Up All Night With Lourdes Leon, Who Went to a Haunted Hotel in New Orleans to Find Herself
Annie Forrest
Lourdes “Lola” Leon sat in an almost empty chapel, backlit by a stained-glass window. Around her neck was a massive glittering crucifix. Under her black hood her hair was rod-straight and thick. She bent her head piously, hit a vape, and then noticed me: “You’re GQ?”
Leon, whose artist name is Lolahol, was practicing for her concert the next day, the culmination of a three-day artist residency at the Hotel Saint Vincent in New Orleans. As she worked through her set, she alternated between a martini and a cup of Earl Grey.
The other people in the chapel were Lola’s manager Joanna Cohen; Lola’s friend and producer Sammy, who at 9 p.m. had apparently just woken up; Lola’s friend Henry Chesley, and a supergroup of Louisiana jazz musicians put together by local producer Eric Heigle—Cameron Smith on drums, Stephen Gladney on saxophone, Taylor Guarisco on guitar, and multi-instrumentalists Dominic Minix and Aurora Nealand. That next night Lola would be performing a set here in the chapel, debuting new songs alongside jazz classics for an audience filled with friends of the performers and intrigued Saint Vincent guests.
This was not my first time seeing Lola perform; the first time was in our high school production of Grease. She played Rizzo; I recall her being very good, but I was also 13. Many of Lola’s friends and collaborators are people she met when she was in high school, meaning I also knew some of them. We all grew up in New York; the island is small.
From the Chelsea to the Chateau Marmont, hotels have an enduring appeal as incubators for creativity, places where artists can work unencumbered by the toll of reality. Tonight's performance is the culmination of a three-day artists' retreat organized and curated by Joanna Cohen and her best friend from college Julia Schoen (who does guest experience at the Hotel) and sponsored by FWB, a web3 membership platform. “It’s about having artists come and have the space to be inspired," Schoen says, "and showcase things they might not show somewhere else— a low-stakes environment.” There is apparently a hunger out there for intimate spaces in which an artist can test new ideas in a stripped-down format; Keith Harris, the marketing manager for MML hospitality, tells me that recently the members of Bon Jovi walked into a pizza place (no, this is not the start of a joke) that MML owns in Austin and asked to play there. “We were all like, What is going on?” Harris says.
The Hotel Saint Vincent, with its curling balconies and steel cornices, has all the appropriate factors for a New Orleans hotel—it’s beautiful, luxurious, debauched, and a little spooky. The building, built in the 1600s, was previously the Saint Vincent Infant Asylum, i.e., an orphanage run by Catholic nuns as a haven for unwed mothers in the South. According to Keith Harris, it was still an orphanage right up until the ’90s. “There have been people adopted and raised here in our lifetime,” he says. “It’s a powerful place.” The chapel is now the Chapel Club. The club bathroom is the former Mother Superior’s office. In the chapel that night there were no priests, but there was Madonna’s daughter.
This show would be Lola’s first time playing with a band. “I’m excited to see everything sculpted around her voice, rather than competing with a really high-energy DJ,” Joanna told me. “She’s a more relaxed person—she’s not the type to be like, ‘Make some noise!’ This arrangement allows her to be really soulful.” Cohen tapped Heigle to help Lola realize her vision; because this was her first time, he wanted to find musicians that would make her feel comfortable. “They’re all improvisers. They’re all producers,” Heigle said, and thought for a moment before coming up with a final unifying factor. “And they’re all mad chillers.”
Lola and Joanna’s friendship predates Lola the musician and Joanna the manager. They met when Joanna was programming for Elvis Guesthouse in New York and Lola, as teenagers are wont to do, was trying to get into the venue. But for years, Joanna the manager has been waiting in the wings. “I knew [Lola] was really talented at singing,” she said. “I just wasn’t sure the moment she would commit to it, and it happened about a year ago. Now it’s about finding the right rhythm, that right setup that works for her.”
Decamping to the hotel restaurant, Joanna, Julia, Sammy and I talked over drunken oysters. Sammy met Lola when he was a skater and she was mostly dancing and modeling. Sammy is a source of endless material. Of a perfectly bloody steak, he moaned, “That cow had a name.” Of living in New York: “When I was younger, I was really nomadic.” He gave it a beat. “Yeah…I was basically homeless.” He wobbled his hand as if to say tomayto, tomahto: “Nomadic, homeless.” Of Lolahol: “I’m glad she came full circle. When I first met her, I wasn’t doing music either.” Sammy, who alongside Lola is part of the artist collective Chemical X, produced Go, Lola’s first EP. “Singing can feel like a ‘stepping on your mom’s toes' type of thing,’” Sammy acknowledged, but added, “I mean, we started making this music in my Bushwick basement. It’s very organic.”
Lola’s current jazzy sound feels far from the Lola of Go, a dancehall fiend with a keen sense of humor and an eye for internet culture (the hook to her song “Lock and Key” runs with a Lady Gaga meme: “No sleep, bus, club, another club.”) “I feel like the first EP isn’t an accurate representation of your sound,” Sammy said. “It gets the ball rolling…. Especially to be an artist in this modern day, you need to get over that first hurdle of just releasing music. You only get better with time.” For an artist in the internet age, especially one growing up in the public eye, it can seem almost impossible to develop when you have to account for every change. How does art grow under observation?
On the subject of observation, the photographer Annie Forrest, another Lola collaborator, arrived for a drink, and leaned in to tell me about photographing live musicians. “There are these moments where you’re so in sync with someone,” she said. “It’s like ‘I felt you.’ You never know what’s going to happen, so you try to stay close.”
Staying close is good advice, not just for concert photographers but also journalists. Sammy accepts an espresso martini from a waiter named Money (“Money like dinero, cheese, bro…”) and looks at Joanna. He asks, “Are we being bad?” It turns out we are being bad. Lola, I hear from whispers, wants to listen to jazz. We head to d.b.a, a jazz club on Frenchmen Street. Before we go, Heigle corrects my NOLA faux-pas: “In New Orleans calling a jazz club ‘a jazz club’ is like calling water wet. It just is. It seeps its way into everything.” Doss, a DJ and another of Joanna’s clients, packs her USB drives with her.
At the foot of the stage, Lola is locked in with the band, dancing gently. Outside, she watches people trip down the street and joked, “It’s a drinking state with a jazz problem.” Sammy laughed: “Do you mean a jazz state with a drinking problem?” Shaking her head, Lola noticed me again, and said, apologetically, “I’m sorry for calling you GQ.” My full name, I think, is Gentlemen’s Quarterly.
I stay close and then we’re at a gay bar called Big Daddy’s on “Deep Lez” night. Someone urges Doss to take over the DJ booth, but she doesn’t want to infringe on the local lesbians and be a “jerk.” Someone tells me that the Saint Vincent once had a medium come, and the medium said there were priests haunting the first floor, but the priests really loved what they were doing with the concert programming and the hotel should keep it up.
Aime Grumbach, another friend and part of Lola’s close entourage, shimmied with Henry Chesley. I realize Henry was Linus in my middle school production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. These are the kind of details that make a journalist feel crazy at Deep Lez night. Lola shrugged: “It’s just how we roll over here. Especially if you grow up in New York and you don’t leave. Everybody else leaves at a certain point.”
Early-morning promises were made. From Julia: “We’re going to go on a swamp tour at 11 a.m..” From Sammy to Lola: “You don’t need to be in full glam for the swamp tour.” From Joanna to Julia: “Seafood tower in Mississippi tomorrow?” Finally, Sammy put his foot down: “It’s like when you’re at Basement and someone is like, ‘We’re all going to Rockaway tomorrow, right?’ Never happens.”
In the day the musicians were few and far between. I found Sammy at the pool under a towel with his computer, creating a movable sensory deprivation studio space in the Louisiana sunlight. A child cannonballs and I get drenched. “I’m almost seven,” the kid told me. “I have $25 and it’s all tooth fairy money.”
Night comes and the performance is here. Outside of the Chapel Club, Amanda Osborn guards the door. Apparently, someone came up to her and said they’d heard Marilyn Monroe’s daughter was playing. “Even if your name is on the list,” she said to them, “you’re not getting in.”
Opener Chris Greatti played a guitar with a sticker on it that read FUCK ME, before switching mid-set to a guitar with a more neutral EAT ME sticker. Then it was Lola’s turn. Her set list: “Twisted” (Ultra Naté cover), “Flipside” (Everything but the Girl cover), “The Boy Next Door,” “Cumberland” (Lolahol, unreleased), “Turn Your Lights On” (Emanative cover), “Secret” (unreleased). Lola did a strange and beautiful version of the Judy Garland standard “The Boy Next Door,” a song about wanting someone to pay attention to you and not wanting to bring attention to yourself. Her vocals wavered between a breath and a bell. Immediately afterward, she disappeared, reemerging in sweatpants for Sammy’s DJ set, ultimately leading the small crowd into a dance frenzy. “[Lola] knows what she wants and she’s not taking the easy or obvious path for her,” Heigle told me. “She’s choosing to work with real musicians and do real music and put together a real show.”
At 2 a.m. we packed into cars and headed to a dive bar. At 4 a.m. we continued on to a studio space that Cameron, the drummer, keeps on the edge of New Orleans. There Lola perched on a chair behind a microphone and all the musicians grabbed whatever was lying around. The people in the room had been playing together for three days straight, had just played a concert, and then played until dawn, because there was nowhere else anybody wanted to be. Lola would pivot, suggest a new song, or hum a melody, punctuating each note with a lazy wrist. It was moving to witness art at the moment of creation.
When, at 6 a.m. during a smoke break, I found myself singing Fleetwood Mac as Chris played, I thought, It shouldn’t be this moving, and I took myself back to the Saint Vincent.
Back in New York, Lola and I met in Dimes Square for a glass of wine. The singer sat with her back to the wall, her eyes jumping toward the window every now and then, as she spotted people she knew or didn’t want to see, and gushed about New Orleans. It was hard to tell she was gushing since she’s so dry, but it was apparent she’d experienced something life-altering. “There was this playfulness that I don’t think I’m as used to,” she said. “I didn’t know how to process it, then it kind of hit my system. It was so unreal to hear the musicians transform my songs, with actual live instruments playing them. As we would rehearse them, I would try to give them a sense of what I was thinking when I wrote them because I wanted that emotion to dictate how they were playing. They got it right off the bat,” She laughed: “I was the one that was struggling.”
She’s playing some festivals this year— Primavera Sound in Barcelona in May, Parklife in Manchester in June— and plans to work some of what she discovered in New Orleans into her set. But when I asked if this marked a transition in her sound, Lola corrected me: “It’s different, but it’s just another layer that’s added in. It’s not my new sound—it’s a new sound.”
Lola studied acting in high school, but currently that’s firmly in the past: “I really admire actors and what they can do with different characters, but I’m just not that type of person. I sound like an asshole, but I’m not the type of person to try to become another character—I'm just so myself.” That strength of personality is reflected in her inner circle (tight), her art (not defining but evolving), her taste (unabashed). I asked about the religious iconography around her. “Being conscious of yourself on a metaphysical level is a form of religion in a way,” she said. “My mom always says…”
She changes course. “It's nothing you can touch, see, feel—like it’s just fully knowing you’re part of this much bigger thing and also a much smaller thing. You know, you’re on the earth, but you’re also like out in the sky, in the air.” She referenced the crucifix she wore during her New Orleans performance. “Things like crucifixes—and my mom has always been very into this—especially if it's given by someone special, holds a lot of protection. It’s important for me to feel protected and that I'm protecting myself in my own way by being conscious on that level.”
She plays with the candle in front of her, orders a second glass of wine. “When things are beautiful, I get a wave of nervousness in my body, like I can't even believe that I have the luck,” she said. “It makes me want to throw up, like, every second, in a good way. When things are important like that, I’m a little bit of a nervous Nellie, know what I mean?” She drags out the phrase “I can't even believe my luck. I just want to deserve it. And…I do, but it’s like I…” Trailing off, she watched the shadows move on the table.
Instantly, I’m back in the recording studio. There was a moment where Lola faltered, uncharacteristically unsure of what she was doing. The musicians looked at her, sleep-deprived but exhilarated, all of them in that room for the sheer pleasure of collaborating with fellow artists. Gladney, seeing Lola hesitate, said encouragingly, “Just play—we’ll follow.”
Originally Appeared on GQ
