LAURA KNIGHT
Dark Motion, Light Years
The girl with the white guitar. has dreams. And one of them, she admits, “is to be captured in dark motion”.
Laura Knight says this with all the poetic idealism you would expect from a 19-year-old singer-songwriter. And the added edge that comes from having been signed to a record company at age 12, with her first single ‘Sunshine’ released by the time she was just 15 _.
“It was a happy, poppy, song,” she says, shrugging her shoulders today. “That’s cool. I’m still proud of it. It’s not like I have to be negative to be myself now. I just want to stay clear of any corny clichés.”
19 years old – and Laura Knight is beginning again on her own terms. Hers is a funny mix of teenage freshness, and an old hand’s attitude to “the industry”. It includes four years behind-the-scenes working in the studio, as well as performing live to what she calls “mature” audiences: “Seeing a whole bunch of drunken guys at my feet having a fist fight when I was 16 fast-paced my learning as a performer,” she laughs. “I started doing a pretty rocking set after that.”
She likes the look of her guitar over her shoulders as she plays and sings, a petite young blonde on stage kicking your arse back to the walls like an electrified Valkyrie. Talk of influences merges Vanessa Carlton with Evanescence, Coldplay and Fiona Apple; even electronic dance music gets a mention. “The truth is I’m still trying to discover my sound,” she says.
Even so, “I do dream the big dream of getting out there commercially on a big scale.”
Jewel and Paramore are her guiding lights – “I just love them to death.”
“Jewel taught me it’s natural to spend a lot of time on your lyrics; that the meaning behind them matters. The bottom line is that I love songwriting and it’s the area I hope to be noticed for in the long run.”
“But it’s through playing guitar that I learnt to really love performing. I saw that I didn’t want to be just another girl with an acoustic guitar. That’s why listening to rock bands such as Paramore was such an inspiration. Their singer Hayley Williams is my idol: she’s fiery, charismatic and puts her whole body into her singing. I really like that.”
Somewhere between “Jewel’s ability “to sit inside herself and slowly reveal herself through her lyrics” and “how Williams says what she means with a punch,” Knight has carved out a fresh set of pop-rock songs that are all her own:
‘Losing Myself’ – “Funnily enough it’s about losing yourself in a moment and letting go, It’s about getting really immersed in a good time and frame of mind”.
‘Beautiful Nightmare’ – “That’s about a boy I shouldn’t like but I do”.
‘Use Me’ – “It’s about a guy just using girls, and me turning it around. The lyrics say it best: “Lucky for me I’ve got my head screwed on tight!””
‘Fly Away’ – “I wrote that about suicide but it could be about anyone who has died. It could be about escaping, psychologically or physically, through death. It’s about awakening in heaven too and finding that sense of peace and clarity. You could interpret it lots of ways.”
‘Perfection’ – “That’s about girls getting caught up in the fashion industry and eating disorders. It’s a whole stage some girls go through. I went through it. I still notice how many girls struggle with it. The whole issue is really secretive, people don’t like to talk about it. I think anyone who hears that song and has gone through it will know what it is about, the whole isolating, controlling head space that girls get themselves into with dieting and weight loss.”
Knight emphasizes that “It’s easier to talk about personal issues through music than a conversation. I feel like I am a pretty open and positive person, but I can express the urgency of these darker emotions more in song.”
That urgency has been with her ever since she first picked up a guitar after her parents divorce when she was 8. “I still turn to writing songs to help me work out what I’m feeling,” she says. “I always end up writing about what I haven’t resolved or worked through. So all my songs are emotional songs. It’s like I’m engrossed in the bad stuff, but by the end of a song I feel great, purified.”
She wants that joy, sadness, anger and hope to translate to the people who are listening, for people to be able to relate the songs to their own lives, and in their own way. And sometimes too for them to hear one of her upbeat songs and just “feel sexy and get up and dance around while you’re getting dressed to go out.”
Laura Knight smiles, still thinking about how to define who she is, or who she might be: “There’s a lot of questions to answer, a lot of unknowns in my music and what might happen with my songs. But there’s at least a certainty I am headed there,” she says, pointing her eyes towards somewhere up ahead.
- Mark Mordue
