Exclusive Interview: Neara Russell on Finding Balance Beyond Music, Touring with Luke Hemmings and Aly & AJ, and Breaking Barriers as a Woman in the Industry
- Abby Anderson
- May 29
- 7 min read
Neara Russell is about as multi-talented a musician as they come. Her resume speaks for itself, with gigs as a songwriter, producer, music director, vocalist, and keyboardist all appearing across her work with artists like Aly & AJ, Luke Hemmings, Meghan Trainor, and Bridgit Mendler. But after fourteen years in Los Angeles, a few performances on live albums, tours around the world, and countless experiences that have shaped her into a powerhouse woman in every music landscape she takes on, Neara’s personality radiates as brightly as her skillset. No matter the flashy, Hollywood names she’s worked alongside, Neara remains grounded, grateful, and inspired to keep reaching for new ways to live the life she dreamed of as a little girl learning piano.
Now coming up on a year since she wrapped her last global tour playing keyboards for Luke Hemmings on the Nostalgia for a Time that Never Existed Tour, Neara joined us for a Zoom call to talk about everything from how Chopin and Sheryl Crow inspired her path towards music, the pressures of being a woman in the male-dominated sides of the industry, and how she’s approaching the next era of balancing her identity both within and outside the world of music.
Growing up in a log cabin tucked away in the woods of rural Wisconsin, music was a daily part of life for Neara. “My father is a musician and was my music teacher growing up,” she recalls. “I was homeschooled, and my mom would usually handle the academics with me. She was an English teacher, so she would cover all the book-learning stuff.” While her mom nurtured a love of words and composition, her dad immersed her in the world of playing music from a very young age. “He got me started with piano really young. I have very early memories of sitting at the piano with him while he was playing jazz or Chopin and starting to bring my little fingers up and interrupt him with my own little ideas,” she says, laughing. That playful curiosity quickly turned into structured lessons. “He started kind of formally getting me started with scales and basic classical music by the time I was six.”
As Neara got older and her style matured, her musical world expanded beyond classical music and jazz. “When I hit my teenage years, I was listening to Avril Lavigne and Sheryl Crow and all the rocker women, and just got really excited about that,” she says. Inspired by their bold voices and powerful presence, she began writing her own music and experimenting with different sounds. “I started writing like Imogen Heap, using more synthesizers,” she explains. That shift in style led to a bigger realization: “I decided when it was time for college that I wanted to move more into contemporary music.”
After receiving her degree in music from Berklee College of Music, Neara relocated from Boston to Los Angeles, which opened the door to huge professional opportunities for her from the start of her career. “My first big touring experience was with Bridgit Mendler from Good Luck Charlie,” she shares. “She was awesome, and she took really good care of us. That’s when I started actually going to Europe and Australia and Singapore and all around the States and started to have my first tour bus experience,” she says.
Since, Neara has only grown in finding ways to keep her expectations realistic about life as a touring musician. “There [have] been some memorable, rough moments, for sure, of loneliness. You're sort of all stuck together on this bus and you don't always get your own hotel rooms. You kind of have to get to know each other and either be a family functionally or dysfunctionally really quickly,” she shares. She’s now in a place of gratitude towards working with artists and professionals who bring out the best in her work ethic and share in her vision for maintaining stability on tour. “This past year, I got to play keyboards and sing back-up for Luke Hemmings, which was honestly one of the best experiences I've had. Not only was he incredible, and his team was, you know, fully functional and awesome, but he's about the sweetest person I can imagine. I'd done a lot of personal work since my last tour with meditation and therapy and being able to be more stable. So I had by far the best time, I think, this past year with Luke.” Neara’s gratitude for that experience echoes as she reflects on the very human joys from outside of playing music while on Hemmings’ tour, laughing as she shares that she would sleep twelve hours a night on the bus and look forward to experiences with the tour crew (like going to an Australian koala sanctuary!).
“I'm not the star. I'm not the household name. I don't have millions of dollars. But when I really look at when I was 13 and I was like, ‘I wanna be on stage playing songs that everyone loves,’ that actually has happened around the world." - Neara Russell
But touring isn’t Neara’s only outfit as a musician. “At some point over the last ten years, I think I've done almost any kind of role,” she laughs. Much of Neara’s big-name work recently has been with pop-rock duo Aly & AJ, working both as a keyboardist and music director for many of their recent live performances. “I've played keyboards. I’ve sung a little bit, although, you know, [Aly and AJ’s] vocals stand on their own, of course. I've run their Ableton playback sessions and built those sessions, and they've invited me to music direct some of their performances. I was side stage running the computers for their show at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. That was a fun one.” Working with Aly & AJ led Neara to some of the most technical work of her career, which she’s very proud to acknowledge is an uncommon place for female musicians to find themselves: “I'm usually one of the few women in the room, but particularly when there's computers involved. [I] definitely feel like I have a little bit of extra pressure to sort of represent in that sense.”
After breaking into music direction for Aly & AJ, Neara has continued to pursue that path as one of her creative outlets. Neara views her experience with music direction as being a very different skillset than that of a keyboardist or vocalist - and the responsibility of being the person to shape the music-listening experience for others isn’t lost on her. When sharing about her experience crafting a performance for Meghan Trainor on The Late Late Show with James Corden, Neara shared, “My credit with [Meghan] was preparing her and a choir for the show,” she says. “That role was sitting behind the computer and having my in-ears in at rehearsal and just listening to all those incredible singers and bringing all of them together. I was so nervous and kind of starstruck, but I just needed to sit there and make a few key points. Very macro. Like, you zoom in and then you sit back. Whereas preparing for tour as a musician, you're all about the details.”
On mindfully shifting her preparation process for a music director gig versus a performing gig, Neara shared, “The music director does all the work of rehearsals. The band might show up. Maybe they're prepared, maybe they're not. Maybe they're on time, maybe they're not.” Neara's ability to ground herself serves her well across all domains, but manifests differently depending on her role; as an MD, she thinks through the arrangements, manages the energy of the room, and makes sure the structure is solid before the rest of the team plugs in. “You’re kind of keeping the ship going,” she says. “And then you send everyone off and move on to the next thing.” On the other hand, as a musician coming into a rehearsal, her mindset is slightly different. “I typically show up the first day to rehearsal as a musician like, I know the songs, but you're like, ‘Okay. What do they expect of me?’” That unpredictability has taught her to strike a balance between preparation and flexibility. “I think the 80-20 rule is pretty good,” she adds. “Where I'm 80% prepared, but I'm also 20% ready for anything. Ready to be flexible.” Whether she’s directing or performing, she’s practicing mindfulness and adaptability in knowing when to lead versus when to listen, which seems to be her key to making any musical collaboration work. She laughs as she shares, “We have kind of an inside joke, I guess, that it's not that hard to get a gig, but you gotta keep it.”
Neara’s ability to compartmentalize and remain present in each project she embraces remains her priority, and recently, her project has been balancing her mental health amidst the unpredictabilities of her life as a musician. “Right now, I’m finishing my certification as a mindfulness meditation instructor. Between that and learning guitar and learning Spanish, finally, I've got my hobbies more or less. They're also things down the road that might feed into my career as well.” She sees making herself as well-rounded and intentional as possible as a project that will serve her far beyond any performer credit. “I'm not sure what will happen, but I'm kind of like, ‘What else am I about as a human?’ Because I've just been literally my whole life identifying as a musician, pretty much 24/7.”
Before signing off to enjoy the Los Angeles sunshine after a bout of rain, Neara’s angelic personality and deep-rooted understanding of the industry shine through as she expresses her gratitude at being asked to leave our conversation with her words of wisdom to anyone who sees her career arc as their dream. “I have to say that the industry is changing so so fast. I know for me, being a small town girl and having a very certain idea of what to expect for my life, it was like Rolling Stone magazine. I was born before the internet, you know? I didn't have too much to go on, but it was rock star or bust. That was all I knew.” She reflects, “I've found through my steps of just saying yes to whatever comes up in front of me that in some ways, it doesn't look like how I imagined. I'm not the star. I'm not the household name. I don't have millions of dollars or whatever. But when I really look at when I was 13 and I was like, ‘I wanna be on stage playing songs that everyone loves,’ that actually has happened around the world. Whether it was someone else's songs or whatever it was, it doesn't matter. I actually got to experience it. And I think that the more that I got out of my own way and [didn’t try] to force the idea that I had about it, I actually have gotten to experience pretty much everything I think I imagined, which is more than most people can say. It's a real gift.”
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