‘There’s freedom when you don’t know the notes’: Noah’s arc to guitar festival fame
Spanish-born, New York-based singer/songwriter Lau Noah has translated viral popularity to main stage success since she first picked up a guitar in 2016. Now the self-taught musician is heading to Australia for the first time to bring her unique “Baroque folk” style to Adelaide Guitar Festival.
As she prepares for her Australian debut at this year’s Adelaide Guitar Festival, it’s hard to believe that performer Lau Noah first picked up a guitar less than a decade ago.
Since then, the distinctive guitarist and singer/songwriter has been lauded by artists such as Jackson Browne and Jacob Collier, and she’s now headed to Adelaide to support Israeli Australian performer Lior.
It’s been an astounding rise to fame for Noah, who learnt piano as a child back home in Catalonia, Spain, but gave up lessons after feeling restrained by formal teaching techniques.
“I went to music school as a kid, but I quit by the time I was a teenager, it was just not for me to be following any rules,” she says. “So, I continued to play piano and sing and write my own songs by myself throughout my teenage years.”
It was in 2014, when Noah moved to New York to work as an au pair, that the world of music opened up to the then-19 year old.
The days were hard – low pay and looking after a newborn baby and six-year-old twins – but the nights were spent teaching herself the guitar. Noah says the impulse to play was thanks to falling in love around 2016.
"Love was my inspiration but thank God this ended … my love for the guitar continued with me."
“I had a very good reason to play guitar: I was actually very in love with some guy who played guitar really well, and I wanted him to be very in love with me, too,” Noah says.
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“So, I was babysitting at the time, 10 hours a day… and then I would go home and spend evenings trying to figure out my way through the guitar, so that then I could write a song, and I could send it to him and be like, ‘Look, I made this’. Love was my inspiration but thank God this ended, because things are meant to end all the time. But my love for the guitar continued with me.”
Noah plays by ear, and says her lack of formal guitar training was also a great motivator, providing a blank canvas to create new sounds in a style she describes as “Baroque folk”.
“There’s some freedom when you don’t know the notes you’re playing and the keys you’re in, and you just place your fingers on top of those strings and try to find your way through by just listening to what you have in your brain, and you try to find the same sounds on your fingers,” she says.
“That was exciting to me. I think that’s the thing that opened the gates for me to this world of possibilities.”
In the early days, Noah spent hours practicing at home, posting her performances on social media. Before long she had booked her first gig in New York in 2017, followed by a Tiny Desk concert in 2018.
Throughout the pandemic Noah continued to post clips of her creative compositions, and it wasn’t long before some big names began to take notice.
“I started posting videos on Instagram and suddenly you had Phoebe Bridgers and Jackson Browne and Jacob Collier really interested in what I was doing,” she says. “I guess other musicians were sending them my videos or things like that.
“So, my break was actually the internet, and my job was to always make sure that these connections materialised in real life and that we could eventually play together. Because that is actually where life happens, not on the internet, but the internet is an amazing starter for the connections.”
Those musical connections took off, catapulting Noah to the Royal Albert Hall in November 2023, where she opened for Ben Fold’s UK tour.
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“I played a solo show at the Royal Albert Hall in front of 5000 people, which was incredible,” she says. “There’s a song, the last song on my record, which requires the collaboration of the audience – I teach the audience a two-part harmony. To hear that sang back at me from stage, from such a legendary place, was amazing.
“Then last year, I opened for Jacob Collier in Europe, and that was also insane. To talk to 8000 people every night, you know, listening to my songs in Spanish, in English, being quiet and listening to just one person on stage, a guitar and a voice. It gives me so much faith in humanity.”
When she’s writing her fast-paced compositions Noah says she can hardly breathe until the song is complete, and feels like she’s “rafting through crazy rivers”. When it comes to her voice, the singer admits she still sometimes worries about its power.
“I feel like there’s so much praise in these big voices and my voice is not a big one,” she says. “My voice is one that says a lot, that feels a lot, but it’s not big and loud. So, I still nowadays have questions about where my voice is supposed to be, but they go away quickly.”
In 2024, Lau released her first LP A Dos which featured collaborations with acclaimed musicians including Collier, Chris Thile, Jorge Drexler, Gaby Moreno and Cécile McLorin Salvant. In the same year, she was a finalist in the American Songwriter Competition and won the award for Best New Artist in the acclaimed Cartagena Music Festival in Spain. A collaborative record with bassist/composer Adam Neely, titled The Way Under, was released in July this year.
Noah’s unique sound blends elements of folk, classical, jazz and Latin influences, and storytelling is at the centre of her craft, she says “it comes with a harmonic complexity that maybe classic folk doesn’t have”.
“It’s not so much the story, it’s your ability to make your audience believe your stories are true,” she says. “I think that’s what it is. Picasso used to say, ‘Everybody knows that art is not true, but the job of the artist is to convince their audience about the truthfulness of their lies’.
“It sounds like manipulation, but it’s not. It’s to say, reality has many layers, and we cannot be content with just one of them. So, my stories have to do with this, with expanding the limits of what is real and what we feel to other kinds of worlds, even using the imagery of magical creatures or alternative universes or things like that and bringing them to a more human language. I think that’s very interesting.”
She says the Adelaide Guitar Festival organisers found her “in the ether”, and she is looking forward to her first show in Australia – hinting that she may perform a song or two alongside Lior as well as opening the night.
“Some Australian fans might also recognise my duet with Jacob Collier but I will actually have some surprises from some Australian singers that I really adore,” she says. “I don’t want to give away too much but I always play one of those covers that everybody in the world knows, but in my own style.”
Lau Noah and Lior will perform at Her Majesty’s Theatre on Sunday September 14. Adelaide Guitar Festival runs from September 10 to October 12.