Lara St. John

Lara St. John on Empowerment and the Making of Dear Lara

Violinist Lara St. John joins me to discuss her upcoming documentary Dear Lara, her remarkable career, and her ongoing work to ensure a safe and inclusive music community. Lara’s creativity, warmth, humour and brilliance come through in this wide-ranging interview and you’ll hear about her decision to become the first classical soloist to start her own record label, her formative year in the former USSR, advice about learning music and the violin, and a tribute to one of her main mentors, Joey Corpus. In fact Joey’s amazing story wasn’t one I was familiar with and since this conversation I’ve learned more about this inspiring pedagogue. We talked about two of her many albums, and you’ll hear a couple of clips from Shiksa and She/Her/Hers; track names are in the timestamps and everything is linked to Lara’s website in the show notes. Lara is also known for her love for iguanas, and at the very beginning of this episode you’ll get to meet Baby Octavius!

Trigger warning: Please note that there are detailed timestamps, so you can go to specific parts of this interview; there are mentions of both sexual assault and a suicide attempt

Podcast Other Podcast Players Video Transcript

Lara St. John Website Varaiuni Bar Fight Video

Katherine Needleman, Bente Illevold, Samantha Ege,  Naomi Moon Siegel and Yolanda Bruno

Newsletter Podcast Merch Buy me a coffee?

Portraits by: Titolayo Ayangade and the snapshot of Lara’s iguana Baby Octavius is for those listeners on the podcast apps who didn’t get to see him at the beginning of the video!