One name that kept popping up in the Nashville hip-hop scene from the late 2010s on was Lul Lion. At shows, on projects and in collectives, she was quite often the only woman in the mix. Then she seemed to drop off the radar last year. The Tennessee native (real name: Emanda Reid) might’ve been mostly out of view, but she wasn’t idle. Turns out, she’s been out in L.A., reinventing herself as an artist.
Reid grew up playing basketball in Johnson City, Tennessee. But it wasn’t until she got to college in Knoxville, studying political science at the University of Tennessee, that she set off down the DIY artist path, freestyling with friends and booking time in the school’s library recording studio.
“That was my first introduction to people, like, ‘Oh, she’s doing music. Oh, she’s kind of taking it seriously.’ And so that’s when I kind of had to form Lul Lion at that point.”
At underground shows put on by her Knoxville crew, Lul Lion started meeting artists from all over Tennessee. “But I really gravitated towards Nashville,” she says, “and the Nashville sound, the Nashville scene and the Nashville artists at the time and continued to make relationships with them. And that’s how I [decided], ‘Okay, well, I think Nashville’s where I probably could grow the most.'”
When she moved to Nashville in 2018, she immediately started hopping on tracks with local fixtures like PETTY, Reaux Marquez, OGTHAGAWD and Brian Brown.
But she initially thought of herself as the weak link among them.
“In the early times,” she recalls, “I was like, ‘I can’t believe you guys want to work with me. I can’t believe you guys see something that I could add to your tracks or your albums.’ And I think they just believed in my songwriting and my voice, my tone. Like, they believed that I was going to push through and find my way.”
Lul Lion did develop an unflappable, unhurried melodic flow. Her rapping was cool and even, prone to suggest toughness and seem emotionally guarded.
And she gained confidence in her voice, to the point where she knew she could hold her own with the guys.
“‘Hey, you need a female voice on this,'” she remembers telling her male peers in Nashville. “‘You need a a different perspective on this.’ Because, yeah, I just knew I could bring something different to the to the table.”
Lul Lion released her own stuff through independent labels Power Entertainment and Cake Records, played shows throughout Tennessee and pursued her ambitions as far as she could. But over time, she realized there were other things that she wanted to do, like lean into her pop sensibilities and transcend the limited ways that Black women’s music too often gets categorized.
“We see that time and time again with Beyoncé. She’s doing so many different genres, and she gets boxed in always. “
Lul Lion could relate: “I just wanted to be seen, like, ‘Oh, she can do whatever she wants.'”
She began to find producers who shared her affinity for hypnotic hooks that take flight over pulsing, mechanistic dance floor beats. It just so happened they were based in L.A.
When she made a trip out there to get in the studio, she wound up staying. But it hasn’t been an easy transition. She’s been working a demanding day job. And before she realized it, she’d gone a long time without releasing music.
But the loosies “So High” and “Get To You” that she dropped a few months back and her new Speed of Love EP reflect how she’s evolving towards R&B-steeped dance-pop that’s fare more up front about articulating desire, a mode she describes as “put it all out there.”
There’s an urgency to it — and not because her team is pressing her to make moves. She’s handling everything on her own right now, and wants to show herself, and those who’ve followed her, that she’ll see her vision through.
“I’m just trying to just let people know I didn’t quit,” she says. “I’m still making music. I’m still passionate about it. I still see myself making music in the long term. I didn’t let life stop me.”
The other big change she made this year is her name. “I just wanted to go by L10N,” she explains. Gone is the prefix “Lul.” “I’m past that,” she says. “I feel big now.”
But she didn’t go with the standard spelling. In place of the letters I and O is the numeral 10. As in, Tennessee. It’s a nod to where she came from and the scene she wants to keep a strong connection to no matter how she’s expanding her range.