Now, Rodriguez is in a more introspective arc with ‘’, a new effort for Giant Music that was written in the aftermath of the Eaton Fires that destroyed her family home in Altadena. At 14 tracks, the album is a personal ode to the fragility of loss, one that found her refining her belief in herself and her love for music as her mother, Reina, rebuilt their childhood home from the soil up in California. While unguarded, ‘Dream House’ is a reminder of Rodriguez’s gift for writing unique and effortless pop music: ‘Trainsong’ surrenders a twinkling melody to waves of light-refracting percussion; ‘HandsOn’ is a “gimme, gimme” away from a ROSALÍA verse; and ‘Machete’ cuts deep, snapping angles like ‘Positions’ because God knows, Lorely’s “top tier”. 

With ‘Dream House’ being a homage to resilience, CLASH recently caught up with Rodriguez, diving into her fifth album, working with Cecile Believe and Devonté Hynes, her love for Rebe and Julee Cruise, and how an unexpected voice memo led her to a moment of rediscovery.

As someone who has spent years writing about emotional emptiness, class differences, and being Honduran-American, how vital is it for an artist to use art to heal and evolve?

Well, I mean, I just made a record about healing and evolving with ‘Dream House’ and I think if I didn’t have music as a tool to express myself I’d feel pretty in the dark. It just helps me understand myself so much more; like making music and talking to myself through music. So yeah, it just feels like I’m one and the same with music. 

When did you first realise you had the strength to write from such a personal place?

I surprise myself every time I make a record, but with this one especially… I don’t know. I’ve written love songs, I’ve written songs about class inequality, living in New York and being a starving artist and all of these life experiences that I have had before. I had this whole entirely new life experience, which is going through this disaster and my town burning down and losing my childhood home. I had to muster up the courage to talk to myself through music and be like, “Hey, how are you doing? Are you okay?” [laughs]. And just trying to figure it out through songs and stuff… it can be a little scary, you know? Just the things that come up and that new level of vulnerability when you go through something so different. It was such a new and scary experience that I had in my life that I had never experienced before. 

How long after the Eaton Canyon and Altadena wildfires did you eventually start writing and recording the material that would make up ‘Dream House’?

I couldn’t make music for a while because of that fear of hanging out with myself and how I actually feel. The first song I made for this record is ‘Dream House’ and it was five months later. I was very far away from L.A. as I was in Norway, visiting a childhood friend, and I started to write about the optimism, which to me signaled a direction that I wanted to talk about. Not just like, “Oh my God I miss all the things and my childhood identity”. I wanted to show the potential in the future and me rebuilding and all this stuff. 

So once I started to write ‘Dream House’, I ended up talking about my mom who has shown up a lot in my work. I love telling her own story through my story – this multi-generational experience of being a woman. Once I started talking about her and lyrics came out about how I wanted to build a dream, it felt good. It felt like I was manifesting a home. 

Was ‘Dream House’ primarily recorded in Los Angeles?

It was mostly made in L.A. with collaborators that I was extremely comfortable with so I could get that feeling that “anybody could be home”. Or like “this room is home”. Or “these people are home”. So it was mostly made in L.A., besides that one song that I started to write in Norway, but it was really just like a voice memo that started it. Which rarely happens to me. 

I usually make music in the studio but sometimes I get an idea and I put my voice notes on and I start singing into my phone. When that happens, it’s really so special. This is bit of a tangent but I’m reading ‘Catching The Big Fish’ by David Lynch and he has this idea that ideas are like rooms that you walk into in your mind. I can’t remember exactly what it says but when you get these voice memos, it’s like the ideas are already there and you just have to walk into it, so I have to record them on my phone.

Where did the core sonic influences for the project stem from?

I just made a playlist actually [laughs]. It’s mostly other people that I worked with on the record. I don’t know if you’re a fan of Cecile Believe or are familiar with her work, but she is so incredible and I wrote eight of the songs on the record with her. I was really influenced by her songwriting and her production, and she produced ‘Dream House’ and helped produce other songs as well. I worked with Jessy Lanza, one of Canada’s finest, and I was really influenced by her and her sound as I really wanted to work with her and Nick Leon. 

And just like when you get into a room and you’re with your friends and you’re all talking about what you’re listening to and I don’t know… like usually when I have sessions, within the first 30 minutes or so we’re like playing each other music and stuff and it’s like, “What are you listening to? Oh I’m listening to Saint Etienne” or “I’m listening to Underworld” or “I’m listening to Kate Bush and Strawberry Switchblade”. It’s really fun to go through a playlist with another collaborator and riff off of that vibe. That’s so fun for me as a producer and a songwriter. 

As it’s alluded to through themes of reconstruction and even on interludes like ‘We Have Walls’, what was it like rebuilding your family home alongside your mother?

It was a surreal experience. I have never experienced anything like this before where there’s a physical representation of this intangible thing that I’m making, which is my record and music, you know? And my mom and I were doing this side-by-side and on our own projects and on our own missions. It was beautiful and bizarre. As I’m coming back from the studio and going to my mom’s house, we’re both building the foundation piece by piece. There’s this motion and a physical representation of this record. 

How has your mom’s relationship with your music evolved over the years?

When I first started this project, she was really scared for me to be an artist because she was like, “How are you going to make money?” [laughs]. She wanted the best for me but I think as time went by, she’s been able to express her own artistry through me and her own love for music and connect with my fans. The people that listen to my music and are at my shows are always really excited to see her. She used to make my clothes on tour and has an Instagram account called , and she’s even been on my older records. She has a lot of pride in me pursuing my passions. 

Is she still making her own bootleg merch?

She does not anymore. Oh my God that was so bad [laughs]. Shutting down your mom is so… I’m just happy that she’s happy for me but when I came home that day and I found that she had made like 100 fake Empress Of shirts [laughs] — I had to be like, “Mom… this is really not okay”, you know? Maybe I’ll do something with them someday. With no regard to what I was doing with graphic design at the time, she just did what she wanted to do. 

I listen to a lot of old music from the ‘80s. I love The Blue Nile so much. I don’t necessarily make music that sounds like that but I really love the synth sounds and the textures. There’s just something that I’m obsessive about with that type of music. And Kate Bush as well. My favourite record is ‘The Kick Inside’ but I was also listening to ‘Hounds Of Love’ a lot throughout this new record’s process and there’s something about the strings, the arrangements and synths. 

I really love that era of ‘80s electronic music. One of my favourite records of all-time is ‘Floating’ by Julee Cruise. I wouldn’t have made songs that I’ve made if I never heard Julee Cruise, especially my earlier music. There’s this ballad on my second album called ‘Again’ and I made that trying to make a Julee Cruise song. There’s also this song on my third album called ‘Hold Me Like Water’. There’s all these songs where I’m tapping into that. 

Aside from your ‘80s playlists, what’s in your rotation nowadays?

I love this artist Rebe; she’s from Spain. She makes really dreamy music. Her Instagram handle is . She’s great but I also love Ear. I feel like they’re making great music and I love their production. I listen to so much older music and sometimes it’s music that’s really comforting to me, you know? I always find Caribou really comforting, I’m always going back to the album ‘Swim’. Or I’ll be like I want to feel like I’m back in New York ten years ago, so I’ll put Panda Bear on. He makes some of my favourite records.   

Well, that’s where I had my debut album performance for ‘Me’, the first record that I put out. So it’s kind of like a return to home. It feels like a full circle moment and the venue’s closing. I’ve seen so many shows there. I opened for Florence And The Machine there in 2015 and that was crazy to play a room of that size for an arena artist, you know? 

There’s just so many memories; I’ve seen so many shows there and that neighborhood has changed so much. The venue closing is just the nail on the nail on the nail of a coffin of what that neighbourhood used to be and what it was when I was starting as an artist playing warehouses and everything like that.

It is pretty disheartening to see cities and music hubs lose parts of what made them such an influential place to be in the 2010s. Especially when it’s due to gentrification. 

I feel like there’s still such a need for artists to connect with listeners and I’ve been trying to find ways to do that myself. Even though I don’t have a traditional L.A. show for this new record, yet, I’m playing a bookstore this week and I really wanted to do something accessible and personal. So I’m really excited to play shows like that. It reminds me of shows that I used to do ten years ago. You want to see the fans, you know?

I haven’t done it in a while but I’ve done so many shows early on in my career where you get to the bar and you’re playing on top of the table [laughs]. And you only had a chance to set up like twenty minutes before. It’s fun. You learn a lot about yourself and how you want to perform when doing smaller shows like that. 

How would you describe this era of your career that you’re in now?

I’ve learned a lot in the last year about myself and remembered a lot about myself. It just feels really honest and very personal. I’ve been vulnerable before but this is like a whole new level; I feel really condensed in myself. I think people will hear it on the album. There’s so much experimenting on the record that feels very honest, like with ‘Waiting’ which is this piano strings song, and then ‘Machete’ which is like a song that’s ideal for driving around and feeling yourself. I’m not thinking about being myself; I’m just being myself. It takes a lot of looking in the musical mirror.

‘Dream House’ is out now.