Milkshake Break With Charlotte Lawrence
“Should we get Shake Shack? I want Shake Shack — I want a milkshake.”
Charlotte Lawrence will be onstage, mic in hand, in a matter of hours, but at the moment — dressed in denim cutoffs and a white T, her hair in a ponytail — the 18-year-old is blending in with the sea of teenagers around the Madison Square Park Shake Shack rather seamlessly.
Raised in Los Angeles, Lawrence is the daughter of TV actress Christa Miller and director and producer Bill Lawrence, the creator of the series “Scrubs.” To many, she is recognizable from Instagram, either hers or Kaia Gerber’s, where the pals are often seen lounging bikini-clad in Malibu or hanging with other scion bffs. But Lawrence has been hard at work on building herself as a musician over the past two years; her first single drew over 16 million streams on Spotify, and with her debut EP, “Young,” out today, Lawrence is ready for her name to be known.
“It’s funny because neither of my parents can sing or play any instruments — they’re both tone deaf,” she says, seated at a table underneath the burger chain’s fairy lights. “I think I get my writing genes from my father, and my mom has insane music taste and always did the music supervision for the shows that she was in. So I had great music around me and art and always grew up on the creative side, but it was very surprising to [my parents] that I could sing at a young age.”
Despite the Hollywood world she grew up in — spending days on set with her parents — she’s never quite felt the pull of acting.
“I feel like I could do it if I really wanted to, but music is my passion,” she says. “I just love performing — I’m very extroverted. I think that music, acting and modeling do go together. Bottom line is I’m an entertainer, and I love seeing fans sing my music — it’s the best feeling in the world.”
She’s been signed with IMG “since I was little,” but views modeling now as a way to supplement her music, not as the end result.
“When I started releasing stuff two and a half years ago I was like, ‘I want to brand myself as a musician and have people love me for being a musician, not for being an Instagram girl or a model,’” she says. “And there’s nothing wrong with that, but if I really want to do [music] as a career I feel like I have to really center myself in my music.”
About the music: she’s been writing her own music and playing piano since she began. “It has to be authentic and real to me,” she says. “Say if I came in really, really sad, I wouldn’t write a happy song. A lot of times I do write an actual story about something that happened, or about a guy or something. And I think no matter what I’m signing, I have to still be able to feel it in that moment or in five years from now — I have to be able to connect to that moment: this is my story, this is a little piece of me.”
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