About
L A Mitchell has been a stealth operator in New Zealand Music, her credentials will surprise you, having performed support for Lionel Richie, Stevie Wonder and Guy Sebastian. She worked alongside Dave Dobbyn, Bic Runga, Tim Finn, Anna Coddington & Sola Rosa & Dukes. Her name in New Zealand is synonymously connected with the juggernaut group, ‘Fly My Pretties’ backed by Black Seeds front-man, Barnaby Weir and more recently she spun heads in a run of mind-blowing shows as a member of the Bill Withers Social Club alongside Troy Kingi & Dallas Tamaira (Fat Freddie’s Drop). Her most recent work has been with her Husband, Matt Barus, on their duo project Terrible Sons, Finalists for the 2024 Folk Artist Tui. They’ve quietly amassed over 21 million streams of the duos’ acoustic indie folk. She has also been nominated for the Apra Silver Scroll top 20 list 3 times. Her recent single Mother held a chart position on the NZ ALT charts for 8 weeks, reaching #4.
Her new album ‘Meaningful Work,’ release date yet to be decided, is a body of work that melds her previous voyages in music into one. An alt-indie-electro-pop styled album, it holds attitude & expressions of power and confrontation alongside honesty and introspection.
“Shatters the status quo of your long-cemented ‘Immortal G.O.A.T Musicians’ list.” Oxford Lamouraux, 13th Floor
”Only twice have I been moved to tears by the sheer beauty of live music. The first was hearing the Teskey Brothers perform Rain at The Powerstation. The second was L.A. Mitchell last night – a seemingly mythical musical creature who channels the best of Joni Mitchell, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse, and Adele, yet is entirely her own.” Oxford Lamouraux, 13th Floor
About L.A.Mitchell Vocal Studio
L.A.Mitchell trained in Jazz Vocal Performance, and earned a Bachelors degree in Music from Canterbury University. But it wasnt plan sailing. She struggled as a singer in her degree program, where her experience of her voice was constricted, limited and full of tension. Her response to this challenge was for her to dig deeper into understanding the body from a physiological perspective and also how her thoughts and ways of thinking were inhibiting the body.
“I recognised there was a deeper need to connect with the physical self as the feeling centre of the body and build the breath and expression and release from a more grounded place - where I created a safer place in my own body to let go of the voice.”
It is this knowledge she applied in a slow and careful way to experience connection and release from a place, not of pressure but of comfort and gentleness. It is through this personal research and trail and error that she has developed a way of teaching and approaching the voice that aims to give her students a solid foundation and freedom to use their voice any way they choose.
More recently she began a series of trainings for Women, recognising the experience of singing gets lost in the milieu of life and the demands of other more immediate pressures, and if you sang but didnt deisre to pursue it in a competitive way then it just dropped out of your life. She set up a series of work shops called “Revive Your Voice” and has toured New Zealand helping woman reconnect with their voices and gain some freedom through the sharing of knowledge to sing for joy and delight.
This experience has also led her into the use of the voice and singing as a healing tool for grief. And this year 2025 will see the first Grief Choir set up in Ōtautahi, Aotearoa - to explore communal singing as a space for healing.