Alicia Waller on finding the strength to record her new album Louder, Then
The following interview was edited and condensed from a conversation on June 30, 2026.
Dale Trumbore: I think a lot about music as memoir. A memoir is not a diary; a great memoir has a drive and a focus. It curates life experiences and transmutes them into not exactly lessons, but really personal information that serves other people. I think a lot about the ways that music can do that, and I get the impression that your new album, Louder, Then, is very much “music is memoir” for you.
Alicia Waller: I’m going to take those beautiful three words with me and likely share them with others, because I think that encapsulates something very clear that most generative musicians will understand.
I am from a suburb of Northern Virginia where it’s a very desirable, affluent area, and young Black kids learn the art of a particular dance—and we’re trained in it from a very young age—which is to be pleasant and not offensive and to understand how to navigate these predominantly white spaces. And one of the lessons that you learn is to not complain about race, not point to race, not excuse any challenge in your life. I was raised with that and took it very seriously. If something was hard, you’re not allowed to complain about that, and you don’t allow [race] to cross your mind.
And then 2020 happens, and you look around and you think, like, “Man, I think this thing is maybe real. I think that there’s something going on here that is pretty hard to combat.” So here I am with my extraordinary ambition, and I wanted to write about the things that I wasn’t meant to say, the things that I wasn’t meant to say as a woman: I love big. I have a desire to love. I have a desire to be feminine, to be sensual, to care, to mother, to nurture. I also have a desire to be freaking successful.
Oh my gosh, yes. Go on.
I wanted to write about these things and also write about the friction, too. So that “music as memoir”—I was ultimately writing about a woman who wants more than what society says she should. I was writing about this the other day, in fact: What happens when a woman puts aside what she’s supposed to do and just admits publicly who she is? I think that’s what my hope is with the project.
Hear Louder, Then on Spotify, Apple Music, and all other major platforms.
That’s amazing. Even in college, we were both really ambitious people. I don’t know if you feel this way, but I knew who I knew who I wanted to be, yet there was also so much self-doubt—so much external pressure and internal pressure. How do you get through that? How do you cut through the societal nonsense? Do you have things you do for your own mental and physical well-being, or your own creative process?
I’ve been on a journey of getting strong, physically, over the past few years, which first started like very esthetically—actually, not only esthetically, [but] I was just getting tired of the cycle. The kind of rebellious streak in me [was] like, “The answer can’t be me killing myself on a treadmill, starving myself. There must be a way to do this, right?” So, I started to hear about strength training and decided to give it a genuine shot. I was like, “Let’s see what happens in six months.” From there, it was mostly a curiosity, and then it became: “Wow, I can’t believe how easy this was.” That gets me back to the mental health aspect because strength training actually became a point of meditation for me.
I have a lot of drive in life. And in weightlifting, there are moments of intensity, but you’re actually hanging out a lot; you’re sitting and resting in between sets. It’s the most still I allow my mind to be in a day, and I really value that. I’m going to put in work that’s very simple, and then get an extraordinary benefit out of it. For example, one, the mental calm; two, looking kind of great in the end; and three, also just feeling strong. It feels great to feel capable. Over the last few years, the stronger that I’ve gotten, the more confidence that I get.
You push yourself constantly at your break. The point is to push yourself to where it’s a little too much. That is how you get stronger. Then, there’s a phenomenon that happens: you start to carry that into your life. This idea of, “I’m just going to add 2.5 pounds this week, and then, over time, I know that that’s going to turn into 30 pounds”—that increase of strength and discipline feeds into your life.
I love that. I have my dumbbells lined up behind me; I’ve gotten very into at-home lifting. The mental benefit of that has been so transformative for me, too. I feel like pushing yourself to failure is a perfect analogy for creativity too, right? You want to be pushing at that point where you’re just a little bit or a lot uncomfortable, but without pain. I love that it’s a meditation for you.
What has your experience of this album release been? I know you had your EP [Some Hidden Treasure] come out in February 2020, and that was a very different time in the world. What was your experience of releasing an album with Louder, Then, and what systems do you have in place to support you through that?
As I was kind of ideating about the next body of work [after Some Hidden Treasure], I came across the name Louder, Then in my head pretty early. I wanted to pick a title where the meaning was so clear to me that every time I was called to discuss it, or look at it, or interact with it, or share it, I would immediately know and feel what it meant. I was going to "keep being loud about it, keep sharing it.” I think that’s the only system that I put in place: to make the title clear, at least to me. Some people have admittedly been like, “What does this mean?” But it makes sense to me, which is what matters. And, as soon as I explain it, it makes sense to them too.
On the podcast Truth in This Art with Rob Lee, you say, “I use the term ‘vernacular music’ to express that it is a singularly identifiable expression of sounds through culture and through a given culture, and that we all have them, and to kind of equate them.” I love the way you express that we’re not putting “world music” into this other separate category.
Yeah. I didn’t go to a music program for graduate school. I decided to do a program that let me do music but also let me do what I wanted to do, and that ended up being at NYU, [with] a master’s degree that I ultimately called “International Relations & Music Diplomacy.” I was taking my voice lessons and making music, and I was beginning to flirt a little bit with a jazzy expression, but then I was also in class with the International Relations kids, and I loved it!
As a result of those classes, I started to think a lot about hegemony and the American-centric and Western-centric state of the world: American hegemony. Most of the time in international relations, you’re talking about it politically, but I started to really think about it culturally, because that’s what I was most interested in: how that affects human interaction. And so then around the subject of “world music,” I started to come to the conclusion that it’s entirely too Amero-centric. So I refuse to use that [term], because it’s just utterly misleading. It implies that the rest of “the world” is just one thing, when there are thousands of different, and rich, and deeply considered, vernacular forms all around the world.
I realized that I was consistently gravitating to the music that was representative of a people. The music [where], when you go to a place, everyone has an opinion on it and can tell you their thoughts because it’s just so representative. My first instinct was to call it “soul music”—because it represented the soul of a people. But American soul music is too well known, so I had to concede that using that as a term would be too confusing. So I came to the conclusion of “vernacular music”—“vernacular” as in, we all speak a language, it’s uniquely identifiable to a people—a vernacular representation of a musical expression.
So that’s why I’m very tied to that. That’s what I am most attracted to. So, when it came to me doing this [album], that’s how I was thinking of it. I was thinking in terms of the music vernaculars of my own culture—Black American music—which in this case resulted largely in soul music with jazz influences, and sometimes the blues. It’s essentially soul music as expressed through a jazz vernacular.
photo credit: Cherylynn Tsushima
Do you have any suggestions for conductors or performers in the classical space for how to integrate or move into that jazz vernacular?
Rhythm is a big thing for classical [musicians]. Our rhythm in classical is much more broad and loose because, while there are percussive elements in classical, there’s not time being kept in the same way. I remember when I first started working with a lot of jazz musicians, once they got comfortable with me and realized that I would be cool with their thoughts, they would say, “You kind of need to work on your time a little bit,” because I was a bit more broad. And I think that rhythm and pocket are probably the biggest differentiating markers between the classical musician versus the jazz musician. And if the classical musician desires to enter into that space and to have more fluidity across genres, the rhythm and pocket is where to find it.
I want to quote you back to yourself one more time. You said on The Truth in This Art podcast, “If you’re going to legitimately lend a voice to interpreting the musics of others, you have to offer your perspective as well, and that is truly what took me, finally, to songwriting.” I love that perspective so much.
Going back to this idea of American hegemony: While in this country I might exist largely as a minority, in the world I am an American, and that still comes with a lot of power. So as I’m interacting with the musics of others, I started to realize the only way that I would go further and deepen my own artistic practice is if I started to interact with my own vernaculars and know that more deeply as a part of a larger practice. That truly is what took me into songwriting in the first place. I remember talking to one of my best friends in the world who is a beautiful pianist and now works in publishing. I was casually like, “You know [how], when we were younger, you’d listen to songs and you’d think what you would do differently, like, ‘Oh, they should have done this instead?’” She was like, “No, I never thought that.” That was shocking to me, because I thought we all did—I thought that was just a part of loving music.
That’s what it is to be a composer!
Exactly, but I sincerely didn’t know that! I was always such a strong singer, and I think that sometimes when [one] gift is recognized, it often comes to the detriment of other musical capacities. Looking back and seeing what I’ve become, it now makes sense: “Oh, you always were like this.” I still feel this now, every time I want to cover someone actually. In my spare time, I tend to listen to instrumental music more than vocal. I was just thinking about I Want You by Marvin Gaye, which is one of the most extraordinary openings, and is entirely instrumental. I could listen to that opening over and over again. Actually, I often do! It is so beautiful, the way that those musicians are conversing with one another.
So, to be honest with you, sometimes I feel a little guilty. I know that I’m supposed to be showing off my voice, but every time I do a cover, I gravitate more to the compositionally more interesting [music] as opposed to vocalistic fireworks. I think that’s another indication of, “Oh, this girl actually always was attracted to the construction of the song.” But I still didn’t fully understand this about myself until I kept wanting to sing others’ songs and noticed a trend in the type of music I was wanting to cover. Then finally, when I realized, “oh, you like colorful, dense world-building,” I was like, well, let me see what happens if I try to write my own. And then we have Some Hidden Treasure.
And then there’s Louder, Then, which is entirely in English, and there’s only one cover song, right? That feels like such a choice. It goes to the title of the album being a beacon: you’re like, “This is me.” It goes back to “music as memoir.” Obviously, art is not necessarily always drawn from our own life; it can be about a character. But it feels so personal to know that you love covers and singing in different languages, yet you chose to put out this album in English, with your own compositions.
This jazz musician [Victor Wooten] was talking about finding your voice and not copying others. And the reality is that we all have a unique voice; it’s just that our heroes have the courage to embrace it. That’s the only difference between us! I just think he is so dead on the money here—“having the courage to embrace it.” So when you mention “music as memoir” and “the genre of one’s own,” I think—and going back, super meta, to the idea of Louder, Then itself—I’ve been simply trying to find the courage to embrace who I am.
