Lara Lavi never sleeps. To say she has been busy these past few decades would be an understatement.  

Many have pegged Lavi as a ray of light, a renaissance woman who embraces every inch of her ability as a new media/entertainment/finance law attorney, community activist and organizer, entrepreneur, entertainment company executive, business development and marketing specialist, film and TV director, producer & writer, artist manager, as well as a multi award winning Americana singer-songwriter.  

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Throughout her decades of professional life, Lavi is finally answering a life-long question a well-meaning therapist asked her years ago – Where is Lara in all of this?

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As an Americana singer songwriter, Lara Lavi has waited decades to return to her recording career. After several near starts, Lavi is finally putting out a series of albums starting with her upcoming release Mermaid Under A Desert Moon: Chronicles. After years of writing, recording demos and masters and shelving all her music in hard drives waiting for the right time to relaunch her career after leaving A&M Records, Lavi is finally returning to her authentic self not a moment too soon.

 

Lavi, a timeless award-winning songwriter, has written an exquisite collection of songs that document her creative life from 20 plus years ago all the way until now. How High Is Too High, the first track has a U2 - Daniel Lanois-Joshua Tree era vibe at the peak of the song asking the universal question that has pervaded Lavi’s psyche for as long as she can remember, “What do you say to the man who promises the moon but delivers only the sky?”  The song itself is breathtakingly dramatic, but coupled with Lavi’s power house vocals, the song is a journey in and of its self; setting us up for one banger after another.

 

Lavi took a major detour from her musician self in 1988 when she graduated from law school; a reluctant decision she underwent to unsuccessfully get on her parent’s good side given her family never understood her as an artist. She took a job as an in-house attorney for the Auburn, WA based Muckleshoot Indian Tribe. During her time with the Muckleshoot Tribe, she bonded with many elders and experienced her first Shaker funeral when the tribe’s patriarch died at 92 – The Ballad of Louis Star became an anthem for the Tribe, especially the Starr extended family. Louis Starr is Lavi’s musical response to experiencing the loss of this elder and the perspective it gave her related to her Indian lawyer job advocating for the last elk, the last salmon, the last cultural stand in the PNW Indian Country she served.

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The days of the wild wild elk herd fade
The memories buried in an old man’s grave
If you listen in the winter to the Chinook wind
You can hear Louis singing to his grandchildren

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Lavi honed her skills writing lyric-melodies and song co-writes as an artist in development for Warner Chappell’s Nashville office where she wrote with iconic writers including Pat Bunch, Andy Byrd, Michael Lunn and Steve Bogard. As an artist in development WC paired Lavi with everyone from Waylon Jennings to Bernie Taupin to Barry Manilow. Her training in Nashville is apparent in all her work including one of her piano vocal scaled down tracks on the album – Kansas.  This stark musical painting depicts a vivid picture of Lavi’s younger self going deep into the details of an experience she had with an ex boyfriend’s mom and sister in Lawrence, Kansas. The song creates such a vivid picture you can feel the wheat and the wind rip through your face as she sings 

 

I wanna be in Kansas with you
I wanna stand in a wheat field
I wanna feel the wind rip through our faces
I wanna go to Kansas places
I wanna follow you on your country roads
Flat and solitary
In a wake of Kansas dust
I wanna do what your people do
I wanna be in Kansas with you

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The title track Mermaid Under A Desert Moon, produced by world renowned producer and string arranger/ Phillip Peterson and Lavi’s own son Cameron Lavi-Jones of Seattle’s Alt Rock band King Youngblood, is a wild psychedelic rock masterpiece digging deep into Lavi’s torn heart of metaphorically living in a desert as a mermaid dreaming of the sea where she truly belongs. This angst drives Lavi in all her lyrical work.

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Why must we fix
What never was broken
Yet resist what is shattered
Or stands on the edge
Promises made
We still leave unspoken
As we listen for the unwritten tune
It’s the song of the mermaid under a desert moon

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Half the album was written and recorded mostly with Reed Ruddy back during Ruddy’s Kaye Smith and original Bad Animals - Studio X era.  Recently however, Lavi was introduced to producer multi-instrumentalist Ryan Leyva aka Johnny Nails. It is with Leyva that Lavi’s resurrection started showing real signs of life. Leyva stepped in and produced the newest songs on the album which make up the entire Side B of the vinyl release. The final track on the album – Chloe Tree – was written not so much about the death of her beloved 16-year-old spirit animal - labradoodle Chloe who went literally everywhere with Lavi until July 2025, but rather about the pain of loss and the hardness this world on fire has made her in recent years. The song is dark and haunting with a southern roots Americana feel.  Many have said that Chloe Treebelongs in the film Sinners. In this song, Lavi writes:

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Be like water
Let it wash right over
There ain’t no heaven
And there ain’t no hell
Best believe
I’m a sinner’s daughter
No idea
How this all resolves
 

Lavi may in fact have no idea how anything in her life will resolve except that her empirical truth is to record and release her songs and pray someone out there sees her light before her soul breaths deep in the mystery. To this end, Lavi believes the absolute strongest song on the album is her recently written Afraid to Cry. Lavi wrote this song out of exasperation at a low point in her 35-year marriage. She even told her husband to read the damn lyrics if he wanted to understand where she was coming from. Lavi’s son Cameron stepped in to help complete the writing of the song, produce it and play one of the most profound and moving guitar solos of his career. In Afraid to Cry she writes what every broken-hearted person has ever held inside:

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You shut down
And so did I
Hard pressed to laugh
Afraid to cry
But I still love you
After all these years
How do we get past fear?

 

Ryan Leyva mixed the song and Afraid to Cry gives us not only undeniable proof of Lavi’s ability as a serious artist but also a taste of the Tsunami of songs coming next musically for her.

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Says Lavi, “For years, I have served the careers of others I deeply admire, either as their attorney, manager or mentor. As meaningful as these roles have been, I have felt like the woman left to die on an erupting volcano making sure everyone else gets to safety except me. Something happened when I wrote Afraid to Cry with my son. Every ounce of my authentic self-started literally screaming in my brain to get out and make art. Rather than put myself back in therapy to try to cope with giving up on myself, I decided instead to go into the studio and create music just for the sake of the art and stop worrying about who to suck up to, or the politics of the music industry or what my Spotify numbers are this week. These are all things I have navigated for so long for others. At this point, I just want to let this music return me to me.”

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Lavi has a plan, an album a year – first with this initial release Mermaid Under A Desert Moon, and then Finish Line – an album she wrote much of with a former collaborator Mark Cardenas. Lavi will complete the trilogy with Last Honest Kiss. These albums give hope to Lavi’s creative surge. She also plans to finally complete and release her children’s lullaby Project Little Dreamers complete with an illustrated book with the lyrics she collaborated on with Canadian visual artist Karen Gilmore back when she was pregnant with her son Cameron.

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Lavi is credited with resurrecting the legendary Death Row Records from bankruptcy back in 2009, making sure all the artists owed money were paid and realigning the label so that it could eventually be acquired by a financial group led by Snoop Dogg. Higher education has always played a big part in Lavi’s development. After several years studying both animal behavior and economics at the University of Chicago Lavi took a break from school to work, first slinging drinks and then getting her real start in the music industry singing the blues at the Chicago institution - the Kingston Mines. Lavi has toured, with among others, Carol King, Sheryl Crow, Buddy Guy, The Band and Bonnie Rait who at one point sitting back stage during a lunch break called Lavi “the music industry’s best kept secret.”

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Explains Lavi, who the Village Voice once called “The quintessential Songstress of our times,” At this point in my life I guess I am living proof that a woman can return to her authentic self even if she spent decades away from her own true heart like a mermaid in the desert. Many women seem to identify with my message. At the end of the day, it is just incredibly freeing to make music just for the sake of the art without fear, or giving a damn about anything but the joy of creation. I wouldn’t be the songwriter I am now if I had not had a life time to write about.  It’s kind of like my song Emily Lies off my last album Inside the Red Room – “Wherever you go, that’s where you are.”  I’m where I am so supposed to be now and so ready to get on with it.”