Loyal Lobos Doesn’t Find Space—She Makes It
Written by Brooke Bunce
Photographed by Andrea Silva
When I Facetime Loyal Lobos (otherwise known as 26-year-old Colombian-born artist Andrea Silva) on a sticky end of July night from my Brooklyn apartment, we both find ourselves in a state of flux; I’m in the midst of a move to a new apartment after living in the same Crown Heights spot for 6 years, while Andrea has an impending album release only days away—a debut album that has been tirelessly worked over and lovingly kneaded for three years. (If I had moved my phone just a few inches left or right, the chaotic state of my surroundings would have been revealed. Luckily, it’s easy to appear like your life is in order through an iPhone screen.)
Even though that album release is imminent when we “meet” over FaceTime, Andrea isn’t resting her laurels. When we talk, she’s in the studio in Los Angeles, and a lot of our 2-hour conversation is peppered with anecdotes about upcoming, work-in-progress tracks and new sources of inspiration. When I ask Andrea what it’s like to finally let the rest of the world experience something she’s been working on for so long, she lets out a relieved laugh and tells me it’s both like breaking up with a boyfriend and “sending a kid that was a fuckup to college because you’ve been stuck with them for way too long and you’re like, ‘When the fuck are you gonna just leave?’”
Now, as I type this piece from my new apartment that’s still in Brooklyn but just a few subway stops westward, that “kid”—otherwise known as the 10 tracks that make up Everlasting—has been set loose to figure out exactly who it is and who it wants to be.
For Andrea, there’s an obvious bittersweetness to the moment. When I ask her the biggest question on my mind—what it’s like to release art during a global pandemic and one of the most unstable moments in recent political, economic, and social history—she’s brutally honest with me: “I had a mini breakdown about it. I was like, I don’t want to do this because I’m not enjoying it. I’ve eaten so much shit to get here … If I’m not enjoying the process of putting it out, something that I’ve worked on for three years, then what’s the point? It was the most painful thing that an artist can experience, not being fulfilled by [your] music.”
To put it lightly, that “shit” amounts to years of daunting obstacles and hurdles. At 19, Andrea moved to LA from Bogotà without knowing a single soul in the city. Her immigration process was “incredibly difficult,” her English “wasn’t that good,” she “really didn’t have any money,” and she had to work hourly jobs just to scrape by (“sometimes I would get a gig and I’d be taking off my grocery clerk shirt and running to the gig to make it on time.”) Issues with her visa restricted her from leaving the US, keeping her far from friends and family in Colombia. She didn’t even have a manager or an agent at first. The process of making Everlasting was taxing—”then quarantine hit and I was exhausted,” she said.
Eventually, what got her through that breakdown was the idea of continuous creation. “The moment I come up with a new idea, I put all my focus on that. And now I’m just letting this album flow. I’ve got to focus and create and release and create and release.” And though she’s far too humble to ever say it herself, her enduring focus is what amazed me most about her. If there were an alternate title to Everlasting, it could be Perseverance. She tells me that, for the most part, the only music she listened to while making the album was her own, whether that was on her phone during a break from waitressing or over the store speakers at one of her cashier gigs. And it wasn’t listening for pleasure—it was listening to analyze, to critique, to interrogate. And she knows that if Everlasting was still being made now, it would still be getting the same critical ear now as it did then. “I feel ready to let it go because I don’t want to over-knead it. It’s still gotta be organic and not feel overly produced or overly done.”
Despite all odds, Everlasting doesn’t emit the same intensity that the story of making it does. It feels effortless, breathless, stretchy, fluid, and endless. If it were a person, it’d be your first unrequited love. If it were a feeling, it’d be like plunging into a lake on the first hot summer day. If it were an animal, it’d be a hummingbird. The songs float alongside you, instead of sitting heavy on top of you. In the music video for the album’s opening track “Whatever It Is,” Andrea is both otherworldly—riding her horse (horses, she writes in the YouTube description, “represent freedom to me”) through a luscious landscape of Colombia in a diaphanous slip (at one point, she’s wearing her mother’s wedding dress)—and fantastical, draped on top of piles of plastic fruit and fake severed hands wearing an emerald-green satin two-piece set with dazzling green eye makeup to match. In short, it captures the world that Everlasting straddles so perfectly: one of daydreams, lilting choruses, longing croons, falling flower petals, and boundless realities.
This doesn’t mean that the album is full of sweeping love songs—it’s probably, in fact, most prominently full of anti-love tracks. My favorite of the bunch, “You Were Bored,” is a rhythmic, folk-tinged story of a friendship gone wrong. When I tell Andrea it’s my standout track, she agrees easily. We talk about how hypocritical—and yet, perfectly on the nose—it is to write a song about how much you don’t care about someone that used you. It’s a perfect encapsulation of clearly not being able to move on. “Si Te Portas Mal (Be Bad)” explores the weaponization of femininity and sensuality, sung sweetly in Spanish. It’s probably too deep of a read, but the translated lyrics couples with Andrea’s breathless vocals made me think about how complex of an experience it is to be a woman.
Future music, too, will explore these routes even further. Andrea tells me she’s currently working on a song about her relationship with her mother. We sidetrack after figuring out we both have Scorpio moms (an experience that can only be understood if you live through it) and talk about how familial relationships can be inspirational wellsprings, just like romantic ones. She tells me how supportive her parents, still living in Colombia, have been throughout her career (encouraging her without pushing her) and how much she loves her sisters; one lives in France and just gave birth, the other is going to school for architecture.
The final, delicious product that is Everlasting was a huge labor of love from a shockingly small team. Andrea and producer Evan Voytas started making the album from his studio apartment, taking demos she had written before meeting him and rebuilding them into complete tracks. They met during a mutual friend’s studio session and “we kind of like, trusted each other immediately,” she laughs. Her energy, which she describes as “explosive,” immediately clicked with his calm, meditative demeanor. That trust was a huge part of what made it work; Andrea tells me that songwriting is such a sensitive, intense process for her, she can’t imagine opening up to another producer the way she did with Evan.
To oversee the project, Teddy Geiger came on as executive producer (alongside her solo career, Teddy’s recently worked with Niall Horan, Caroline Polachek, Shawn Mendes, and Lizzo as songwriter and producer). On working with Teddy, Andrea laughs and instantly acknowledges how much a third party helped Everlasting take shape. “Evan and I were just so consumed in [the album] that at some point we had no perspective… and Teddy kind of came in as referee on that,” she says. “She’s such a puzzle-solver. It almost feels like she’s moving the pieces together for them to fit, like a Rubik’s Cube.”
Smiling, Andrea admires how unapologetic and genuine Teddy is. “Teddy wears the prettiest Dorothy-style dresses, but she loves pellet guns. So this bitch is like, shooting with a huge gun in the cutest dress. She just does whatever she wants, and that’s just so refreshing… she’s not even being scandalous to get a reaction. She truly wants to be scandalous. She just fucking does it, you know? That’s been such an important energy in my life.”
It’s easy to see why Andrea is in awe of Teddy’s aplomb. Before writing this, I was curious to see how she’d be described in other press coverage. As I expected, there were the typical comparisons to other artists of similar folk-pop sound or Latin artists with Colombian backgrounds. When I bring this up, her eyes roll unceremoniously to the back of her head. She tells me that when she moved to LA, she either evaded the dreaded “what’s your music like?” question altogether or gave a quippy answer of “mariachi meets lo-fi punk.”
Three of Everlasting’s tracks are sung entirely in Spanish, a tactic not used for categorization but as another tool for creation, as Andrea puts it. “English is such a simple and open language. It’s very vowel-y, and you need less words to complete one sentence. Spanish is such a specific language, like there are genders for objects, and you need more words to prepare for the verb. I like playing with both. Spanish is also much more rhythmical because it’s more consonant-y.” Singing in English, she explains, always felt safer because it wasn’t her native tongue. “I felt less exposed.”
A lot of Andrea’s songwriting process feels the same way the album sounds: tactical and rooted in sensuality. She tells me that she prefers to write songs on a guitar first so they feel “grounded,” and that it’s hard for her to perform onstage without something in her hands. When she wants to communicate how something should sound, it’s difficult for her to do so without expressing a feeling or touching an instrument. Using language similarly as a building block, she’ll start first with melodies, then explore which words fit—whether that’s English or Spanish is up to her.
From the jump, Loyal Lobos has always been—and will always be—about opening up a room of one’s own and defying neat categorization. For Andrea, it’s about making sure that where she came from doesn’t supercede the rest of the things that make her journey, and her music, beautiful. “I’m proud of where I’m from. But I also feel like as a Colombian, I’m more than just a Latina person. In Colombian, we don’t only do Latin music.” She continues with a definitive proclamation that should come with every album she sells: “I open my own space. I want to be a space. I don’t want to be put in a specific category.”
And of course, being that she is lovely, humble, and always self-deprecating, she adds: “Maybe I’ll have like a tiny little corner and that’ll be my space. And I’ll just keep creating from there.”
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