up there to play the music that you love,” she notes. “If you fuck up, it’s fine. If you fuck up in front of 10 people, if you fuck up in front of thousands of people, it doesn’t matter.”

If opening for Taylor Swift was the only thing on beabadoobee’s resumé, she’d already have a more impressive track-record than most musicians her age. The reward of having that accomplishment is, in her own words, that “you’ve done it and you’ve managed to do it without actually shitting yourself on stage.” “Then you have a big meal and you’re like, ‘Thank God I’ve done that. Now it’s time to sleep and get stoned,’” she continues, before reflecting on the same part of herself that Beatopia was written about. “Knowing me as a seven-year-old girl, I would have never believed that in my life, that I would have performed in front of that many people. I was a very timid child, so that was a really big achievement.”

On Beatopia, Laus found herself working with musicians like Matty Healy of the 1975, PinkPantheress, Jockstrap’s Georgia Ellery, Cavetown and, of course, her longtime writing and recording mate Jacob Bugden, who she considers to be “an extension of my brain” and rips that incredible solo in “One Time.” Laus has spoken previously about how those sessions were some of the most intimate collaborations she’d ever done, and she still emphasizes that those partnerships completely rewired her approach to making records with other people—especially her decision to decamp to Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in Malibu and make This Is How Tomorrow Moves last year. “I found comfort in making music with my friends and writing songs in my bedroom,” Laus says. “I felt like, as much as it was scary to enter this new world of creating an album in such a prestigious studio with such an incredible producer, I felt very welcomed and I felt very comfortable. It was the perfect place to be at that exact moment. The transition was scary but then, when I got there, everything made sense.”

Laus joins Marcus King, Gossip, Travis Scott, Neil Young & Crazy Horse and the Red Hot Chili Peppers as recent protégés of Rubin at his Southern California oasis. Being at Shangri-La gave her “complete clarity.” It was the most confident I was ever, physically and emotionally,” she says. “I’m the type of person to value the way I look a lot of the time. I love getting my lashes done, I love getting a tan. I’m just that girl.” But when she was at Shangri-La, it was the healthiest Laus had ever been. “I was eating really healthy food, I was engrossed in the music that I was making and I did not, for a second, care about the way I looked,” she continues. “That’s a really big thing for me—I’m quite a self-conscious person—so I felt really happy about that.” Sometimes, Nick Cave was wandering around the studio between takes. Most of the time, Laus indulged in a habit of dedicating an entire day to recording and then taking a break to go jump in the ocean before returning to the material.

Every artist that works with Rick Rubin has a different story to share about his wisdom. When I spoke with King about his time spent in Malibu while making Mood Swings, he emphasized Rubin’s lack of concern about the clock, resistance to overdubs, his focus on making sure that every song could exist on melody and his embrace for truthfulness in storytelling. For Laus, Rubin wanted to put her lyrics at the forefront of the music. “He wanted to prioritize that,” she says, “and I thought that was so special. As much as I love instruments and sounds, I had very important things to say about myself, about my friends, about my life—that’s why I started writing music. Having that drilled into everyone’s mind in that studio was really special, because it’s the one thing I care about the most when I write music. It’s the reason why I write music.”

All of This Is How Tomorrow Moves germinated in London except for one track: “Beaches.” Composed just days before she was set to take shelter in Malibu, it’s a song that poured out of her in anticipation of making a record on the other side of the world—as she fantasizes about the Pacific Ocean and using the West Coast as a muse worth following into the shadows. “Days blend to one when I’m on the right beaches,” she sings. “And the walls painted white, they tell me the secrets. Don’t wait for the tide just to dip both your feet in.” “Beaches” was one of the first instances of her actively documenting her life and then, in such a short amount of time, making a song about it. “I wrote [‘Beaches’] in one day and I was like, ‘We need to put this on the album,’” Laus says. “‘This perfectly describes what I’m feeling at this very moment.’ And it’s such a good round-off for the record. It’s so special to me. It’s just three or four of the most simple chords you can think of.”

In preparation for their trip to Malibu, Laus and Bugden demoed a lot of the tracks in her bedroom in London. But, when she presented them to Rubin, he didn’t want to hear them—insisting on Laus and her band re-learning every song just as she’d written them back home. “I was like, ‘Okay, shit,’” she laughs. “I was super stressed out, but I did it. And it made me realize, ‘Oh, my God, these are fully finished songs that sound good without all the fancy instrumentation. I could release this now and it could be fine.’ I loved the songs I’d written. It made me really appreciate the work I had done. It didn’t feel like work, because I just love writing music.” Rubin’s allergy to demos galvanized a confidence in Laus, because she just needed someone to tell her she was good. But Rubin didn’t tell her that, he held the truth up so she could see it clearly.

That time spent in California with Rubin will likely alter the way Laus makes her next beabadoobee album. Of course, the confidence she left Shangri-La with isn’t a bad thing to hold onto, but Rubin’s methodology of subtracting filler and prioritizing lyrical meaning and chord simplicity reminds her of the type of writer she was when she wrote “Coffee” seven years ago. “It was two chords and a melody line with very silly lyrics,” she says. “At the time, when I released it, I thought it was stupid. But it’s one of my biggest songs, and I still have a lot of love for that song. If I continue this mindset of writing music without having to overthink things, then that’s something I’d like to follow.” Laus’s new mindset also beckons a fresh appreciation for Fake It Flowers and Beatopia, and songs like “Lovesong” and “See You Soon.” When she had a brief encounter with Rubin, and their exchange has lingered with her:

“He was like, ‘Oh, I love this album so much. I just wish people would love it as much as I do, because I just really want people to like it.’ And then, the last thing he said to me was, ‘Do you love it?’ And I was like, ‘Yes, I love it so much.’ He was like, ‘Are you sure you love it?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I love it so much.’ He was like, ‘Well, that’s all that matters.’ That’s something I have to constantly remind myself, because a lot of outside opinions seeped into my brain with Beatopia and Fake It Flowers. I’m quite critical of myself. Listening to Beatopia, I love that album with my whole heart, but there are times where I thought the lyrics could have been better. That’s what I was most conscious about. Now, I look back at it and I’m like, ‘I loved those songs and I still love those songs.’ There’s nothing wrong with those songs, they perfectly described who I was at the time. I look back at them so much happier.”

The beauty of a beabadoobee album is that it’s always going to be a textural buffet. A song like “California” brings to mind the crushing guitar slides of Pavement, but the piano-ballad “Girl Song” arrives like an honor student graduating from the Tori Amos School of Intoxicating Minimalism—and the introduction of its bridge was inspired by beabadoobee’s time spent with Swift. “That girl loves to write a bridge, and I didn’t really care for bridges a lot,” she admits. “I was like, ‘All right, guitar solo and chorus again.’ That’s not to say that it’s bad. I still do that, but I really wanted to try and write a sick bridge.”

Laus was inspired to pen “Ever Seen” after watching Swift perform her country-coded hooks every night, finishing the track after playing a set at Glastonbury in 2023. This Is How Tomorrow Moves is elemental, switching between shadings of slow-burn ephemera and rollicking, up-tempo screamers. This unpredictability stems from Laus’s compositional routine, which is her insistence on making sure every song she writes has a beginning, middle, end, bridge, two verses and two choruses. “When I write a song from scratch,” she says, “I make sure it makes sense from that. It helps the flow of everything that comes after it, and it tells you what it needs.”

And while the Ashlee Simpson-inspired “Take a Bite” packs a smack of sass that could’ve brought the house down on a CW show in 2003, Laus admits that the song is often more associated with Incubus than the 7th Heaven alum. “Everyone says the Incubus rhythm, which I didn’t actually think about,” she contends. “That rhythm that [Simpson plays on ‘Pieces of Me’] is awesome, so I did it within that rhythm. I was stuck in that song, because I actually fucking hated the rhythm. Then, Jacob came back with a demo that I fell in love with and I was like, ‘Okay, now I can finally write the lyrics. I can finally find the right melody.’ If you have the bones of it, that determines what happens with the song.” If there’s one thing that can be taken from This Is How Tomorrow Moves, it’s that the music of Incubus and Ashlee Simpson is more similar than anybody may like to admit.

Same as with Beatopia, no two songs on This Is How Tomorrow Moves sound alike. It’s the product of Laus’s listening habits, because she’s just as likely to turn on Lana Del Rey as she is the Smashing Pumpkins or Jagged Little Pill and Michelle Branch. She stuck to one genre on Fake It Flowers, because that “perfectly described the person I was at the time,” but she’s not just a 20-year-old guitarist who loves Kim Gordon anymore. Obviously, she still loves Kim Gordon, but there’s space now in her taste for more flavors. Laus isn’t shy about wearing her heroes on her sleeve, as she made a song about Stephen Malkmus in 2019 and, on the This Is How Tomorrow Moves title track, she name-drops Elliott Smith for good measure.

This time around, though, she found refuge in the discographies of Fiona Apple and Aimee Mann, cataloging their piano and production sensibilities while working on her own. “When I listen to music, I always focus on songwriting and the chords and the artist,” she says. “I get completely obsessed with the musician. When I listened to Aimee and Fiona—undeniably incredible musicians and artists and human beings—their production really stood out for me. They love their use of piano in their songs, just like Elliott does.” Laus mentions the spiritual influence of the Beatles on This Is How Tomorrow Moves, too—not because she was listening to them while writing/recording it, but because Paul McCartney was at Shangri-La recording a podcast with Rubin around the time she was tracking her album. “I felt the energy there,” she insists.

Laus wouldn’t call herself a prolific writer, but only because she insists on living her life a bit before writing an album instead of constantly tackling the mundane and the everyday. “As soon as I do that, it just comes so easy to me, which I’m really grateful for,” she says. “And as long as I have my guitar and as long as I’m in the comfort of my own home or somewhere that I feel like, when I’m by myself, I can really express myself creatively with no judgement, then that’s when I can write a song.” She wrote every song on This Is How Tomorrow Moves by herself and at her own pace, and it’s a truth that she’s especially proud of.

“I think, from the years of playing guitar and writing songs, I’ve definitely learned my style and what makes a song sound like ‘me,’” she says. “I have all these little quirks and these little lyrics that I use that, when you listen to them, you know it’s a beabadoobee song. I’m finally feeling comfortable in the chords I write, because I’m not the most talented guitarist. I’m not really technical at all, but I think that’s the beauty of it. Just putting my fingers randomly on the fret and, if it sounds nice in my ears, I just have to trust it. I finally have that trust instead of just constantly second-guessing and questioning if it’s good enough or it’s smart-sounding enough or interesting enough. There’s a beauty in the simplicity of the way I write my songs. I find that really comforting.”

While on tour with Swift, Laus and her band had a week off and elected to decamp to a studio in Los Angeles. While there, she wrote a song a day, including “One Time,” “The Man Who Left Too Soon” and “Coming Home,” the latter of which signaled to Laus that her third album was ready to be written. “Before that, I was writing songs here and there,” she says, “but a lot of what I was talking about was falling into the same theme, and it felt like I had an album when I only had three songs.” When she left Los Angeles and started playing shows again, she was obsessed with writing material for This Is Where Tomorrow Moves, and you can tell that she dove head-first into a whirlwind of creative fury, arriving on the other side with 14 tracks (and a handful that didn’t make the final cut).

For Laus, she wrote Beatopia to heal her inner-child. “I was talking about subjects that were hard for me to talk about,” she says. On This Is How Tomorrow Moves, she’s “mature enough to understand that I can’t always put the blame on other people.” The themes aren’t restricted to who Laus was when she was in Malibu or when she and Bugden were working in her London flat. It’s the ultimate container of growth, that the album doesn’t exist in the vacuum of a life no longer being lived. “There’s always a hopefulness at the end of the song, which I really like,” Laus continues. “It’s weird, because I listen to this album now after months of making it, and there’s always a song that perfectly describes how I’m feeling at that very moment—even though I wrote it ages ago. I think that’s the difference: No matter how old I am, I could still listen to it and feel like, ‘Oh, I need to listen to this song. These lyrics are really helping right now.’”

Vignettes of self-esteem and body image insecurities swirl in the same spaces as domestic dreams and the act of falling in love that alchemizes into falling apart. There’s romance in every hook and heartache in every stab of distortion that kicks dirt up into the vortex of This Is How Tomorrow Moves. And yet, the album’s title is hopeful and resounding in its assurance, and the songs always gravitate back to it. The phrase reminds Laus of the “Is it me or recently time is moving slowly?” line in “Beatopia Cultsong.” “The word ‘moves’ just feels so physical,” she says. “It feels like you’re going through a journey, and I had to write all of these songs to be able to move to tomorrow. I had to talk about these things, I had to get these things off my chest, I had to understand myself more in order to understand this title.”

And finding the album title was a random happenstance for Laus on one of her tours. When she’s traveling around the globe with the beabadoobee live crew, she looks for writing on buildings that could be the name of a Midwest emo band and keeps a log of them. “We saw a building that said ‘This Is How Tomorrow Moves’ and we were like, ‘Yo, that’s a sick Midwest emo band,’” Laus continues. “I was like, ‘That’s a cool-ass name. I’m gonna write that down.’”

As This Is How Tomorrow Moves comes to an end, Laus harmonizes a truth that lingers across our conversation: “Writing ‘cause I’m healing.” Even though the record’s title sprung from a notes app collection of phrasings, it was serendipitous that she and her band drove by the building it was plastered across. It stood out, just as Laus’s writing does, and there’s an inherent requisite of trust within it. “This is how tomorrow moves” is an affirmation and a promise. She may sing about “moments that cease to exist,” but, on This Is How Tomorrow Moves, Bea Laus manages to take the act of climbing forward into the joys of living and suspends it in time for good, imperfections and all.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.

beabadoobee Learned to Love the Past, Present and Future With Her Whole Heart

In our latest Digital Cover Story, Bea Laus talks about recording with Rick Rubin in Malibu, touring with Taylor Swift, and trusting the instincts of where her songwriting wanted to go on her new album, This Is How Tomorrow Moves.