Laura Frank Is Taking the Wheel

There comes a point when you stop waiting for someone else to tell you where you're going.

 You grab the keys, get behind the wheel and work it out for yourself. For Laura Frank, that feeling sits at the heart of her new single “Living My Life In The Front Seat.” With her debut album Life In The Front Seat on the way, Laura Frank is getting ready to introduce a much bigger piece of herself.

Its latest single, “Living My Life In The Front Seat,” isn't simply another song from the record. In many ways, it's the one that explains what the whole thing is about. It's a song about ambition and independence, about taking responsibility for your own decisions and accepting that getting a few of them wrong is part of the deal. But underneath all of that, it's also about knowing where home is.
For Frank, that's the country.

“‘Living My Life In The Front Seat’ is a toast to my future self,” she says. “The one who's followed her dreams and made it to where she wants to go. It's a reminder to stay grounded no matter how far I fly.” There's a nice tension in that idea.

Frank wants to go places. She wants the career, the travelling and whatever opportunities might be waiting further down the road. But she doesn't want getting somewhere to mean forgetting where she came from. “At its heart, it's a love song to my home in the country,” she says. “I can be flying all around the world chasing this career, but the bush is where my heart lives. No matter what life throws at me, that's where I belong.”

That sense of home found an appropriate setting when it came time to record the song. Frank and her band headed to Brooklet Recording in the Byron Hinterland, swapping the noise and distractions of the outside world for a studio surrounded by the kind of landscape that sits naturally alongside the song itself.

Rather than feeling overly constructed, “Living My Life In The Front Seat” carries the warmth of musicians playing together, with the arrangement building around Frank's voice and the story she's telling. And while there's plenty of heart in it, the song isn't really about looking backwards.

It's about who's driving from here. “It's also about ownership,” Frank explains. “I'm holding the wheel and making the deals. I'm in control of my own destiny, mistakes and all.” That last part might be the most important. Taking control of your own life sounds great until you remember it also means owning the wrong turns.

There'll be roads that lead nowhere, decisions you'd make differently and moments when you're not entirely sure where you're headed. But they're your decisions and your wrong turns. For an artist approaching the release of a debut album, that's a pretty fitting place to be. A first record is inevitably a snapshot of everything that brought somebody to that point — the songs they've written, the places they've lived, the people they've met and the version of themselves they were while figuring it all out.

Life In The Front Seat sounds like Frank is less interested in pretending she has all the answers than making sure she's the one asking the questions. The new single captures that spirit particularly well: chase the big things, remember the small things, stay connected to home and don't hand somebody else the steering wheel. The road ahead might not always be straight. 

But at least Laura Frank knows who's driving.