‘Going Out of My Mind’ Because Trousdale Is Coming to Santa Barbara

Finding their sound and place in the spotlight amid the digital age, pop trio Trousdale is approaching music-making and tour life in a whole new way. Following the release of their first feature-length album, Quinn D’Andrea, Georgia Greene, and Lauren Jones are on the road for their second headlining tour and making their way to SOhO Restaurant & Music Club for their first Santa Barbara show. 

The album Out of My Mind cannot be cornered into one genre, allowing Trousdale to take the audience on a journey of emotions with their setlists. Greene described their sound as “folk pop, country rock, [and] art folk,” but it’s really “what you get with three different people that come from three very different upbringings raised on three different types of music all singing the same thing with everything [they] have.” 

On the cusp of Gen Z and Millennials, the three women are experts at leveraging their creativity to build an online presence. If taking on the feat of writing, recording, and producing their album (almost) completely alone wasn’t enough, Trousdale constructs an experience around listening to their music and breaks the barrier before their audience with TikTok vlogs, music videos, and funky makeup looks.

“We’re in an interesting time where I think the idea of music videos is getting reinvented in a lot of ways. There’s a lot of different visual content that people can create with their music,” Jones said. Spotify visualizers are the animations or imagery on the screen that move with the music while it plays. Using Spotify Canvas to create them, Jones has been having fun capturing the essence of their songs with visualizers. 

The creativity doesn’t end there — D’Andrea spent hours with her X-Acto knife precisely cutting out and photographing each paper fragment in the “Smart Iowa” stop-motion music video. As deadlines were approaching, D’Andrea showed up to the final days of production with her X-Acto knife ready to multitask between giving notes on the songs and cutting tiny people from black paper. She fell in love with the process so much that the X-Acto knife ended up joining her on tour. 

Dubbed the group’s TikTok guru by Greene, D’Andrea takes inspiration from the content she enjoys and gauges what people want to see based on how posts perform. “We’ve been really trying to expand what we show on TikTok and Instagram to share what it’s like to be on tour,” D’Andrea said. Some of their favorite TikToks to film are “Get Ready with Me”s while they do their makeup, hair, and get dressed before shows. 

Greene used to be the makeup artist for all three of them, but D’Andrea and Jones have learned from Greene and taken to Pinterest to hone their own skills. Now they all crowd in front of the mirror together and find the process to be a therapeutic pre-show ritual. Their bold graphic looks were originally inspired by ’60s icon Twiggy but have now evolved into their own unique style. Like on the Out of My Mind album cover, you can usually find Jones in blue, Greene in pink, and D’Andrea in green — each with matching eyelids. 

While their digital presence certainly contributes to their success, “they’re putting the music first,” Trousdale musical mentor Professor Christopher Sampson said. As the founder of the University of Southern California (USC) Popular Music program, where the trio met and joined forces, Sampson was “instrumental in the development during their time at USC,” according to his colleague Professor Patrice Rushen. Almost 10 years after meeting them in his songwriting class, Sampson has loved watching them from afar and seeing that “they’re leading with great songs and great voices.”

Coming together in a performance-based program, Trousdale naturally became friends and got their start writing together and playing small venues around L.A. like Molly Malone’s Irish Pub and the Viper Room. “We all really respected each other so much as individual artists that we were all just giddy for the chance to be able to sing and play with each other because we were all just fans of each other,” Green said. “And this kind of magical moment happened when we started playing together and it just really clicked.”

Noticing their individual and collaborative talent early on in their freshman year, Sampson took the trio on a “mini East Coast tour” while they were in school. “I think they learned a lot about what they were in for. It was hours of long drives in a van, unloading and then getting soundcheck … and I turned the whole thing into a learning experience,” Sampson said. 

After spending their college years as a primarily live band paying to play shows, graduation came around and the women went their separate ways trying to pursue careers in music. “I think we all needed some time to figure out where we all were before we really committed to making Trousdale our full-time jobs,” Jones said. In the year following, Green and Jones collabbed sporadically and D’Andrea got a job doing musical theater on a cruise ship before they rekindled in 2020. 

“It was a natural split to discover more and a natural re-finding,” Green said. 

The group only got to play one live show before the pandemic hit. Realizing they couldn’t play live anymore, they decided to start producing themselves. 

“That was a huge turning point for us because we span a lot of different genres and try to follow whatever the song is asking for in the production,” Jones said. The group released their first song (a cover of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” by the Beach Boys) in 2020 and continued to release singles and EPs until they were ready to take on an album with the release of Out of My Mind in September 2023.

For the album, the women wrote and recorded a whole slew of songs and narrowed it down to their favorites. The overarching theme of the album is acceptance and in songwriting, the women tap into their individual experiences to articulate the highs and lows that everyone goes through. 

“We have a group of songs that we’re really proud of lyrically, and to paint the soundscape for them and to say we did all that feels like quite an accomplishment,” Green said. “And that we get to play it live and hear how it affects people or connects with people feels like the dream.” 

With the jump-start of their recording career coinciding with the pandemic, it is no secret that the group relied on social media and streaming platform algorithms to disseminate their music. Their distributor Genesis Ahtty at Independent Co pitched their music to playlist curators at Spotify and landed them on playlists like “Relax & Unwind” with 3.6 million listeners alongside artists like Taylor Swift, Hozier, and Bon Iver. “Getting ‘Wouldn’t Come Back’ on playlists helped us gain more traction and get on more playlists. In that way, the Spotify and Apple algorithms have really benefited us,” the trio wrote.

Now, with more than 100 millions streams on Spotify and nearly a quarter-million followers on TikTok, “the trio of Quinn D’Andrea, Georgia Greene, and Lauren Jones are well on their way to establishing themselves as an indie folk force, with an irresistible sound similar to that of Kacey Musgraves, HAIM, Joseph, and The Staves,” according to Atwood Magazine. 

In the age of streaming, Gen Z artists and listeners have an updated approach to promoting and finding music.

“[Social media] gives us a chance to show our personalities more frequently than just a show, so I think our fans feel more connected to us. And I think the whole point of what we’re doing is to be connecting with people and giving people a space to connect with each other,” D’Andrea said. “It’s really great for us to have a platform where people can see who we are and then when they come to our shows they have a little bit of an idea of who we are.”

Going along with the theme of acceptance in Out of My Mind, Trousdale wants their tour to feel like a space where “everyone and everything and every feeling is welcome and safe with [them].” By letting the world in on their journey through goofy behind-the-scenes TikToks like Quinn testing out a hiccup-curing device before a show, the goal is to let their audience know that they are nothing but a group of friends pursuing what they love and having fun along the way. 

At their SoHO show on February 29, you can expect to be graced with Trousdale’s “pure tone quality that blends very naturally” and fun personalities, according to Sampson. 

Knowing that people are coming to their show all with different backgrounds and experiences — like the three of them have — Trousdale taps a wide range of emotions on stage and invites the audience to do the same in the crowd. “We try to talk about the really good things in life and the really bad things in a way that it feels helpful,” D’Andrea said. “We’ll give you a good time and a good cry.” 

To learn more about Trousdale, follow them on social media @TrousdaleMusic everywhere or visit their website trousdalemusic.com. To purchase tickets for their Santa Barbara show on February 29, visit sohosb.com/upcoming-events.