The Harmonic Genius of Lau Noah

So this is Lau Noah. She is a Catalan composer and songwriter that I think is one of music's best kept secrets. Her music is harmonically dense and lyrically rich.

Which explains why she has collaborated with the crocked one himself, Jacob Collier, alongside many virtuoso musicians like Shai Maestro and Chris Thile. Her music is just unlike anything that I've ever heard before.

Check it out, man.

This stuff is crazy. It's colorful and intense. The key changes are surprising and evocative. But what is so mind boggling about this stuff is that she is self-taught.

She does not know any music theory, and this was apparently one of the first compositions she ever wrote. I can barely wrap my head around this. How do you have such deep harmonic language without the technical training? I asked Lau a little bit about her process. The very much like, let's harmonize

every freaking note you're singing with the guitar. So just place my fingers randomly here. And then I went note by note with my voice, you know, and found a melody on my voice that matched the guitar.

Is that not by not? Yeah. It's not groundbreaking. It's just harder work than other people.

You play things that are ergonomic that makes sense for the shape of the human hand. And he tried to make it look as if and sound as if it was much harder than it is, but it's not that difficult. Okay, so I guess on the surface it's not that hard. You take idiomatic shapes to the guitar and then you

harmonize those shapes with your voice. But there clearly is some more stuff going on here. There are key changes. There are complex seventh chords. There's things that I would identify as something like a II-V-I progression. Do you just pick up that stuff from exposure and osmosis? How do you learn

to write with this harmony intuitively? I was part of the jazz world for a while, was just watching people. Would you say that that's where you got a lot of your harmonic language or. I think it's a blend between that exposure of many years of more complex harmonic language from the jazz world, but

also all the Disney soundtracks I was obsessed with as a kid. There is a lot of complexity in that language as well. I think the most genius composers are the ones who bring in that complexity, making it feel and sound so universal. You are too beautiful, my dear to be true and I'm a fool for beauty, yeah oh

by a feeling that because I found you I could have bound you too