O'SIMUS

Welcome to Wheels Off, a show about the messy reality of the creative life.

I'm Rhett Miller.

That's when it got wheels off.

We started ugly and ain't gonna stop.

Oh, she made me feel like a good guy.

That's when it got wheels off. Lauren Hoffman is a fantastic singer-songwriter from Virginia.

She now lives in Los Angeles, which is from where she joins Wheels Off, which is to say me on a Zoom call.

She came into the music industry at a really young age during a very strange time.

It was as the old business model was collapsing.

And she came in hot man, she was making a record for Virgin Records.

She was courted and whined and dined and all of those things. We were contemporaries

briefly. And then she got out. She decided to get some lawyers, get out of the major label contract, go make some indie records, go make

records on French labels, go make records under different names, you know, band names, different

forms. She's tried a lot of things. Her path is winding. Her perspective is fascinating to me. I think the way she's

kind of chronicled all of it in her own brain and processed all of it is really, it's, to me, to me,

it's really a useful perspective on the music industry as it was, as it is now.

And more importantly, as she points out during this whole thing, as it is on a larger level, from a more bird's eye view. We all sort of get hung up on

how there used to be all this money from CDs, how then there was, you know, now we've got

this other weird industry that's very streaming driven. And we always get hung up on, on these

things. And Lauren forced me during the course of this interview to really step back

and get out of that narrative that has so much to do with the delivery systems that we

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