There are quite a few musicians in our fandom who have been wrocking out for years and years, but Lauren Fairweather has been a part of the scene from almost its very inception! Rising to wizard rock fame as one half of the Moaning Myrtles (a band inspired by everyone’s favorite toilet ghost), Fairweather eventually set off on their own, gaining a reputation for fun, sweet musical odes to the wide world of fantasy literature.

For today’s installment of Wrock Talk, I was lucky enough to chat with Lauren, and the two of us talked about what the wizard rock scene was like when it first began, how much Lev Grossman’s The Magicians trilogy means to Fairweather, and how J. K. Rowling’s bigoted antics have impacted the fandom.

Paul: I know that you probably get asked this a billion times, but can you give us a summary of how you got started with wizard rock?

Lauren: I found Harry and the Potters online in 2004 and started going to their concerts when they toured near me. For one of them, I brought my best friend Nina along and after that show, we decided to start our own wizard rock band, The Moaning Myrtles! We started really early on in the movement so people found us really quickly even though we didn’t have a lot of experience with recording or promoting music online. Luckily, the community was so supportive that we learned from other bands as we went along and eventually started performing at shows and conventions.

Paul: You all were really a pillar of that early community! So, after the Moaning Myrtles, you started releasing solo work. What was it like going from a band to a solo act?

Lauren: I started learning how to play guitar and worked on writing my own songs when I was in college and while it wasn’t as fun as writing and performing with my best friend, it allowed me to be involved with the fandom community I love more often because I could go even when she wasn’t available. I had more room in my schedule to travel than she did, so I started going to as many conventions and wizard rock concerts as I could.

It also opened up my ability to write about more things. Writing from Myrtle’s perspective is a lot of fun, but I had other characters and even stories I wanted to investigate through music and my solo work gave me the opportunity to do that.

Even though I work on and perform my solo music a lot more often these days, it’s always really exciting whenever we get to reunite for special performances like we did for the Yule Ball tour with Harry and the Potters and Potter Puppet Pals.

Paul: Much of your material has been Harry Potter-focused, but some hasn’t, such as your Magicians-influenced work. What is it in a book, film, or piece of media that inspires you to write songs about it?

Lauren: For me, it’s about whether I relate to a particular character or if I’m emotionally moved by a story. If I can’t get moments from my favorite books or TV shows out of my head, writing songs about them helps me to explore those moments in a more in-depth way.

It also allows me to connect with fandoms I’m a part of. Not every fan community has something like wizard rock yet and especially with the Magicians fandom, I’ve really enjoyed getting to share my fan works with them. For one thing, the author of The Magicians, Lev Grossman, really loved my album Peaches and Plums and posted about it on Twitter a bunch. That’s an experience I never got to have with Harry Potter (and given J. K. Rowling’s harmful actions towards the trans community over the last few years, I don’t think it’s an experience I would want to have with her). 

I hope that it’ll eventually bring me new opportunities to travel to fan conventions and perform for different kinds of audiences! That’s one of my favorite things about writing music about books and TV shows, especially since my work is largely done through the internet; I love getting to share my music with people in person.

Paul: I’ve long been interested in the recording practices of DIY and indie artists. How do you record your music? Has the process evolved since you first started out? How so?

Lauren: These days, I record at home using an AKG Condenser microphone and an ART Voice Channel preamp with an old MacBook Pro and GarageBand, and then if I can save up or raise the money, I pay a producer to mix and master the tracks I recorded. Outsourcing the mix/master has been the biggest jump in quality for me over the years. I initially did that step myself but I have learned that I prefer to record myself and let an expert take it from there. I’ve worked with some amazing folks who have really taken my work and applied their artistry to it and I am grateful that they took on some pretty weird projects for me.

When I first started out, I was basically just using a USB microphone meant for Skype calls and those early recordings, however messy, helped us to reach more people than I ever thought I’d be able to perform for.

Paul: Wizard rock has been around for a long time—a really long time. As someone who was there in the beginning, how would you compare the burgeoning world of wizard rock c. 2004 to the modern scene? What’s changed? What’s stayed largely the same?

Lauren: Mostly, the people involved are different. There are a bunch of bands and audience members who’ve stuck around the whole time but like with anything, you can expect interest to wax and wane for individual folks. I got to see this first-hand when I did the reunion tour with Nina; she hadn’t been to a wizard rock event in probably 7 years and I had to introduce her to most of the friends I’d made since then because they were newer to the scene than that. She knew Harry and the Potters and we had asked Brian and Bradley from Draco and the Malfoys to be in our band with us, but she was meeting pretty much everyone else for the first time! 

Bands are still popping up all over, finding new and interesting ways to spin the genre on its head and apply their own creativity to it. I try to encourage people who’ve been wanting to start writing their own songs about stories that inspire them regardless of their experience level and that’s something I’ve believed in ever since I started writing wizard rock myself. I love finding newer wizard rock bands! One of my all-time favorite wizard rock bands is The Lovegoods and they released their first album on Bandcamp in 2017. 

One thing that hasn’t changed that I have always loved about this community is how enthusiastic and accepting the audience is. I adore getting to play for a bunch of excited people who aren’t afraid to sing along to songs about Harry Potter in public, and I love being in the audience and getting to hear other wizard rock bands play. It is the most fun I’ve ever had and as long as we keep supporting bands and following them wherever they’re willing to play for us, I hope it sticks around for a good long while, in whatever form it may continue to take.

Paul: In an email that preceded this interview, you mentioned you’d be interested in discussing J. K. Rowling’s hateful rhetoric the last few years regarding the trans community. How do you think her bigoted remarks have impacted wrock? Has it impacted your perception of the music?

Lauren: I am absolutely furious that J. K. Rowling repeatedly continues to use her platform to tear down the trans community; it goes against many of the things that she claimed to believe in and the lessons that we grew up learning from her. What she has said has done real harm to trans folks who grew up reading her books and it has fueled further hateful rhetoric from the people who sadly agree with her, causing irreparable damage to a group of people who were already hurting. 

I am now kind of glad that J. K. Rowling was never supportive of or involved in the fan communities that have gathered around her books. We have built this fandom from the ground up without her help and in some cases, despite her attempts to destroy it. For years, she shut down fandom events and Etsy shops and we have persisted in spite of that because we’ve created a place where we can feel accepted and celebrated. We’ve been inspired to create things that J. K. Rowling never could have created, whether they’re inspired by her work or not. My hope is that, while it may take some time for people to mentally separate her negative influence from the parts of the fandom she never touched, the friendships we’ve made and the spaces we’ve built without her will still be there when we’re ready to return. 

Personally, I am not currently excited to create more fan-works that are inspired by the wizarding world universe. It’s one of the reasons why I finally released a full album about another fantasy series, even though I wasn’t sure whether any of my existing audience would be interested in listening to it. It probably helped that I’ve been releasing individual songs about other books, movies, and TV shows since 2007, so this was just a bigger step forward into that approach. 

These days, I even feel like performances of my existing wizard rock songs should come with the disclaimer that I strongly disagree with J. K. Rowling. Though, this would not be the first time I’ve done that – back in 2017, Nina and I started introducing our very first Moaning Myrtles song, “And Then I Died”, as a cautionary tale about why you shouldn’t police someone’s gender in a bathroom.

A few months ago, I came out as genderfluid and began openly using she/they pronouns and I don’t know if I would have had the courage to do that if it hadn’t been for the trans folks I’ve met because of wizard rock and the recent outpouring of support for the trans community in this fandom. I think it’s interesting how a woman who turned out to have so much unnecessary hate in her heart unintentionally managed to teach several generations of people that no one should have to live in a closet. 

And because I am working to replace my idea of magic with examples that aren’t all from Harry Potter, I think I’ll move past that reference and instead end on a quote from The Magician’s Land by Lev Grossman that captures the way I feel about what makes the people I’ve met through wizard rock and fandom gatherings so magical: “He was full of emotion, full of feelings, bursting with them, and when it came down to it that’s what being a magician was. They weren’t ordinary feelings – they weren’t the tame, domesticated kind. Magic was wild feelings, the kind that escaped out of you and into the world and changed things. There was a lot of skill to it, and a lot of learning, and a lot of work, but that was where the power began: the power to enchant the world.”

Paul: You’ve been gifted a Skiving Snackbox. What piece of “candy” will you try first? 

Lauren: This is an interesting question to consider during a pandemic. Also, the allure of taking a sick day as an adult is also much less exciting than when it would get me out of a day of school. Even if I could take a day off from work, I would still have a kid who would need things from me and it would involve feeling horrible until it wore off so I’m honestly not sure you could pay me to eat those, haha. 

If you’re interested in checking out more of Lauren’s work—be it music, crafts, or fun blogs—be sure to visit their website here! Be sure to also support Lauren buy purchasing some of their music from Bandcamp! And follow them on Twitter, too! You won’t regret it!