INTERVIEW: Laine Hardy on ‘Other LA’ and what he learned on Idol

Laine Hardy shot to fame upon winning the 17th season of American Idol. This year he has released a string of hits, including a new Christmas song. Here, we interview Laine about the release of his new single ‘Other LA’ and his experiences since American Idol.

Hello! How has the last year been? It must have been very strange coming off ‘American Idol’ and then not long after going into quarantine? 

Yeah, I mean this year has been eventful with COVID, it’s a little crazy right now. It’s been different to a physical on the road tour, but it’s a different way of being able to connect with my fans and I think it’s really cool.

You grew up in a very small town, how do you think that that’s shaped your music and your sound?

Growing up, I had a lot of influences from all kinds of different genres of music and the way I was raised definitely had an impact on the way I play music now and the way I create music is all reflected from that.

It must have been a big transition from that small town to Idol, so how was that experience for you? Was it a huge learning curve? 

I had to learn fast, right when I got there, I didn’t know what to experience at all, everything was so fast-paced. Going from playing locally in bars, restaurants and festivals and stuff to all of a sudden, American Idol came around and the whole process was just so crazy. I had to learn fast, but I learned a lot in that small amount of time.

Well there’s all the other stuff that you must have had to learn quickly, even the simple things like interviews and staging…

Yeah at the time, when you’re going through everything, you’re going through it fast and you don’t notice it at the time, but you’re really learning a lot of things along the way.

You put out ‘Tiny Town’ this year and you’ve talked about how important that song is to you, so can you talk about the first time that you heard that song? 

The first time I heard that song I was at Michael Knox’s office – that’s who’s producing my stuff – and we were getting some songs together, for what we were going to record. He played that song and I thought ‘wow, I really relate to that,’ Michael Tyler wrote that song, himself, he’s from Missouri and it’s crazy that everything he wrote about is so relatable to me.

How did you connect to Michael Knox himself – he’s written with some heavyweight talent – so what was it like working with him?

At first it felt unreal, it felt really crazy to say he was producing myself, he’s so awesome and really easy-going and easy to work with. He can put a bunch of jumbled up ideas into one straight path and line and I gave him all my unorganised ideas of what I wanted my sound to be, he put it into one straight line.

In terms of the new single – Other LA – can you talk about that song and how moving to Nashville has affected your songwriting?

I wrote that song right before the quarantine here, I was home for a while and then we wound up recording it. I love how the song sounds, Michael did a great job with that. Being out in Nashville, I came out here, right before I won American Idol, I came out here, didn’t know anything or anybody. I started writing all day long with all these amazing songwriters and I was, I was nervous. I didn’t know one thing about writing a song, I came out here and the first write I went to, I was so nervous. The songwriting community out here, they’re all so kind and they have that Southern hospitality mind-set, I thought it wasn’t as bad or tough as I thought. They were so easy-going.

You built this huge fan base during American Idol, was it really daunting to put out music knowing there were so many people waiting to hear it? 

Well I didn’t know what to expect, everything was so unpredictable at that point. During the show, I didn’t know that I learned this, but you can’t predict what’s going to happen, you can plan things around some kind of schedule but things are not always predictable. I had to go at it like that.

You’ve released your Christmas single recently, how fun was that to put out? 

That was an idea my A&R had, he mentioned it to me one day, he said ‘hey, what do you think about doing a Christmas song this year?’ I thought that would be really cool, so we started browsing through the catalogue of all the essential Christmas songs that everyone is listening to at this time of year, we had the idea of ‘Please Come Home for Christmas.’

Thank you Laine for taking the time to chat with me!

Thank you.

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