A Chat with Lauren Alex Hooper (25.08.25)
Singer-songwriter Lauren Alex Hooper has never shied away from vulnerability in her music, but her new EP, Too Much And Not Enough, Vol. 1, feels like her boldest step yet. Rooted in her autistic experiences, the record is both deeply personal and universally resonant, blending powerful storytelling with pop sensibilities. Across its tracks, Hooper explores themes of masking, loneliness, empowerment, and identity with a raw honesty that pushes beyond traditional boundaries of pop music. We speak with Lauren Alex Hooper about her new EP, Too Much And Not Enough, Vol. 1, and more below.
OSR: Too Much And Not Enough, Vol. 1 has been described as your most personal project yet. What inspired you to finally tell these stories now?
Hooper: I’d wanted to write about my autistic experiences for years, both for myself and for my younger self who couldn’t find any music that she related to, but it felt very vulnerable and not something to be rushed into. In 2019, I started a Masters Degree in Songwriting, and it was during those two years – despite the massive disruptions and terror around COVID – that I really grew in confidence with my writing. In the final module in 2021, we were assigned a supervisor and basically sent off to write whatever project we wanted, whether that was an album, a musical, a song cycle, as long as we could tick all of the boxes, we could do whatever we wanted. Writing about Autism had always been in the back of my mind as an option for this project, and when it finally came around, I was sure. I was confident enough in my identity as an autistic person, and I was confident enough in my writing skills that I felt like that was the first moment where I felt properly equipped to write these songs.
I’d been collecting ideas in my Notes App for months in preparation, and so, when the previous module finished, I was off and running, two-week break be damned. I was ready, and so were the songs. I wrote about twenty songs in the space of eight weeks, I think, and I was fully committed to working on the production and then releasing them as soon as possible, as soon as all of the assessment and graduation stuff was over, but then I was completely thrown off course by a death in the family and a medication change that damaged my mental health so badly that it still hasn’t fully recovered. So it took a long time to pull myself out from underneath all of that, at the very least to the point where I could get back to working on music. If there’s one thing that I know is going to help me get through a hard thing, it’s making music. My long-time producer, Richard Marc, was ready and waiting for me, and we’ve been working almost solidly since then to get these songs finished and out in the world. It has been a real labour of love: there’s been so much labour, but you can so clearly see the love and the joy in the behind the scenes stuff I’ve been posting on social media.
OSR: ‘Armour’ opens the EP with a powerful exploration of masking. Was it emotionally difficult to write and release something so vulnerable?
Hooper: The idea of using armour as a metaphor for masking was something I’d been kicking around in my head for years: I’ve got poetry from years ago where I was clearly testing out the idea. It felt like a much more fitting description than masking, for me at least: a mask is easily removable, whereas armour is much more difficult to remove and traps your whole body, which is a better description of my experience with masking. I wouldn’t say it was difficult to write, but it was emotional; I think the stakes felt very high for these songs and ‘getting them right’ was so desperately important to me. But it was also really freeing to finally write about things that I experience every day that I hadn’t exactly been encouraged to write about by certain people in the industry. It’s not exactly a common theme in pop music, is it? I think a lot of people just didn’t know what to make of it. But, to be honest, that just made me even more determined to be as authentic and as vulnerable as I could because I knew there was (and is) a space for this music.
Releasing the song has felt a lot more vulnerable than writing it, I think. I’ve been holding these songs close for years now, and finally letting them go has been a strange and anxious process. It’s helped that it’s been received really well – this song has been the resounding favourite so far – but I still feel a bit like a mother bird pushing her baby birds out of the nest, hoping that they can fly and that they’ll find their place in the ecosystem.
OSR: ‘The Loneliest Whale’ uses such a striking metaphor. Can you talk about the moment you connected that real-life story to your own experience?
Hooper: Thank you! I found it such a moving story that I knew I’d have to write about it at some point; I just resonated with it so strongly. The first time I read it, I was a teenager and had spent several years out of school due to a then-undiagnosed illness (which, in hindsight, was probably my first experience of autistic burnout, not that I knew I was autistic at that point). I had a couple of friends who would visit, but hearing them living these full, busy lives was almost as isolating as being alone – not that I didn’t appreciate them keeping me company and helping me to get through that time. My life looked a lot more ‘normal’ for the next several years, and then, just after I started university, I was diagnosed as autistic, and suddenly it all made sense: why I felt like I was slightly out of sync with everyone else, why communicating and socialising were so exhausting, why the world felt so overwhelming.
The story of the Loneliest Whale was constantly at the back of my mind because it felt so relatable: I felt like I was on a different frequency to everyone else, just like the whale. So when it came time to write these songs, this was one of the first ones I started exploring. I’d expected it to be a story of isolation, but as I was researching in preparation, I discovered how much this story resonated with people: so many people had made art about it, written books about it, written poetry about it, incorporated it into music. And that gave me a whole new perspective on the story and on the song I was already formulating in my head. If all of these people were connecting because of this shared feeling of loneliness, then maybe we weren’t as alone as we all thought, and that was the idea that really brought the song to life.
OSR: What was the creative process like for this EP. Did the songs come quickly or over a long period of time?
Hooper: I wrote the songs really quickly and a lot of them all at once, to a certain degree. I remember thinking it was like trying to spin a load of plates, all at once. Because they felt like such big ideas that I was trying to fit into the length of a song, I felt like I was constantly turning them over in my head, and then I’d pluck one out to focus on specifically. I’d never written like that before, and it was so much fun: it felt like my brain was operating at its full creative capacity, which was deeply satisfying. The production took a lot longer because my producer and I had to coordinate our schedules, which wasn’t always easy. Plus, I’m very particular about the sounds and the vocals and how they all blend together, so there were a lot of mixes! Josh Fielden at Sprogglet Studios truly deserves a medal for all the work that went into mixing and mastering these tracks because I must’ve given him a novel’s worth of notes over the duration of the project.
OSR: You explore very specific autistic experiences in these songs. Were you ever concerned about how non-autistic listeners might receive or interpret the work?
Hooper: I was much more concerned about the songs resonating with autistic listeners; there is so little music specifically for autistic people that the autistic community was my priority. But I did want the songs to be accessible to allistic (non-autistic) listeners as well, and I always felt that the key to that was through writing about these experiences and these feelings as authentically as possible because emotions are universal, regardless of a person’s neurotype. If listening to ‘The Loneliest Whale’ made someone feel understood or ‘Last One Standing’ made someone feel empowered, then hopefully they can relate to others who feel the same way, autistic or allistic. All emotion comes from the same place, and while the intensity and ability to regulate those emotions may differentiate us, the emotions themselves connect us.
I’ve heard from both autistic and allistic listeners and had beautiful and emotional comments from both so it does seem like the songs are resonating with people, regardless of their neurotype, and that’s been really special.
OSR: ‘Last One Standing’ feels like a celebration of special interests. What does that character mean to you, and why was it important to write from their perspective?
Hooper: So, ‘Last One Standing’ was written from the point of view of Daisy Johnson from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and she has been a special interest character for me from the moment I started watching the show. She develops so much over the seven seasons, and even though the details are obviously very different given that she eventually becomes a superhero, she goes through multiple story arcs that I related to so deeply, including her search for both her biological and chosen families, losing people she loves, and the development and trust in her sense of self.
Arguably, her biggest storyline is learning of her biological and cultural heritage as an Inhuman, humans with alien DNA that gives them superhuman abilities. Daisy not only learns of this without any context or support, but she develops an ability to manipulate vibrations that is both dangerous and uniquely valuable, but takes time to learn how to manage. I’ve never liked hearing Autism be compared to having superpowers: I think it minimises the struggle and trauma that many autistic people go through and invalidates anyone who doesn’t feel like Autism has granted them a ‘superpower-like’ special interest or strength. But I still deeply related to Daisy discovering this core truth about herself, the strengths and weaknesses that are a part of that, and the community and purpose she finds because of it; my autism diagnosis and the journey that followed could be described similarly.
Why my brain picked her as a special interest, I have no idea – I loved her long before all of the personal parallels became evident – but the show and her story have brought me so much comfort and joy and strength over the years. Watching the show is a safe place for me, but channelling Daisy and her story is empowering: the way she’s learned to accept herself, the confidence she has in herself and her strengths, the fact that her ultimate goal has always been to help others. As I said, she brings me both comfort and strength, and that is one of the amazing things that having a special interest can do. My first tattoo was a daisy, to be a reminder of all of these things (as well as being a tribute to my Dad, who first got me into the superhero genre), and my Autism Assistance Dog is also called Daisy because she is my real-life superhero. I wanted to write a song about special interests, and given how empowering Daisy has been for me, I wanted to create a song that could also be empowering for other autistic people.
The society we live in is not an empowering one if you’re autistic, and so it felt really important to me to write a song that, hopefully, could make the listener feel like they’re invincible, like they can take on the world. Writing the song – especially the lyrics “I’m not a scared little girl anymore, I know exactly what I’m fighting for” – was very special and really clarified the purpose I’ve found in trying to improve things for the autistic community, and I hope that that lyric in particular can help others the same way it helped me.
OSR: How did you approach the production on this project? Did you collaborate closely with a producer, or keep the sound very DIY and personal?
Hooper: I’ve worked closely with the same producer, Richard Marc, on all of my projects so far, and there honestly aren’t words to describe how grateful I am to have met him. We sat down next to each other on the first day at university, studying songwriting, and that was it. Less than a month later, we had written and produced our first song together. We’ve been best friends ever since. It’s like we just made sense to each other right from the beginning (there were jokes at uni that we shared the same brain), and over time, we’ve developed our own language when working together. My brain associates sound with colour, and my sensitivity to sound all play a part in the production, and Richard is so good at translating my thoughts into music.
For the most part, it was just the two of us co-producing this project, and from both a musical and emotional perspective, I’m really not sure I could have done it without him. We worked with the same mixing and mastering engineer, Josh Fielden, who is fantastic and brings the best out of my vocals in particular every time. I was also able to bring friends in for their specific skills: Lasse Corus did an awesome job on the drums for the tracks with live drums, and Luce – who is also an incredible artist as LUCE – brought her gorgeous vocals to a handful of songs. It has been really, really special to work surrounded by close friends, by people who’ve been so supportive of my journey. I’ve felt so safe and the songs so celebrated; I couldn’t have asked for more.
OSR: The EP is subtitled Vol. 1, does that mean we can expect a follow-up? Is this part of a larger creative vision?
Hooper: That is my hope. I started writing an album, but quickly came to the conclusion that an album didn’t make sense because I wasn’t writing about a static topic. I will have new experiences, my autistic traits may shift over time, and my relationship with being autistic could change as well. I felt like it made more sense as a body of work that I can keep adding to whenever I have more to say. So it became an EP, a Volume 1. I’m not sure when the next one will be, but I do already have songs written that I’d like to put on it.
OSR: What does success look like for this EP? Is it about numbers, or something more intangible?
Hooper: I think success can be a very complicated idea, and it’s so easy to get sucked into a spiral of comparison and competition. It’s something I’ve been working really hard to have a healthier relationship with and to give myself grace when I do struggle with it. And because this project is so personal, I’ve thought a lot about this. I think numbers are great: the number of streams or the number of views demonstrates that the songs are reaching people, and that’s always been my biggest hope for this project, that it reaches the people that need it. That’s obviously harder to quantify, but the higher the numbers, the more people it’s reaching and hopefully it’s resonating with them in one way or another. But I think that nothing beats someone telling you what your song means to them. I’ve heard from one person that after listening to ‘Armour,’ they were speechless because it explained exactly how they’ve felt throughout their whole life. Another person told me that ‘The Loneliest Whale’ made them cry because it resonated so deeply with them. Hearing things like that, I think back to all of the moments when I’ve felt so distressed that I’ve hated being autistic, and all of that agony means something; it’s bigger than just me because, without it, I wouldn’t be where I am now, and I wouldn’t have made this body of work. These songs wouldn’t exist, and they wouldn’t be having the impact that I can see them having. So hearing these comments is the biggest sign of success for me.
OSR: What message or feeling do you hope listeners walk away with after hearing this project?
Hooper: This project has always been for the autistic community, so I hope that anyone from the community who listens to it feels heard by it in some way, whether that’s because the songs resonate with them personally or because it’s empowering to see more and more autistic voices being recognised. I hope that, with more autistic voices being heard and uplifted, more autistic people will feel empowered to share their voices, using whatever medium works best for them. As for neurotypical listeners, or listeners who are neurodivergent in some other way, I hope that it helps them to gain a greater understanding of Autism. Even though these songs are about my specific experiences, these are all traits – masking, difficulty with eye contact, sensory overwhelm, etc – that many autistic people experience, to various degrees of visibility and understanding. I hope that this project can bring another perspective to what it can be like to be autistic and maybe, because it’s in the form of music, in a new and more accessible way.
Many thanks to Lauren Alex Hooper for speaking with us. Find out more about Lauren Alex Hooper on her Instagram, X, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify.
