Colorful lights shined onto a vocalist’s face decorated in clown makeup as their raspy voice assembled a crowd to gather.
“I feel like a stranger to myself and a ghost to everybody else,” NE student Lore Love sang. “I’m a roll of the dice on my charisma for the night. The life of the party depending on who I want tonight.”
Titled “Life of the Party,” it’s the first of seven songs their band Dead Week played on Sept. 27 at Bruised House, a small Keller music venue Lore runs, advertises, sets up, takes down and sometimes even where they perform.
Love is the lead singer-songwriter for Dead Week and plays guitar, is a vocal coach, a lead coordinator for a solo artist program, the planner for Bruised House, a student and can vocally impersonate different instruments.
“I used to hyperfixate on a song and would loop it endlessly and try to mimic every single little tiny thing, always analyzing where I feel it in my body,” Love said. “I can do a pretty solid trumpet impression.”
Love pressed their lips to the left side of their mouth, raised their shoulders up, tightened their neck muscles and continued by singing different trumpet notes with vibrato.
“The voice is weird, but you can do pretty much anything with it,” Love said. “I didn’t have any money growing up, but I’ve always been very fixated on music, and I wasn’t ever gonna let that stop me.”
For as long as Love can remember, they’ve been deconstructing and reconstructing music and sound. There was no specific genre or band in which they narrowed their focus. Everything interested their child mind, and they studied everything.
“Chronically, over and over again, I’d listen until I had every sound, every part memorized. And even then, I don’t think I could ever truly get my fill because there’s always something going on,” Love said. “All the different voice parts that are happening in that. Also, the instrumentation, I would mimic all of those vocally.”
Once they could wrap a hand around the neck of a guitar, Love said their passion for music became an unstoppable force absorbing their entire being.
“It’s weird, it sounds so silly, like it always just felt like my divine thing I needed to do,” Love said. “This was my thing. If I wanted to truly have a life with this, I need to run at it, full force.”
Throughout grade school, Love was in choir and theatre. They even took guitar and voice lessons at The Rock Mill, a Keller music academy, where they teach lessons now.
“We all just have that thing we need,” Love said. “I took a break from performing one time when I was 16, and it was around the pandemic, and I was so sad. It almost feels like a thing I physically need to do for my sanity.”
Performing, writing and singing, Love never stops working. However, they said it doesn’t feel like a job when they’re doing what they love.
“It feels so visceral and cathartic,” Love said. “It’s beautiful, and also it’s a release. It’s like you’re letting out all of your deepest feelings. You’re screaming, almost healing to some degree, but also addicting.”
Love’s addiction has taken over every part of their life in the greatest way. Their friendships, careers and hobbies all incorporate their love for music in some way. And when they’re not performing, teaching, studying or planning, they’re writing.
“They take a lot of inspiration from the world around them, or what’s immediately happening in a moment, and they’ll just jot down lyrics,” said Alex Fox, the guitarist for Dead Week.
There is no equation for their writing method. Love takes the world around them and expresses their thoughts through lyrical storytelling.
“As human beings we experience emotions, just in different cadences,” Love said. “So, writing in a way is very deep and personal to me but also feels like it can be applicable to anyone at the same time.”
Fox said it is Love’s raw emotion they let out that has led him to discover his own uniqueness, how to express it and use innovatively.
“They really make the gears in my brain turn,” Fox said. “They kind of force me to be on my toes creatively all the time now.”
He’s been in projects with resilient people before. He said the industry is full of capable people, but Love stands out among the rest because of how they support others.
“Being able to work with someone who is so creative, who’s so unafraid to be super expressive with their vision … it’s very refreshing,” Fox said. “They can be a little hardheaded sometimes, and I love them for it. They just have a way of wanting.”
Bassist for Dead Week and Alex’s partner, Caylee Fox, said Love’s way of wanting also opened her up to being more creative. Through listening with care, Caylee said Love’s energy allows her to comfortably share ideas.
“They’re just so open and silly and whimsical,” Caylee Fox said. “When I met them, I was very shy and timid, and since then, I’ve become less shy and timid.”
Love advocates for her and the community in more ways than she can count, and to Caylee, it’s their character that changes people.
“They’re this very thoughtful also cheerful character that makes a room light up,” she said. “It’s just instantly, you want to laugh. You want to smile. They’re such a light.”
NE student Chloe Sisk met Love at one of Dead Week’s shows in February. Since then, Sisk said Love has had a big impact on her life.
“Lore is so supportive,” Sisk said. “Anytime I’ve ever expressed or anyone around us has ever expressed interest in doing something creative or doing something to better themselves, Lore is always head first into it.”
Sisk had gone to shows before and worked on projects, too. However, Love’s passionate nature has pushed Sisk to become more confident in her abilities.
“Lore has inspired me to entirely be myself,” Sisk said. “I would have never been able to have fun and express myself and dance and talk to people without them.”
