Leighton Meester Q&A: Music Is 'A Window Into Me'

Where are you now?
I'm filming this movie called 'The Oranges' and it's been amazing so far. It's with Hugh Laurie, Catherine Keener, Allison Janney, Oliver Platt, Adam Brody and Alia Shawkat.

That cast doesn't suck.
[Laughs] Not at all, it's really great. It's about two families that live across the street from each other and are super close friends and my character, Nina, she's pretty much absent from the whole family for a while. She comes back and starts to have a relationship with Hugh's character, David, and it really disrupts all their lives.

I've talked with a lot of people who do both music and film and there's a feeling that you can express yourself musically because it's your words, versus those of a director or screenwriter.
Absolutely. Being in a film you have to be successful for the writer's vision and the director, whatever they want. Obviously, you can lend yourself, and that's the beauty of acting, it's being part of yourself. But my music has been enhanced by my acting in the sense that when I sing, it's performance. But as far as writing and creating music and the people that you work with, it is a different world, and you can start from square one and really build a song from whatever your heart desires. And that's the most fulfilling. It's the same thing with people who act; if you love it, you don't necessarily care about the commercial success of something, as long as it's quality. That's how I also feel about music, I just want it to be good, I want people to get a sense of me through my music.

So will people get more of a sense of you through this album?
Yeah, I think so. It's a mixture of the past four or five years of my life. The songs I've released so far, I'm really pleased with people's response. They definitely reflect who I am as a person and an artist. I can appreciate all different kinds of music, but I'm having a good time making essentially pop dance music. And lyrically, since I've written everything, people can see a window into me and how I feel about certain things.

In writing the songs for the album was there anything you discovered about yourself that maybe surprised you?
I've had raw acoustic songs, pop ballads, piano ballads, super-electro very Euro-sounding ... I've done rapping, I've worked with other artists, so I've done the full gamut and been able to discover what I really love. I've discovered different things about how I've changed over the years and this is why I like to write. If you're a writer, as you go through something, like if you're in love or if you're in a relationship, you have to write it, because you're not gonna feel that way forever. Feelings change and eventually you don't feel that way anymore. And so it's good to write it down and make it into something because it captures that moment so perfectly and that feeling. I've written a couple of songs about real things in my life, real heartache. I don't feel that way now, but when I look back I'm like, "Oh wow, I really remember that," and that puts it in perspective so well.

So the album gives some definite insight into your views on relationships.
All of my songs do represent at least a snapshot of what was going on in my life at the time that I wrote it.

I've heard 'Your Love's A Drug,' and it's such a fun, catchy song -- one of those tunes you can't get out of your head all day.
Good, thank you. Recently, I've been working with this band who have taken a lot of my music, especially some of the really poppy stuff, and made them very bluegrass-y. When they perform they're electric, but they do really beautiful acoustic songs and they recomposed a bunch of my music so I've been playing and performing with them lately. They're called A Check in the Dark.


Which style do you prefer doing live -- the slowed-down Check In The Dark stuff or the dance-pop?
That's actually a really tough question ... I don't know. My last show with A Check in the Dark was really impromptu and turned out beautifully. I think I'm going to be kind of addicted to that style of performance from now on. But I do love going and performing at big clubs -- what we've done so far, which is working with the original tracks that I've been doing and dancing.

But you have been doing clubs?
Yeah, I've gone to Vegas a couple of times and we've performed in Miami, a few songs, smaller sets, at stadium shows. I usually have a DJ, a keyboardist, a drummer and two dancers, so it's like a band. My songs are very club friendly, so I really like performing them in a club, and I just want to get to the point where everyone is dancing their asses off when we're performing 'cause a lot of times they're like, "Oh, there she is. Let me take a picture." I want them to get drunk and have their groove on.

What songs get you dancing your ass off?
I really like that song by Young Joc, 'It's Going Down.' I like 'TiK ToK,' I like the Black Eyed Peas a lot, 'I Gotta Feeling,' stuff like that, about how you're popping bottles and you don't have to worry about tomorrow.

Who else have you worked with on the album?
I've worked very closely, pretty much on every song, with Shahine Ezell and the other producers that I've worked with -- Kenna, Stuart Price, Mike Caren, Paul Oakenfold. I wrote two songs with Kara DioGuardi. I also wrote with Jupiter Rising, who's really awesome, a guy named K.O., who's an incredible producer and songwriter. I did a song with Toby Gad. I've done a couple of songs with the Writing Camp, and I've written a couple of songs with a girl named Bonnie McKee.

You've got a film coming up, 'Love Don't Let Me Down,' that has a lot going on musically.
The music for 'Love Don't Let Me Down,' oh my god, it's so good. It's country music, and Gwyneth Paltrow's material is more traditional country, really big music -- it's amazing. She sounds beautiful. My music in the movie is a little bit more current, very pop. I have a couple of songs that I feel like are really good in there.

Were there any country singers you looked to as role models or for inspiration?
I worked very closely with Nathan Chapman, he produced all the songs. He's a teenage girl trapped in a man's body, so we ended up doing a song together, a country song, which was a new experience, but it was really addictive and he's incredible -- the music we made together is amazing, very beautiful. But there are a couple of more poppy songs that we did that could easily cross over, and he worked with Taylor Swift and Jewel. Somebody else that I really looked to for the movie, especially for performance, was Carrie Underwood.

See Leighton Meester's latest music video, 'Somebody to Love,' featuring Robin Thicke:

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