When the Eaton fires burned through Altadena in 2025, Lorely Rodriguez, better known as Empress Of, kept looking at the county fire map and checking in on her childhood home. Her family, including her mother and her brothers, had evacuated, but they held
out hope that their house would make it through the blaze.
“It happened so fast,” she says, recalling the moments when she watched the fire take over homes just a few blocks from her own. “At some point, we just knew. And then my brothers drove over and sent us a picture. They’re like, “It’s gone.”
Rodriguez spent a lot of time sitting with grief and then, slowly, she began processing the crushing loss the best way she knows how: through music. “I wasn’t making music at first, and I was sort of waiting for the moment when I would write about this, because what happened was so life-changing,” she says. “But moments like these also make you realize the essence of who you are, what you have. You lose things, but you remember who you were. So I was making music to remember who I was.”
At first, she thought maybe she’d write a few songs that would fall into an EP. But slowly, more music poured out of her and it turned into Dream House, her fifth album. She teamed up with her close friend and collaborator Cecile Believe, who produced a lot of the LP (Cecile also appears on the track “SYW”). Rodriguez also tapped her past music partner Dev Hynes (Blood Orange), who featured her on the hit “Best to You” back in 2016. The two of them worked on a song called “Blue Light” that’s one of the standouts on the project.
Throughout the album, Rodriguez intersperses her mom’s voice, pulled from interviews and conversations they had during this time. Her mom narrates the process as their family’s new house was built, sharing as each piece goes up. “She built her dream house while I built mine,” Rodriguez says. The album artwork shows Rodriguez walking into the front door of her family’s finished home, all of it representing a project that’s staggeringly beautiful and full of hope.
Below, Rodriguez talks about some of the songs on the album and how they came together.
“Dream House”
For “Dream House,” I was thinking about my mom, and I was in this sort of trip-hop, dreamy sort of place, listening to a lot of Saint Etienne and stuff like that. I’d written a bunch of sad songs, and I wanted to write about the optimism of what could be, you know? I really loved that song because yes, it’s something really hard that happened. But there’s hope and warmth. I feel like that’s the tone of the album as well. So I started with “Dream House” and I was just talking about this house I want to build with my mom.
“Blue Light”
I made “Blue Light” with [Dev Hynes] in mind. I didn’t know he would be on the song, but that was sort of the essence of this one. We’ve collaborated before on his music, he’s been on my music, so when I made this, I wrote it with his parts in mind. When I reached out to him, it just felt really natural. I always feel like collaborations feel the most natural when you’re in the room with someone, but this one felt so intentional because I made the song thinking about him. And then I sent it to him and he was like, “I’d love to” and he sent me back his parts.
I think our voices sound really good together. The songs we have made together have a real earnestness and I think that’s beautiful. I listen to “Blue Light” and I listen to “Best to You.” To me, they feel like it’s the same car ride, you know? “Blue Light” was one of the later songs I’d written. I’d written a lot of the album already, and I was just sort of looking for things that were missing. I’d written a couple of dance songs. And I wanted a sort of comforting, nostalgic, mid-tempo type of song.
“SYW”
Cecile and I started to make music last summer. I was like, “I want to make music, but I need to do it with people I’m close with so I can feel comfortable talking about anything.” We did “Dream House” and she produced it. And then we just started to make more and more and more. She’s co-written eight of the songs on the record with me. She’s incredible and she deserves so much recognition. Any room I go in, I’m shouting Cecile’s name. I’m like, “She an amazing producer, amazing songwriter, amazing artist.” And she just contributed so much to the scope of the music on here.
We had talked about a feature and “SYW” was the one that felt like the most fun. I mean, we were seeing each other like almost every day. It was very much just like getting a coffee. It was like, “What kind of coffee do you want? Which one of my songs will you be able to sing on?” There was a verse I wrote there, but we rewrote a verse together that suited her and did some slight arrangement production things once she was on the song.
“Welcome to the House” interlude
I had the music and I was like, “There’s a thread missing.” I spoke to another friend who’s a producer and he listened to the album and he was like, “You should think about this album like it’s a movie. What’s the opening scene? How does the movie end?” And he was like, “If you take ‘Dream House’ off the track list, think about all the all the songs and then think about where you want the exclamation point to go.” I’d never made a track listing like that before.
I had all these amazing videos of my mom rebuilding our house. And I also invited her over to just talk. I have an hour of her talking and some of it is so amazing. I want to figure out what to do with it, because I only put little snippets in the record. We all lose something at some point in our lives. To hear this multi-generational story, between my songs and her speaking is, to me, it tells a universal story and a feeling.
“Trainsong”
It’s just like, “Bam!” It’s not a dance song. It feels very much like my last year. I was touring after what happened to our house and I was working, but it was kind of bizarre because I was processing a lot of stuff. I was traveling so much and I was trying to feel like I was at home wherever I was. I really love that song and I love the production; it feels very dreamy. It’s one of my favorites. Every time I put it on, I feel like I’ve escaped into the song.
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