With the release of their sophomore album (out now on all streaming platforms), trio Trousdale has done it again. ‘Growing Pains’ is a masterfully compiled, 12-track LP that blends bright pop music with a country twang, oscillating between catchy choruses and poignant ballads. A week before the album’s release and about a month before they kickoff their international tour, I spoke with Trousdale (Quinn D’Andrea, Georgia Greene, and Lauren Jones) in the WHRB studio about their musical journeys: humble beginnings, soundboard malfunctions, color palettes, and the endurance of friendship. 

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about your individual journeys with music, and then how you found each other!

Georgia: College can be so scary, especially freshman year when you're coming out of state. When we met at USC, it was like instant friendship—a comforting, special bond that we all had, especially in a school where my experience was really high stress. It was very easy compared to some of the other things we were doing at the time, in the sense that it was very genuine and natural to want to come together and sing.

Where does the name Trousdale come from?

Quinn: It's a street that goes through USC. When we were talking about band names in freshman year, we were kind of getting ahead of ourselves. We hadn't really written stuff, but we were in college for music, so we thought, Yeah, let's be a band. And the name just stuck at that point. 

And congrats on finishing your sophomore album, Growing Pains! How does it feel to be done with that big project?

Q: So good. We've been sitting on it now for a few months, which was really wonderful, but we’re also really excited to get it out into the world.

G: The moment when you finish an album, for me personally, is the best time. That direct week after. Because you're like, oh my god, I'm so excited. It sounds so good. It's so fresh. I listen to our music a lot. and I've never felt as strongly about any of our stuff before this album. Every single song I just love and listen to all the time, and I'm still not sick of it. I've been listening to it since we finished it.

Honestly, it's so many different hats. We talk about that a lot. Writing is all of our pride and joy, and then recording is also pride and joy. And then after, you know, social media is just so important. It's just a different head space to be in.

And this is your second album—what’s different about the creation process this time? 

Q: This time has actually been a real cycle of steps, as opposed to last time where we were doing a lot of things at the same time: we were promoting a song that was coming out or had come out, while we were still trying to finish recording the next one, and be mixing it and sending notes and then turning it in, but also finding the artwork for it and doing photo shoots for it. It was a lot of those different hats that we had to wear at the same time, within one day.

Lauren: You don't want to do it all at the same time. You go out of your mind. That’s the title of our first album.

G: We also went in and recorded it live. And for the last album, we kind of pieced it together with songs that we loved that we'd written over the years. With this one, we were very intentional with the songs that we wrote for it and picked for it. 

I love that, and I totally hear that intention. The themes of growing pains, of working through your frustration with having so much going on… tell me about what you guys were feeling as you created the album and the story that you were putting into it.

L: ‘Growing Pains,’ the song, was written pretty early on in the process. The three of us were just reflecting on our journey as a band, and how following your dreams can still be really hard sometimes. We all feel very privileged and are so happy to be doing music for a living, but it's still such a tough journey in a lot of ways. 

So we’re talking about that feeling of being just exhausted, and trying to scrape whatever is left in you to keep pushing through those, what we call growing pains, to get to that next thing. So much of this life is growing pains. You never really stop growing. All the songs all tied into that theme in some way. 

How do you write these personal songs with clear and individual stories as a group of three? How do you maintain your individuality and balance that with the group?

G: As the band has become our full time job, it was important for each of us to really get ourselves in the music of this group of songs. Because we hope we will be doing this for a long time, we want to make it really sustainable and enjoyable, and have each of our truths in the music. With three leads and three writers and three different lives, it's such a beautiful task at hand for us to combine all of who we are into our music. 

Q: Over the years it’s gotten easier, just from the time spent with each other. We know each other so well—we really understand each other and what we're going through, and we trust each other with those experiences. 

It's a beautiful thing. We can cover more ground with the three of us just being three different people. There's more emotional ground relating to, like, the human experience that we get to cover if we let each of us write about what it feels like for ourselves, you know, instead of dimming the edges of an experience so that we all relate. If we were to put a venn diagram of what all three of us fully understand, it's not going to be nearly as much as what each of us know to be true about our world. There's so much more to say that way. 

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Q: Yeah, totally.

There's writing, and then there's performing music with another person or two other people, which is a special thing in itself. What's your experience performing as a trio?

L: Oh my gosh. I don't think I could do it on my own. That's my experience. It just is so indescribable, how much it helps to have your friends alongside you on a journey like this. 

Singing with other people is just such a basic human thing. I feel like the importance of music is noticed at early stages of life, and at old, elderly stages of life, but in the middle, somehow it gets lost. But it never loses that power. It really, truly is a universal language, and to share that with people just feels so important. It feels natural—a very grounding thing. It’s like a trust fall. 

Q: I totally agree. We're all relying on each other. That is very helpful, but it also does add pressure. Every performance we do is equally based on the three of us being there and being locked in. And so when you make a mistake, you're not just making a mistake for yourself, you're making a mistake on behalf of the band. That can raise the stakes of it—we really have to be connected. If things are not fully locked in and in tune,not even musically speaking; if we're not in tune with each other it can be really tough.

But then at the same time, there is so much more ground that we can cover too vocally, range wise. 

L: We almost become our own instrument. You learn so much about the tools at your disposal and how to manipulate them in a way that will achieve a certain effect that you want, and then you bring the heart into it.

If you have those moments of being not locked in, harmonically or emotionally, how do you work through that together? 

Q: There's unspoken stuff that happens on stage for sure. We can tell when we're not locked in. And there’s legitimate, tangible support that comes through in terms of covering for each other. 

G: I totally agree. I think we also have tried to become less perfectionist—because, like Quinn was saying, we all if we mess up, we know it affects the rest of us. There's so many elements at play, you know: sound, your feelings about the night, your temperature, your outfit—so many things can affect your performance. 

Q: Oh my gosh, that's so real. If I'm wearing the wrong shoes, I'm gonna mess up on the piano. And I'm gonna be so mad because I messed it up for us, but I'll be so mad because it's my outfit, and I'm gonna have to explain that to them later.

L: At this point, we've played enough shows where if we walk away from a performance and all three of us think we sounded pretty good, that was amazing. Because it's so rare. I would say, every single show that we play, one of us is like, no, sorry, yeah. Wasn't at my best tonight. There are even shows that we've come away from being like, Yikes! And people will still tell us that it was amazing. We're so hard on ourselves. 

This has become a little bit of a joke because it sounds so heady, but I really do feel like people experience time differently. When we're up there performing, we are experiencing our music one second at a time. Every second of that performance we are processing, aware, measuring. In the audience, they're measuring the full two hours as one thing, experiencing it as a whole. And I think that's where the perfectionism comes in. And I think that's what makes us so good. 

G: But it affects your mental health.

L: So we've tried to get better at taking the average, rather than focusing on the tiny moments.

Then on the flip side are the great moments. Do you have any specific memories from the project or from a past tour that are like “that was the best day”?

G: When we played in Seattle, the sound went out. It was in the middle of our song If I'm Honest. The audience just kept singing the lyrics—they knew that song really well. 

In the studio version, at the end of that song, all the background instruments drop out and it’s just vocals…

G: It was literally right at that time, oh my gosh. It worked so perfectly. We just kept going, and none of us knew what was happening. 

Q: And everything, all the amplification, all came back on at exactly the right moment, right when the chorus gets big again. Everyone flipped out. It was so sick.

Another one is when we were opening for Cory Wong in the beginning of 2023 at the Ryman in Nashville. It's such a historic, well known venue, and we got a standing ovation at the end of the show, which people said doesn't happen at the Ryman very often. 

It was such a validating moment, to be in a large room of people that collectively were really taken with what we did, and were really rooting for us.

G: It felt like, in that moment, they were seeing how hard it is, and they were saying, keep going. They were seeing what we see in it. Like they were judging the whole package.

Q: It felt like we had made it. 

L: There's something so special about the lineage. We take the history and the musicians that come before us very seriously. Three part harmony obviously has such a deep rooted history in Americana and folk music. And being on a stage like the Ryman where so many harmony trios have played, and in a city where that musical history is so rich, it was just so emotional to really feel like we're now part of that story. 

Anything you want to shout out that you're listening to now, that you want to put people on? This is my favorite question, because then I get music recommendations!

G: This artist MARO—I was heavily inspired by the song Still Feel It All. Also Yana, Carol Ades, Annika Bennett.

L: Ken Yates, Abbey Cone, Laci Kaye Booth.

Q: Mon Rovîa, Rett Madison.

Okay, switching gears completely. You guys have a really clear visual style where you each have a color: Quinn is green, Lauren is blue, and Georgia is pink. Where did that come from? Are you gonna continue it—is that your thing? 

Q: We were all looking for jumpsuits to wear for a photoshoot at this place called Big Bud Press. We just happened to wear those three colors and took a picture we liked, so we bought the jumpsuits. We posted pictures with them and wearing them for a few shows, and then people started associating us with the color that we were wearing. We didn't put it together that those were the colors of the Powerpuff girls—if we had, we might not have done those colors. But we're just leaning in now. 

G: We've always gravitated towards bright colors for the band; especially in the beginning, the music was just so happy and upbeat. So we were definitely confident about sticking with bright and monochrome vibes. But the reason we did those specific colors was the jumpsuits. And it helps us pick out outfits! 

Q: Yeah, really good quality stuff. Shout out Big Bud Press. They don’t sponsor us—wish they did!

Just one more question for you: is there anything that you're really excited about or hoping for over this tour, the next year, and/or the next couple of years? 

L: We’re going to Europe this summer, and aside from a bit in the UK and Ireland that'll be our first time playing in Europe! I’m really excited for that.

G: We’re also doing a VIP experience and I’m just really excited to meet fans. That is always so fun.

Sounds like there's a lot of joy on the horizon. And there’s a lot of joy in the album, too.

Q: Thanks for listening to it. 

Thanks for making it!

Growing Pains, Trousdale’s second album, is out now on all streaming platforms. Charlotte Stokes ‘27 is a staff writer and Artist Relations Director for WHRB.