Lou Monroe Finds Beauty in the Unknown on “Corpus Callosum”
INTERVIEWS
By Indi Tejeda
8/17/26
Olivia Barry Coder, one half of the haunting indie duo Lou Monroe, discusses her unique musical upbringing and how she found inspiration in the unknown for her single "Corpus Callosum."
Courtesy of Lou Monroe
For Lou Monroe, music has never existed separately from life. The project, formed by vocalist and songwriter Olivia Barry Coder and film score composer Michael James Lee, exists somewhere between sound, storytelling, memory, and emotion. Their latest single, “Corpus Callosum,” is a haunting reflection on grief, identity, the human body, and learning to accept what cannot be controlled.
The song carries the weight of a deeply personal chapter in Olivia’s life, transforming experiences with illness, uncertainty, and change into something both intimate and universal. Written from a place of vulnerability and reflection, “Corpus Callosum” explores the complicated relationship between the self and the body, confronting the things we cannot always understand or change.
But before Lou Monroe existed, Olivia’s relationship with creativity began long before songwriting. Raised surrounded by musicians, performers, painters, and storytellers, she grew up in a world where art was both a constant presence and a way of making sense of life. From her grandmother’s music school to years spent in theater, performance, and writing, Olivia’s creative journey has been shaped by the people who taught her that art could be a place of connection, honesty, and discovery.
But before there were songs, there was Grandma Kay.
Olivia describes her grandmother as almost larger than life: an opera singer, composer, choir director, pianist, cellist and flutist with near-perfect pitch. But what inspired Olivia most was not only her musical ability – it was her refusal to accept limitations.
Long before opening the performing arts school where Olivia spent much of her childhood, Kay taught herself piano while nannying for a wealthy family, listening in on the children’s lessons before practicing alone after shining their shoes.
“She is sort of this mythologically incredible person when it comes to music,” Olivia says. “The richness of stories of her being like, ‘Oh, I’m a woman and therefore I can’t be as good in this very male-dominated space? Watch this.’ Inspire me endlessly.”
Music became part of Olivia’s life almost immediately. At two years old, she was already sitting beside her grandmother, singing and playing Orff instruments in a classroom full of children.
“I couldn’t wait to get a mallet in my hand the moment I’d show up to their music school,” she says.
Yet some of her most formative creative memories happened outside the classroom. Hidden inside the school was a closet filled floor to ceiling with decades of sheet music and literature. Olivia would disappear inside, climbing the ladder and reading until she fell asleep.
“I used to hide from things a lot as a kid,” she says. “I wanted to write stories like the ones I read in that closet. That was sort of the birth of knowing I wanted to be a writer.”
That desire to observe, imagine, and disappear into other worlds became a foundation for the way she approaches creativity today.
Courtesy of Lou Monroe
While her grandmother and aunt taught her the technical side of music, another grandmother - an actor and painter-introduced her to something equally important: emotional honesty.
“She was always sort of my unofficial coach,” Olivia says. “For the stuff technical shit can miss. Which is feeling something. Deeply.”
Growing up, theater became less of an extracurricular activity and more of a way of life. Her grandparents’ performing arts school became her second home, where she built sets, painted scenery, created costumes, ran lights, stage managed, and eventually directed productions herself.
“My family didn’t make money doing any of this,” she says. “Well…they did. But just enough to keep the lights running and the next show.”
She laughs. “Baby, it was poverty livin’ for me.”
Olivia does not romanticize growing up without financial security, but she recognizes how those experiences shaped her perspective as an artist. Living with a single mother and watching the adults around her navigate uncertainty taught her to pay attention to the world’s imperfections.
“It’s easier to see the cracks in the foundation of the world around you when money isn’t there to solve the problems,” she says. “When you’re scared about how the adults in your life are going to pay rent as a kid, you work at your craft harder in hopes of making it out of the mud and helping the people you love get out too.”
Art became the thing that made her feel wealthy. If she could afford a CD, she listened until it was worn out. She studied lyric booklets, analyzed rhyme schemes and syllables, read musician autobiographies, and tried to understand the choices behind the art she loved.
Courtesy of Lou Monroe
Her grandfather introduced her to jazz – Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong – and taught her to understand music through the history surrounding it. A history teacher raised between Chicago and Detroit, he showed her that songs were never separate from the people and experiences that created them.
By high school, Olivia believed classical music would become her future. Eventually, though, she realized the songs that moved her most were not necessarily the ones she studied-they were the ones she felt.
“Nothing really made me feel the way I felt when I’d sing Etta James or Ella Fitzgerald,” she says. “So I quit choir when I was a senior…and I wrote my ass off.”
She began performing in a middle school cover band called ADHD before musician Spencer Kilpatrick heard her singing in a hallway and invited her to join his band, The Scam.
“He gave me $180 from his own paycheck,” she says. “We were in high school. Who the fuck did I think I was?”
More than the money, Olivia remembers what the opportunity represented. “It made it feel like a paid gig.”
Looking back, she credits the musicians and artists around her for helping her find confidence in her own creativity.
“I was SURROUNDED by some of the most talented musicians I’ll ever know growing up,” she says. “Anything I ever do creatively, I have a lot of people whose creative shoulders I have stood on.”
Those influences eventually found a home in Lou Monroe.
Olivia and Michael had connected through music long before creating the project together. When they started dating, Michael was building his career while Olivia found herself missing songwriting.
“We felt sort of insane it hadn’t happened sooner,” she says.
Their partnership works because their creative instincts balance each other. Olivia describes herself as someone who jumps between ideas, while Michael prefers focusing on one piece at a time.
“I needed to refine the sort of chaos I like creating in,” she says. “For him, he needed a bit of that chaos to free him up. I think ultimately that is where Lou Monroe sort of lives- between those two worlds.”
That space between control and uncertainty became central to “Corpus Callosum.”
The song began inside the couple’s 450-square-foot Los Angeles home, where Michael recorded a melody on an old bajolele he had gifted Olivia. With their baby asleep in the next room, he asked if she could find something within it. Olivia put on headphones and began singing.
“Flowers bloom in spring, what a time to be a bird.”
At the time, Olivia was navigating a neurological diagnosis, motherhood, difficulties within her family, and the realities of a healthcare system that often leaves people feeling unseen. The song became a place to confront the complicated relationship between identity and the body.
“When you’re dealing with chronic illness, it makes you square up with deeply uncomfortable truths about this world,” she says. “In fact it forces you to become the uncomfortable topic in the room.”
Rather than avoiding those experiences, she transformed them into something honest.
“It was sort of a love letter and a hateful noticing that I am not as in charge of my body as I’d like to be,” she says.
The title itself reflects that tension. The corpus callosum is the part of the brain responsible for communication between the two hemispheres - a fitting metaphor for the divide between the mind and the physical body.
That same relationship shaped “Phantasm,” another Lou Monroe song written during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in Los Angeles. While protests filled the streets outside her home, Olivia was experiencing worsening neurological symptoms that left her bedridden and unable to participate physically.
“I sat there,” she says. “Overwhelmed with my disdain for a cruel system. Pretty fuckin’ mad I couldn’t use my body in a safe way to practice what I preach.”
Instead, she found other ways to contribute, creating medical kits and listening to the voices outside her window.
“I could hear in every voice out there the voice of a human being,” she says. “Who I loved and admired for being brave enough to metaphorically throw rocks at a much larger, hungry-for-brave-types machine.”
Courtesy of Lou Monroe
For Olivia, both songs come from the same place: a desire to understand what it means to exist as a person in a complicated world.
Her influences extend beyond music into film, poetry, philosophy, and psychology. She credits artists and thinkers including Pablo Neruda, Saul Williams, Frank O’Hara, Carl Jung, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, and Alan Watts with shaping the way she views creativity.
Ultimately, Olivia believes authenticity is the most important thing an artist can protect.
“There is no one on earth like you,” she says. “There may be people who are similar…but there is no one EXACTLY like you.”
For her, vulnerability is not something to avoid, but it is what makes art meaningful.
“I have always felt like art is only worth creating if it is scary or vulnerable,” she says.
That means embracing the uncomfortable parts of humanity too.
“I am a fan of the ugly and scary in people’s work,” she says. “Life is ugly. It’s also beautiful, but you cannot acknowledge that beauty without noticing the horrible first.”
With “Corpus Callosum,” Lou Monroe transforms personal uncertainty into a deeply emotional exploration of what it means to live, change and continue creating. Through vulnerability and honesty, Olivia Barry Coder and Michael James Lee build music that reflects both the beauty and difficulty of being human.
For Olivia, the answer has always returned to the same belief: keep creating.
“A writer, writes,” she says. “Always.”
Listen to "Corpus Collosum"
