Sophie Llyod doesn’t like being labeled as a female guitarist.
“I still think people would generally refer to me as a female guitarist. It can be annoying that it always has to have the ‘female’ put in front of it,” the musician said on The Mistress Carrie podcast. “It feels like it’s kind of limiting your abilities. Like, ‘Oh, we won’t compare you to the guys.'”
She added, “There’s so much girl power now, in rock and in music in general. So many session musicians I know of are also females, especially in the bigger bands. And generally, people are leaning more towards that kind of thing, because — I don’t know, women have a really cool energy as well.”
“It brings something kind of new to the genre. And I guess people are finally starting to see that and appreciate it, and that means more women are getting into it because they’re seeing it more as well. So it’s, yeah, it’s definitely, it’s taken over, and it’s about time,” Lloyd also shared.
Nita Strauss also talked about the challenges faced by female artists in the industry with iHeart Radio in 2022. “The best piece of advice that I can ever give and always give, especially to young females in this industry, is just to be yourself.”
She went on to say, “And it sounds like a bit of a played-out piece of advice. But I think, as a woman in the music industry, it goes a bit deeper than for most people because you’re always being pushed and pulled in one direction or another.”
“And there are these pressures from all different sides of our industry and from fans saying you should act this way, you should dress this way, you should dress sexier, you should dress less sexy, you should sing you should act, you should model you should this, you should that, play here, don’t play there, perform like this, don’t perform like that, you whip your hair around on stage too much, you don’t move enough on stage. There’s no right way or wrong way to create our art and do what we do,” Nita noted.
Lloyd will perform at the Download Festival on June 14 and at the Steelhouse Festival on July 26.
