Video Gains: Hot Press meets Laura Elizabeth Hughes

By day, recent college graduate Laura Elizabeth Hughes captures images of people’s peepers. Working as an ophthalmic photographer in an Eye & Ear hospital, the job “keeps you in pocket” but isn’t always, as you can imagine, for the faint of heart. “It’s a lovely place to work… But some of it could make you quite squeamish,” says Hughes. Water off a duck’s quack to her though, surely?

“Well, hmm. Not really. I’m quite squeamish! There’s a test that we do where the doctors inject a dye into the patient’s arm. I can’t even look at that. I’m just 'no, no, no’!”

You sense she’d much rather be in front of the camera, playing music. Having racked up almost two million views on her YouTube channel to date, it seems a group of people similar in size to the population of Nebraska agree. The madness all started thanks to a young man’s desperate bid to win a girl’s heart.

Enlisted to cover Lana Del Rey’s ‘Video Games’ to help said wannabe lothario impress the object of his affections, the video quickly gained wider appeal. It didn’t work for the guy (how would it?) but it worked for Laura, who had been posting clips online since the days of Bebo three or four years previous. “I got the odd comment here and there [back then], which was really nice. I got some horrendous
comments off people as well! They started to lessen as I put more videos up.”

But her acoustic cover of Lana’s signature song sent her into a different stratosphere. “I’m relying on someone else’s popularity to gain some of my own!” the Terenure resident says, tongue-in-cheek. “Bit of a leech. It wasn’t intentional!”

Other takes on the likes Gotye and Passenger continued to enchant the web. However, she was determined not to rely on anyone else for too long. Determined to strike out on her own, with original material, and get out of the bedroom. Though she’s still at a tender age, Hughes feels it was a long time coming.

“I was about 13 when I started singing,” she explains. “Nobody had heard me sing before. I signed up for this end-of-year school showcase. I asked one of the lads two years ahead of me to learn this song and play it with me on guitar. So he learnt ‘Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue’ by Crystal Gayle. We practiced it once – I was really, really nervous of singing in front of people, even the guy that was playing with me! I got up on stage. Packed hall, whole school there, friends and family. I closed my eyes, started to sing, and I shocked the guitarist so much that he didn’t play! So I sang a cappella. I just kept going.”

Musicals followed, but Hughes confesses that her confidence “vanished” when she left school. She studied photography at third level.

“College killed the creativity in my photography. My music and everything creative was completely put on the back burner for those four years. I’d written songs in my room, I had all this material just sitting there doing nothing. Finally, I was like, ‘No,
I’m not going to let this do this to me. Music’s been a massive part of my life.’”

It was three nights in November 2012 that fully convinced her. Hughes calls it “on par with a religious conversion.”

To begin with, a chance encounter with the “down-to-earth” Justin Vernon – well, a wine-fuelled, typically Irish ambush – after a Bon Iver gig in Dublin proved more profound than the usual fan meet-and-greet.

“I know I might sound like an absolute creep but I recognised his hat out on the balcony! It was liquid courage. I just said, ‘What a gig!’. We sat and spoke together for 10-15 minutes.”

Following that inspirational meeting, she had a “big emotional moment when I was recording, where I started crying after a vocal take.” A day later, her now-manager told her he wanted to properly take on her musical career.

“I was recording in his studio, as a test run, and he told me that I did a vocal take and it completely made up his mind…. It was three surreal nights.” Surreal, but behind what is proving to be a very sensible decision. Restoring her long-lost confidence was key. That meant a rake of gigs between January and March last year.

“It was being thrown in the deep end completely,” she says. “Originally, it was really difficult, I’m not going to lie. I only learned to open my eyes when I was performing three or four months in. I had people going, ‘Laura, would ya connect with your audience, what are you doing?!’ I told them I couldn’t help it – if I looked at people I’d just choke. Now I can throw a couple of jokes – albeit bad jokes! – in
between songs.”

As her audience grew, so did her ambition. Tentatively. Launching a FundIt campaign to put together a debut EP, it took her manager’s insistence to set the target at €4,000.

“I was like, ‘Oh god, this is going to mortify me, we’re not getting this money.”
She needn’t have worried.

“It was the most insane thing in the world – three weeks into the campaign and I had my four grand. ‘Are ya kidding me here lads?!’ For people to have that belief in you is absolutely incredible."

It meant her 2013 mini-tour of Ireland felt like a victory lap. As for the EP? The eponymous release, recorded as a “showcase” for her voice and lyrics, is no strait-laced, safe affair, and finds Hughes searching for her own sound.

“It might have just come out of blue but I love a bit of dirt. It’s a whole bunch of 1, 2, 3, BAM – here’s something you didn’t expect! But it’s all just me.”