Laura Cox accidentally embarked on a fully fledged career after she started posting classic rock guitar covers on YouTube 18 years ago and went viral.
She’s now a bona fide touring and recording artist, with three albums under her belt. But as she herself admits, the transition from YouTube to recording her own material in a professional studio was trickier than she expected, or, in her own words, “a nightmare”.
“I was around 15 when I started playing the guitar. Then, two or three years afterwards, I was really into watching YouTubers playing covers of classic rock solos, and it was really motivating for me,” she tells Guitarist. “I thought, ‘Okay, I’m gonna do the same. I’m gonna post and maybe get some feedback.’
“A lot of the comments were really positive, really encouraging and motivating. But there was also a few criticising my looks, or almost sexual harassment. But, honestly, for me, it was the internet, it was not real life.”
Around 2014, Cox put a band together, and, thanks to her notoriety on YouTube, she managed to find a label and a booker – a move that led her to release her first studio album, Hard Blues Shot, in 2017.
“It was a nightmare,” she replies when asked about dipping her toes into the recording arena. “Because my only experience of music was playing guitar in my room in front of a webcam where I was alone, so I could re-record and re-record.
“But playing in the studio, recording an album with a band and engineers, and every second is costing me money, I was really stressed,” Cox continues. “We had a lot of technical difficulties; the gear was falling apart, and nothing was working.
“I was kind of going into depression after the first studio recording because we couldn’t see the end. Every day we were thinking, ‘Okay, we’re late on the schedule; we still have to record this and this,’ and it was never-ending.”
Thankfully, things got better over the years, and as she – and the rest of the band – gained more studio experience, she even discovered the joy of self-producing on her latest album, Trouble Coming.
“I didn’t record it this way in the studio. I recorded a lot at home, and it felt way more comfortable.”
For more from Laura Cox, plus new interviews with Jeff Tweedy and Brian Robertson, pick up the new issue of Guitarist from Magazines Direct.
