Lauren Jauregui is itching to release her music. An alum of the former girl group Fifth Harmony, the 22-year-old is now going solo, and her excitement is noticeably uncontainable when she visits the BAZAAR.com offices to play some of her unreleased songs.
During the playbacks, she doesn’t just bop her head to the beat. She dances in her chair, mimics performing, and harmonizes with the backup vocals. You can tell she’s proud of what she’s made. These songs are like her children. “They’re like little beings!” she fawns between tracks. “They have lives of their own.”
This year has been nonstop ride for Jauregui. In March, Fifth Harmony announced it’s going on an indefinite hiatus so its members could pursue solo endeavors. In May, the band concluded its final tour. After coming home from the road, Jauregui only took a week off, and by the end of the month, she was hitting the studio and starting the next phase of her career.
“I had so much pent up sh*t that I wanted to get out,” she says, hanging her legs over the armrest of a chair. “Once it clicked for me that I was a good songwriter and that I can do it, it was like a floodgate just completely opened.”
Jauregui was involved in, if not fully responsible for, the writing for all of the songs for her debut album, which has no release date yet. She says she worked with about two or three co-writers on the tracks she’s considering for the final cut of the project. Her producers include Illangelo—one of The Weeknd’s longtime collaborators.
At midnight, Jauregui finally released her first solo track, “Expectations.” Although she’s previously dropped collaborations with artists like Halsey and Ty Dolla $ign, this song is entirely her own. In it, a minimal, bluesy guitar track backs her raspy, soulful vocals as she speculates why her partner hasn’t come home yet. It’s a sultry, stripped down departure from the sugary, pop and hip-hop-crossover hits of Fifth Harmony’s catalog, and a strong introduction to Jauregui’s next chapter.
The songstress plans to release more tracks soon. From our listening session, Jauregui plays a couple of power ballads, including “Expectations,” a more upbeat song with intense female choral harmonies that she vocal-produced, and a song that she says is about “me liking girls.” (Jauregui came out as bisexual in 2016.)
“This whole year has just been this super transformative connection process of getting back to and evolving into who I am right now,” Jauregui says. “I’m very different from when I was younger. I’m a lot wiser, but still me. I’m glad I get to share that.”
The Miami native auditioned for The X-Factor in 2012, when she was just 16 years old. She didn’t make it far as a solo contestant, but she was put into a girl group later known as Fifth Harmony and placed third in the competition. The band released an EP the following year and a debut album in January 2015.
Other former Fifth Harmony members are already making their individual marks on the music world. Camila Cabello, who left the group in December 2016, saw her eponymous debut album go number one and her hit “Havana” become the most-streamed song by a female artist on Spotify. Normani Kordei, who now just goes by her first name, teamed up with fellow budding pop star Khalid for a collab that became a pop radio favorite. Dinah Jane also released a single last month, and Ally Brooke dropped a duet back in January.
As the five artists continue to carve their own paths, Jauregui is wary that their careers will inevitably get compared to each other’s. “It’s a joke,” she scoffs. But she isn’t here for shallow comparisons of women’s successes. “I’m praying for the day when I uplift one woman that it doesn’t mean that all of these other women didn’t deserve it,” she says.
If anyone is more eager than Juaregui for her music, it’s her fans. After dropping “Expectations” at midnight, her followers from Mexico to The Philippines showered her with devoted praise with reaction videos or cover clips on social media. “They’re so ready,” she says. “That’s why I’m so excited to start feeding them.”
Here, Jauregui tells BAZAAR.com what it was like going solo, collaborating with boyfriend Ty Dolla $ign, and the dangers of pitting women against each other.
Jauregui realized her songwriting abilities with a composition called “Inside”. She says she’s still reworking the production to see whether or not it’ll end up on the album, but it was an aha moment for her.
“It was just the first time that I put pen to paper and allowed myself to just flow, because the producer—his name is Khaled [not the DJ] and he’s a friend of mine—he really tapped into me and was like, ‘Yo, why are you so hard on yourself? Just do it. Just get on the mic.’ I would have him leave the room to even put down a melody because I was so anxious that I would sing out of tune and people would think I was whatever. I was just super in my head. Now, in retrospect, it’s so dumb. But at the time, it was so real.”
Another influential moment was sitting in on Ty Dolla $ign’s writing session with Alicia Keys. The R&B legend is Jauregui’s “idol”—she even audition for The X-Factor with her song, “If I Ain’t Got You.”
“Watching someone who I look up work with such a vulnerability was so eye-opening, so therapeutic and healing for me. I was like, ‘If she can do it, I can do it. I can really do this. And she likes my ideas, so maybe she’ll listen to my music one day and know that she had that kind of influence on me.’ I am so grateful to Ty for even allowing me in the session. He has been such a believer in me and pushing me like, ‘You’re great. Show me your songs. Let me see. Let me hear what you’re doing.’”
Jauregui and Dolla $ign’s collab, “In Your Phone,” from his 2017 album, Beach House 3, currently boasts over 12 million streams on Spotify.
“He actually wrote it in the studio, and then we were in the car going home and he was just playing me what he had done that day, ’cause he does like 10 songs in a day sometimes. [Claps her hands together] Everything that he does is amazing. He was playing me songs, and ‘In Your Phone’ had an open second verse, and I was like, ‘Yo, could I get on this?’ And he looked at me, he was like, ‘Yeah, well sh*t, let’s go!’”
She says Ty helped her grow as an artist.
“He’s more of like a beats person, and I’m more of a lyricist, so we listen to each other’s opinions about each other. He’ll listen to my advice as far as lyrics go on how to string something, and then vice versa if he hears something. Because he’s a musician. He plays bass, piano, drums. You name it, he plays it. And he produces himself. He has a plethora of knowledge that I haven’t even tapped into, on top of the fact that he’s had more years on me in this industry. He’s so in-tune with what sounds good and what kind of frequencies to tap into, like, ‘Oh, that needs a bass.’”
“Expectations” was inspired by one of their minor arguments.
“I was in a little bit of a dramatic place when I wrote it, to be honest. We had just had a little fight, like a super blip of a fight, and then I was thinking about it the next day ’cause I was still pissed. When I went into the studio and I was talking through it, I said, ‘I wish I didn’t have expectations. I wish that wasn’t a thing.’ We get caught up in our expectations of things and it ruins everything, and it makes you act out dramatically because you can’t just accept something for what it is.
“So that song was an exploration of wanting to get over that, but still being stuck in that ‘I have feelings’ mindset. I’m sitting there in bed thinking about all these things that could’ve happened, and none of them did. Literally nothing that I thought happened happened, so it was just a waste of a fight. But I got a great song out of it! So f*ck it!”
Her transition from a Fifth Harmony member to a solo artist in one summer was a baptism by fire, but she’s always stayed true to herself.
“I was me since I was a child. I’ve been this person, and my parents raised me to be exactly who I am, always fostered my soul and who I really was. Nuances are what they are, but growing up, I always felt like I could be myself, and my family loved and supported me no matter what. So when I got into this group when I was 16, I felt like it kinda stifled me in a lot of different ways. One of them was creativity. I went through so much thinking that I wasn’t good enough, and I wasn’t capable of doing what I love, which is art. I love art, and that’s what I’ve always been good at.
“I went through so much thinking that I wasn’t good enough”
“Somewhere along those six years, I convinced myself that I wasn’t good at it anymore, and I wasn’t worth it. But it all taught me exactly what I needed to know to be where I’m at right now. I would’ve never been able to be where I’m at, having the opportunities that I do, or the respect that I do going into this sh*t if it weren’t for the group and if it weren’t for what we accomplished together. I’m so grateful for the experience, but at the same time, also incredibly grateful to have come to this point, at this place now where I can breathe and I don’t have to question myself so much, or compare myself and my capabilities to anyone around me.”
In 2016, Jauregui came out as bisexual in a impassioned op-ed where she called out Trump supporters after the election. Now that she’s writing and performing her own music, she’s freer to express her sexuality in her songs. One song she played is about her being attracted to women; some of her other tracks address a love interest that goes by “he,” but in most songs, she uses the universal pronoun “you.”
“[Fifth Harmony’s music] wasn’t my music, so I couldn’t express anything that was particular to me, especially when it doesn’t speak for everyone’s experience. I didn’t want to do that ’cause not any of the girls are, I don’t believe. I feel like although my sexuality seems to have become a huge part of my identity, I don’t really take it so heavy.
“Who we spend time within our bedrooms is nobody’s business at the end of the day. Yeah, I love souls and I love all humans, and I kind of probably limited myself with the word ‘bisexual’ because that binary doesn’t exist, and people are just who they are. I am who I am. I don’t understand society’s obsession with who people are sleeping with. That does not define anything about a human being.”
Jauregui says her sexuality is “just as present in the music as it is in my life. It’s not something I think about.”
“I’ll allude to it or I’ll write a song, ’cause that one song, about me liking girls, is also about Catholicism. And if you listen, all of the words that I’m using are religious metaphors or euphemisms. But basically, it’s just alluding to how it’s a ‘sin’ to be sexual with a woman. I always thought that was so hypocritical because I know that God loves me regardless. I feel God. Every day, I talk to God.
“Sexuality a fluid thing. It shouldn’t have to be this way for anyone to feel smaller than or less than because of who they love or who they want to have sex with. We’re all humans. We all fall in love, and we all have sex. And if you don’t have sex, you’re asexual, cool for you, too.”
Jauregui says the media has a sexist tendency to depict women like they’re competing against each other, while it doesn’t do the same for men.
“We could talk about award shows, we could talk about the culture in general; I just feel like we have this tendency to make it out to be that only one woman can win. I see so many men with a platform, and they work with each other on stuff, and they get on each other’s tracks, or they don’t, and they talk shit about each other, but they still respect each other.
“We have this tendency to make it out to be that only one woman can win.”
“And I’m talking from a media standpoint; they still allow the space for the men to exist where it’s not a competition, where it’s just a matter of greatness, and they don’t allow that same space for women. They really feed off of their click bait of pitting women against each other and making it out to be some sort of ‘who’s better, who’s prettier, who’s skinnier’, or who has a ‘better body’.
“It’s just unnecessary, truthfully, ’cause we’re all so different. There’s no way you can say that one person is better than another because we have different energies. Each person is an individual, so I feel like that whole catty culture really stems from the media. And then when the media runs with a story, then everyone’s believing something, there’s no humanization of these women, and what pitting them up against each other would make each of them individually feel about their own abilities.
“That gets to you, when you’re like, ‘Why does this person keep getting more attention?’ And it’s like, “Oh, because she’s the ‘winner.’ But what do you mean? There’s like 30 of us that are winning right now. We’re on everybody’s playlists. It’s not like everyone’s listening to only one girl. I know that everybody’s playlist is filled with Kehlani, SZA, Dua Lipa, Alessia Cara, you name it. There’s a million girls right now making dope music. Connectivity is involved in their lyrics, and they’re really vibing and giving good messages, and it still is the media’s purpose to somehow make it so that only one of them can win. ‘Who’s the winner of it all?’ Nobody, we’re all winners. We’re all winners.”
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
Stream Lauren Jauregui’s “Expectations” below.
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