Louise Post shows up on Zoom looking exactly like someone who just cracked open a time capsule and is still a little stunned by what fell out. The occasion: But I Love You Without Mascara, a batch of Veruca Salt–era demos from 1997–98 — a period fans obsess over and Post mostly tried not to think about. “Honestly, I’d forgotten about them,” she says. “My friend Matt Fass kept bugging me. ‘It’s my favorite song you’ve ever written, Louise.’ And I’m like… what song?”
It started because she digitized old camcorder footage — grainy shots of friends, bandmates, apartments, tour debris, the 90s preserved in low-res amber. Fass resurfaced the demos. Another friend said, “Let’s just make it happen.” And suddenly Post was hunched over editing software, teaching herself how to cut a music video in 2022 for a demo she recorded in 1997.
She swears she didn’t expect anyone to care. “But it reconnected me with fans who did care, and who wanted this chapter.” The more she talks about it, the clearer it becomes: this wasn’t a nostalgia dump. It was an exhale she’d been holding for two decades.
Take “You Used to Know Her,” the song that eventually landed on Resolver. It was written, rewritten, repurposed, and misunderstood so many times it became a kind of emotional hall of mirrors. “People always assumed it was about Nina,” she says. “It actually started about my stepmother.” Later she threaded in a verse about her older sister leaving for college — a tiny moment that apparently lived rent-free in her psyche for decades. Revisiting the song meant re-framing the whole thing: no Nina footage, no mythology, just the people who held her up when everything fell apart.
“It became a gentle closing of the door,” she says. “On that chapter, on the past, and temporarily on Veruca Salt. We’re just on hiatus — I’m making a solo record — but it felt right.”
Then there’s “A Color You Black,” a demo she loved too much to release at the time and can finally admit was written with her guard fully up. “I’d been blindsided,” she says — a relationship detonating in public, two fundamental people in her life turning out to be not who she thought. The track radiates that bruised vow of self-protection. “I decided I’m never letting anything hurt me like that again,” she says. “And I haven’t.”
Even now, she’s surprised the song resonates. “I’m glad I made something meaningful out of that moment,” she says. “I don’t wish it on anybody, but I’m glad I wrote it.”
If the EP is a time capsule, it’s also a map of an alternate universe — one where these demos became Veruca Salt songs instead of falling between eras. “I was writing for the next record,” she says. “But I was also demoing alone in L.A., and there was… something in the air. A question mark.” She laughs. “I wanted to strike out on my own. I just wasn’t ready.”
She’s ready now, though she still talks about the band like an eternal love. Ghost Notes — the 2015 reunion album — remains a high point. “It was the most cathartic, triumphant thing,” she says. “We’re so proud of it.”
Which makes the next chapter feel both overdue and slightly surreal: Louise Post, solo artist. Officially. Finally. The demos may be 25 years old, but the creative engine right now is wildly contemporary — thanks in no small part to her 12-year-old and a house overflowing with vinyl curated by her audiophile husband.
One minute she’s tapping the steering wheel to Post Malone, the next she’s making her kid listen to Bleach as Nirvana-shirt homework. And somewhere in that generational ping-pong is the hilarious realization that her kid didn’t fully grasp her own connection to the band they were suddenly “discovering.” “They’re like, ‘How do you know this song, Mom?’” she says, cackling. “I’m thinking… well, I don’t know, maybe because Nirvana wasn’t a TikTok sound when I was your age, it was just… life?” She didn’t launch into the whole Veruca-Salt-open-for-Hole-backstage-at-the-Fillmore chapter, but she did insist that if her kid was going to wear a Nirvana shirt, they had to earn it. So they queued up the early stuff, blasted “Swap Meet” down the freeway, and somewhere between Kurt’s snarl and Louise begging for something “poppier,” the past and present crashed together long enough for her kid to realize Mom might know a thing or two after all.
It’s a chaotic cocktail of influences — Nirvana, Billie Eilish, Imagine Dragons, the vinyl wall swallowing her home — but she swears the new album is more indie-pop than rock. “Not pop as in Taylor Swift,” she clarifies. “But influenced by everything I’ve been soaking up.”
Does she want to tour? Sure. Does she obsess over the “solo career” label? Not really. “I’m compelled to do this,” she says. “Something bigger than me is calling me to make this record. Maybe later I’ll go to nursing school. But right now? I have to make this.”
She shrugs, the way you do when you finally stop fighting what the universe keeps dragging you toward. Mascara off, guard down, door closed, door open — she’s doing the thing.
And finally doing it as herself.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
