She may have just turned 20 but Lauren Spencer-Smith is no stranger to the pop charts.
The British-born Canadian-raised vocal powerhouse has been blowing up over the last couple of years since her hit single, Fingers Crossed, went viral and topped the charts around the world, months after she premiered the song on TikTok.
“I posted Fingers Crossed right after I wrote it and then for about two months it was all over TikTok – but I still hadn’t put it out [to buy or stream],” she laughs. “Everybody was getting mad at me, but it was definitely at a time at the beginning of TikTok where you could do that because people weren’t really using it to put out original music.”
Today, she has 6.5 million followers on the platform alone and back in 2021 when she shared the song – which went Top 5 in the UK and Top 20 in the US – the teen had already amassed a significant following thanks to her appearance on season 18 of ‘American Idol’ a year prior, where she made it to the Top 20 but was eliminated during the first week of remote shows.
It’s not an experience she regrets. “I purposefully went on the show knowing that there probably were going to be people more talented than me – I just needed to use it to get my name out there and build a following, which definitely worked to my benefit,” she shrugs. “So I wasn’t having mental breakdowns when I was kicked off the show because I knew the whole time that there was a chance I was not going to win, so I just made the best of it.”
Long before she got to performing for Luke Bryan, Katy Perry and Lionel Richie – plus the whole of America – Lauren knew music was her path. “I was obsessed with music when I was a kid, ever since I was like three years old, and I would do performances in the living room,” she smiles. “I knew I wanted to be a singer by the time I was five.”
What did her repertoire look like? “I was obsessed with singing Firework by Katy Perry – that was a very go-to song for me when I was five,” she laughs. “But when I was eight, I really got into Adele, who is my biggest inspiration in music.
“I’m sure my family hates me! Constantly, my brother would be like, ‘Shut up!’. People would ask me to be quiet and I’d be like, ‘Yes, I’m so sorry, you’re doing homework.’ And then I would forget and start singing again. Honestly, now that I’m older I’m like, ‘Why were you guys supportive of this?’ Because how I sounded when I was eight years old is not how I sound now. But my parents have been supportive of everything I wanted to do since I was young.”
When Fingers Crossed started getting traction and leapt to the top of the download charts, it wasn’t long before the teen, whose family is based in Vancouver Island, British Columbia, found herself jetting to the US to follow her musical ambitions. “Within two days, I was flying to New York and I didn’t come home for two months,” she recalls. “I was meeting with industry people and labels and all these different things. Doing promo runs for the song and going into radio stations. My life really did go from zero to 100.”
When it came to switching things up a gear, the young singer-songwriter was “very prepared” to go into meetings and say: “This is what I want my project to be and this is what I want it to sound like.” “As a kid, I watched every single documentary and every video that existed on the Internet, so I was like, ‘I got this, I’m prepared for this’. But I’ve always been very business-minded and I knew what I wanted when it came to my music and who I wanted to be as an artist,” she insists.
“I felt like it was more fun. It was more exciting. I just felt like something had finally worked, because I’d posted probably thousands of videos on the Internet at that point, so for something to finally go off – I was just excited!”
Over the summer, Lauren finally released her debut album, the gut-wrenching breakup LP ‘Mirror’, which went Top 20 on the UK Albums Chart. Of the project, she mused at the time: “I’ve been working on this album for years. It has been with me through so much in my life, the highs and the lows, and it means more to me than I can put into words. It tells a story of reflection, healing and growth.
“I went through a hard breakup, and the album tells the story of that all, the journey of that and now being in a more happy relationship. The title comes from the one thing in my life that’s seen me in every emotion through that journey – my bedroom and bathroom mirror.”
Now, she’s planning to return to the studio and set to work on its follow-up, keen to explore new possibilities with a wider group of collaborators, including fellow Canadian JP Saxe. “He’s my main inspiration for songwriting. When I was a kid I didn’t pay as much attention when it came to lyrics, but when I was 16 I really started only focusing on lyrics and not melodies, and it was his music that took me in that direction and got me really into songwriting,” she smiles.
“I’m really excited to branch out. I wrote my first album with a lot of people that I’m close to and we kind of stayed in that group, so I think it would be really cool to incorporate some other people into that group.”
Naturally, when it comes to the next 12 months there’s one thing on Lauren’s mind: “A lot of songwriting!” She chuckles: “I go live on Instagram and everybody’s like, ‘Where’s the second album?’ And it hasn’t even been six months. But people are already wanting new music from me, so I’m definitely just gonna go in the studio…”
‘Mirror’ is out now on Island/Republic.
