Boston-native Lucy Frost discovered her love for music at a young age, using songwriting and composing as an outlet for emotional distress and life’s pressures. Since she graduated from Berklee College of Music, with a focus on film scoring and multi-instrumentalism, she has been working for both artists and sync companies. But with the release of her debut album ‘Vitamins’, she decided that now is the time to put all her talent back into her own artistry. We sat down with Frost, now based in Los Angeles, to talk about the differences between the American East and West Coast, her love for cinematic visuals and sounds, and so much more.
When Frost first moved to LA, she was actually more involved in the world of composers than musicians. “A lot of people I knew in the industry that I met in Boston were from LA. And I was doing more film music editing, so it just made sense to come to LA because that’s where a lot of my work was happening.” After she graduated, she decided to “work on [her] own artist stuff and do more songwriting”. Has her East-to-West Coast move impacted her songwriting? “Definitely! The things I was doing back in Boston were really affecting my own music and writing because I was writing for other artists, and a lot of them were very pop-centred and R&B. I almost felt like I hadn’t done songwriting before; I just collaborated with friends. It became very systematic. On the other hand, it was really awesome because I met so many new artists and worked with so many different people. I’ve just kind of taken what I’ve learned and narrowed it down, and now I work with my favourite producers who I met through working with another artist.”
She tells us the first instrument she ever played was her sister’s keyboard. “Our grandmother gifted it to my older sister when she was in fourth grade. She touched it once, and then I played it every day. And my parents were like, ‘It was supposed to be hers!’”, Frost remembers. “I was never forced to do lessons; I genuinely developed this love for it, and that’s how it all started.”
Back then she would just play whatever would come to her mind, not realising she was actually composing original songs. “Now I think it was my first outlet. I was a really shy kid, and I held a lot in. I would come home after a day at school, be really quiet, and sit at the piano and just play in rage”, she laughs. “After an hour, I’d feel so much better! I didn’t realise it at the time, but looking back, making music still gives me the same kind of relief to this day. Being in LA and driving and putting someone I love on and screaming, yelling the lyrics, it’s just a cathartic release, you know?”
Frost’s first musical idols were rather unusual for a child, as she “loved everything film scores”. “I was obsessed with Danny Elfman and Philip Glass. Glass is more of a pianist-composer, very odd guy, but he just writes those beautiful melodies. When I was young, my mom and my grandmother were force-feeding me ‘Phantom of the Opera’ and all the classics. I’d watch a movie, get so inspired, and because my ears are really good, I’d start playing without sheet music. My friends all loved Rihanna, and I did too, but my catalogue was just expanding to different things as well.”
Subconsciously, she believes the music she grew up with still impacts her own artistry to this day. “There is that composer side of me still, and whenever I freelance and score a film, all that stuff comes right back.” Yet, she consciously likes to lean more towards the ‘90s rock her parents exposed her to. “I love Billy Joel; he influences my songwriting a lot!”
The concept for her debut album ‘Vitamins’ was unsurprisingly “so cinematic”. “I got really burnt out writing for other people, so I took the time to actually just hone in on my music and my sound. I had these songs I’ve been sitting on, and I started putting them together, and then suddenly I had this click in my head where I was like ‘I already love scores and cinematic worlds, and now I can do the same thing with my songs and thread them together!’”. “I was totally nerding out”, she laughs. “All these songs came together as a storyline; they became a world, and that’s so cool!”
Frost writes mainly from personal experience, sitting down with her guitar and playing any melody that comes to mind. “Five years ago my songwriting was very much like, ‘I’m going through a breakup and fuck that guy!’. Now I’m less like that; I do it a little sneakier”, she winks.
‘Stray’ is her favourite song on the album and she can’t wait for it to be released – “I just love that song!”. “Musically, it hits me, and I just feel relaxed. It’s very much just in this other world, and I love my writing on it. Sometimes I look back on writing and be like, ‘That was cheesy. Why did I say that?’, but I just love this one so much.”
The hardest song for her to write was ‘Morphine’. “I had written it acoustically and just on guitar, and it was this very Elliot Smith: dark, personal, intimate. I remember I went to three different producers for that, which I usually don’t. I went to the first one, and we created the chorus, and then I went to the other ones, and it just wasn’t coming together. I rewrote some of it because when I first wrote it, I still wasn’t quite sure what my sound was, and I was curating something based on what I was thinking. But the moment I came to the producers that did the rest of my album, they crushed it! They did such an awesome job, and they treated it like each part was very separate and unique.”
Aesthetically, Frost likes anything “dark, kind of creepy but also nature oriented”. The album cover is a picture of her dimly lit in grass. “I chose that because I’ve been using my camcorder and doing weird videos, and I also just love editing those. I like glitchy elements in video editing and the home-videos kind of vibe! And earlier this year I’ve been working with my friend on film visuals for ‘Vitamins’. All throughout I would say I’m into the dark, eerie, cinema vibe.”
What exactly does ‘Vitamins’ mean for her? “Clearly, there’s a common thread of drugs”, she laughs and assures us: “I’m not a crazy drug person!” “I was using these metaphors of morphine and prescriptions and pills because I thought we can all relate to the feeling of being addicted; you don’t have to take drugs. We feel empty, we feel hallow, we feel cathartic release; I think there’s all these concepts within that that are just so relatable. If you’re going through a bad breakup like I was, you’re hooked on this person, and you’re having withdrawals. The whole song ‘Real’ is about social media and AI in this new age of feeling brain-dead and feeling addicted to that world but also trying to escape. It was originally called ‘Vitamins’ because of another song that I scraped that was basically summing up all this bad relationship stuff; feeling like you’re just two people that are not gonna work, no matter how hard you try. I think the title still resonated with me because to me it means…I mean, people take vitamins in the morning as a routine; you don’t think twice about it. Living in LA, there’s also this influencer culture that I think embodied a lot of this album, like feeling that brainrot and feeling stuck and not knowing who you are. You’re just doing something to try and feel better. I also think you can take each song as a vitamin, and it helps you cope.”
In a way, ‘Vitamins’ brings Frost right back to where she started: sitting at a keyboard and turning whatever she couldn’t quite put into words into music. Only now, her outlet has grown into an entire world of its own, and songs about everything we become a little too dependent on – people, screens, routines, and all the things we convince ourselves will make us feel better.
After years of composing, collaborating and writing for other artists, Frost is finally putting that energy back into herself. ‘Vitamins’ feels less like a reinvention and more like all the different sides of her artistry meeting in one place: the shy kid rage-playing her sister’s keyboard, the film-score obsessive, the songwriter and the LA creative fascinated by the world around her.
And if each song really is its own little vitamin, Frost has put together a neat prescription, entirely of her own.
Written by Vicky Madzak // photography by Sydney Lemons
