14 DAY TRIAL // Lea Michele is moving away from her “Glee” fame and is getting ready to finally make her big break on the music scene as a solo artist. Her debut album, “Louder,” will be out in music stores on March 4 after some delays, and she’s promoting it with a new interview and pictorial for V Magazine.
The spread, shot by famed and very controversial fashion photographer Terry Richardson, aka Uncle Terry, is available in full at the link above. If you’re not familiar with the name, we should probably note that, while he’s got major pull with celebrities, his reputation is shady at best, after several of the young models he worked with told the press of his inappropriate conduct around them.
Richardson is also famous for his trademark style of taking a photograph, which often translates into a very raunchy image. In Lea’s case, that’s definitely toned down considerably perhaps also because her image so far has been a girl-next-door-type, very wholesome one.
Lea herself is quite surprised at how far she’s come in the industry, telling the publication she has never imagined she’d get to pose for Terry. Not even her friends thought she would get the chance or, for that matter, that she would ever be this bold as to accept.
“My friends call me Grandma, but, like, Grandma’s killing it right now. I’m pretty sure Grandma nailed it in a half-naked Terry Richardson shoot, okay? So I’m fine with it. I just do my thing. I do what’s best for me. That’s it,” she says.
Besides killing it, Lea is also continuing to struggle to cope with the loss of her other half, as she used to call him: Cory Monteith, her real-life boyfriend and “Glee” co-star, who died last year of an accidental drug and alcohol overdose.
Cory had been struggling with addiction for years and Lea had been by his side all along, but when he died, he seemed to have finally managed to turn his life around.
The singer says she pretty much owes her life to fellow singer and international icon Stevie Nicks, whom she compares to a “fairy” who provided her with gifts like “tools and advice and support.”
“She told me from the beginning that music is going to be [my] therapy, and at the time, I was like, ‘What the [expletive] are you talking about, Stevie Nicks? I don’t want to listen to music. I can’t do anything.’ But once you get out a little bit of the tunnel, when you slowly start to feel like you can be yourself a little bit, it does help. It’s so cool I have her number,” Lea says.
Based on Stevie’s advice, Lea poured her heart and soul into “Louder,” which she describes as the most personal music project she’s ever been involved in. Because of the tragedy she’d just come out of, she also included one song on it that is actually a tribute to Cory, “You’re Mine.” You can listen to it in full above.