The three ladies of Trousdale have gone from singing to a few classmates at USC to performing to thousands at Bonnaroo, and despite their graduation to much larger stages and dreams for even bigger ones, the core of what they do remains the same: three-part harmonies.
Quinn D’Andrea, Georgia Greene and Lauren Jones met in the Southern California university’s popular music program, where their love for classic artists with deep catalogs and blended vocals inspired them. Singing other people’s songs on YouTube, from Katy Perry to the Eagles, led to writing their own material, like the stunning 2021 single “Wouldn’t Come Back.” Bigger crowds and a full-length debut, 2023’s “Out of My Mind,” followed.
Earlier this month the trio released a live version of “If I’m Honest” as part of a deluxe version of “Out of My Mind,” out next month. That was followed this week with a new video for “Point My Finger.”
We chatted with Quinn, Georgia and Lauren via Zoom in advance of their show on Wednesday opening for The Teskey Brothers at Brooklyn Paramount and headline dates on the Still Out of My Mind tour, including a sold-out show in Washington, DC, next week.
Do you remember the first time you sang together?
Lauren: Georgia and I were in Songwriting 1. We were given a song to write together, we were writing it outside at a picnic table without instruments, just tapping on the table. We wrote the whole chorus of this song called “Do Re Mi,” which is actually out now, but we said, “Oh man, this song needs a third harmony,” and we got Quinn to be involved. Quinn has such a deep history in choir and a cappella and was the person everyone would always come to for trying to figure out what harmonies were being sung in a song we had to learn. I remember the three of us were just sitting in a dorm room in a circle, just writing the verses and we sang it for class. That was really the first Trousdale performance. We’re perfectionists but the response was really positive so we thought there must be something there.
Have your harmonies come naturally or have you had to work out so slots in where? How did coming from a academic background have an impact on how you approach the arranging of your parts?
Quinn: I feel like it natural more than anything. I feel like we’ve always had a natural way that we go about singing together. But because it was coming from an academic standpoint, I think that’s true and we’re always trying to be better and figuring out why we do it and how to do it, and this curiosity about how we arrange and at the same time we were learning the greats who were singing harmony-based music. So it’s interesting that we were learning about these people who maybe did it i a supernatural way and figuring out how they did it and figure our how we were doing it. Since we started, I can confidently say we are exponentially better at it now, but I think we can jump into a harmony pretty quickly because we all have our tendencies of where we tend to go.
Lauren: I have to step in and say one reason it was so natural is because Quinn is so good at harmonies. Georgia and I will naturally do melodies and higher harmonies and Quinn would be like down here and filling in all the gaps and jumping around. Quinn is like the harmony master.
Quinn: Thanks Lauren. I do like to jump around.
Your lyrics are often sung from the first person. How are three of you able to sing “I” and make it authentic, especially when maybe only one of you went through what you are singing about?
Georgia: That’s such a great question and it’s something I think is part of what makes Trousdale so beautiful to me is when there’s a song that’s maybe drawn from one of our own personal experiences, and when we’re singing it all together it just adds to the support that the person feels. For example, if it’s a song about my heartbreak that I’ve been through or something, and then Lauren and Quinn are singing and we’re singing “I” in the chorus, like the same emotion like any of the other songs, it feels magical, and that’s just what music can do: Even if you haven’t been part of something, you can connect to the feeling of pain or grief or love. I think music and art is such a great way to connect to yourself and each other. As singers and artists, all three of us grew up singing along to songs. I remember being young and singing along to Avril Lavigne “Complicated,” and I hadn’t been through anything like that, but I was like, “Oh my God, why does everything have to be so complicated?” Also in school, we were trained to connect to the songs and the lyrics and make it personal. There was a teacher who said, “Georgia, if you were singing this about your dad, how would you sing it?”
From relating to each other, that has grown to you being able to relate to your listeners. What is it like to see strangers singing along?
Quinn: Oh my gosh, that’s the most amazing thing ever. I think we spent so many years writing and performing in college but before we put out any music a lot of it was on our campus lawn or in a small venue for mostly people who knew us. So when Covid happened and we started releasing music, I think it was 2021 when people were singing our words back to us, and I don’t think we’ll ever forget that because that is something so altering with like the way you see your own music and the way you see other people connecting to it, especially because it’s the three of us who created it together, it already feels more universal and less personal but in a really beautiful way, and to see people to connect to that, there’s something extremely validating.
Are you working on new music?
Lauren: We’re actually doing into the studio today. We’re working on new music and we’re super excited about it.
In addition to the summer dates that take you through August, what do you have planned for the rest of 2024?
Georgia: We have some other support dates in the works this summer that we can’t share yer.
If we have a conversation in a year or two, what are some things you hope to have accomplished?
Lauren: I think we’ve always had very big dreams. We really just want to take it as far as it can go. It would be nice to win a Grammy someday. It would be nice to play a stadium someday, that’s always a dream. Hollywood Bowl and Red Rocks, those kind of places are always like, wow, what a dream it would be to play those venues. But more than anything, we aspire to be a legacy act like all of our favorite artists who have been putting out music over the course of their whole lives, and it’s the constance and evolution of those artists that’s so inspiring to us. And I think that’s always our dream, to just continue having fun and making music that feels inspiring to us. Right now, the base level dream is just being financially independent from our parents. That’s our big goal right now.
Photo by Caity Krone
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