Who Are Lace and Lee?
Lace and Lee is the name of the remarkably talented indie-folk duo comprised of Olivia Ondrasik and Caroline McPherson, who champion storytelling in their songwriting. Their songs are pulled from life’s most profound moments as well as the mundane ones. Lace and Lee’s music is infectious, exhilarating, and irresistible. The two artists share a genuine bond of deep friendship that is the lifeblood of their fearless music.
How Did Olivia and Caroline Meet?
Olivia and Caroline met while studying musical theater at NYU Tisch – New Studio on Broadway. They were in the same program but didn’t have any classes together in their freshman through junior years. However, both recalled seeing the other from a distance and feeling as if they were fated to meet and work together. In senior year, they finally had a class together and everything just clicked.
Where Did Lace and Lee Get Their Band Name?
Caroline and Olivia were in the middle of a writing session when they started wondering what their name would be if they formed a band. After coming up with The Thistles, The Sisters Grimm, and Forest Folk, they realized both of their middle names started with L: Caroline Lace McPherson and Olivia Lee Ondrasik.
What Instruments Do Lace and Lee Play?
Both Olivia and Caroline play guitar and piano. Olivia has a talent for body percussion, while Caroline also plays clarinet and can quickly figure out any instrument she gets her hands on, including tin whistle, banjo, and ukulele.
Who is Olivia’s Father?
Although it’s not something that Lace and Lee tend to talk about unless asked, Olivia’s father is John Ondrasik who performs as Five for Fighting (“Superman (It’s Not Easy),” “100 Years,” “The Riddle”). [Entertaining Option’s John Ondrasik interview.]
What Is Lace and Lee’s Musical Style?
According to Caroline and Olivia, Lace and Lee create mystical folk rock with haunting, ethereal harmonies that feel both new to the world and ancient. The songs are flavored with Bohemia, Scotland, whimsical colors, and a dash of medieval hymns. The duo’s love of sci-fi and fantasy trickles into Lace and Lee’s ‘60s/‘70s inspired storytelling.
What is a Lace and Lee Show like?
Caroline and Olivia describe a Lace and Lee show as a chance to hang out with bards, jesters, and kooks [themselves]. “We don’t hide our wacky senses of humor or our very real friendship. We like to find a balance between not taking ourselves too seriously, and deep emotional experiences during the journeys of our songs.” Each night is a new night filled with gravitas, whimsy and a commitment to entertain.
Lace and Lee Interview: Friendship, Courage, and Music
I grew up listening to the music you like, but that was way before you were even born. How did you discover this music?
Olivia: I think that’s a big testament to—
Caroline: Our parents.
Olivia: Both of our parents kind of raised us on Steely Dan; Led Zeppelin; Crosby, Stills, and Nash; Carole King—
Caroline: Simon & Garfunkel. My dad sang James Taylor to me every night before I went to bed.
Olivia: And obviously, my dad knew a thing or two about music, so we’d be playing ACDC on the way to kindergarten! That was kind of a big thing. Caroline and I — I know we mention it a lot — but we were both just very inspired by the ‘60s and ‘70s storytelling.
Caroline: Also, very early on, probably our third or fourth show, we played Bethel Woods, which was the site of Woodstock. It is an incredibly insane thing to say that it was only our third or fourth show, but it completely changed us… I mean, we were already really inspired by the ‘60s and ‘70s, but being there and really seeing what the artists back then were actively doing with their music. We were like, “This is what music is for.” Music is to change lives, to change minds. So that’s a really big part of why that music inspires us too. It’s not just the tone; it’s also the meaning and—
Olivia: And the intention behind it. I think that kind of music, and all music to some extent, but especially this music. It really kind of bypasses the mind. It just goes straight to your heart and into your gut, into your soul.
You weren’t kidding. The two of you are like this hive mind or something.
Caroline: [Laughing] It is a bit like a hive mind.
So you’ve already played Woodstock. You’ve been on some amazing tours with Five for Fighting… Did you have small gigs where you learned how to perform in front of a large crowd, or did you just have to be a pro from the very first gig?
Caroline: Honestly, the second one. We definitely did things a little backward. But it’s a blessing. I think a big part of our comfort comes from our theater training: to fake it until you make it. Those first few shows, we were faking it till we made it.
Olivia: Definitely. And I think what people sometimes see as an overnight miracle, it’s not. Our whole lives, we were training to be able to do this in different ways. We were always theater kids, performing in different scenarios. I think that gave us the ability to do this when the opportunity arose.
Caroline: Yes.
Olivia: And that being said, we’re playing those little gigs now. Don’t you worry.
Caroline: Last night—
Olivia: We were playing a club and there were maybe 20 people there. That’s where you can test material and work out the sound and—
Caroline: It’s so much fun. Some of the best shows come out of those places.
Olivia: Absolutely.
When you have that smaller crowd, everything can be so much more personal.
Olivia: You really see their faces and their reactions… and you are reacting to them.
Speaking of reacting, you have incredible rhythm together. It’s like a classic comedy team.
Caroline: That makes me so happy. Honestly, it feels like I’ve known Olivia my whole life. It feels like our paths were meant to cross. We just have very similar minds. We have very similar senses of humor.
Olivia: You’re so right. That’s an important—
Caroline: It’s a very big part of it. And we have similar perspectives on entertainment too. We want to have those moments of gravitas where we’re really saying the hard thing. And then, the next moment, being like—
Olivia: How’s the weather? It’s like we’ve kind of come from the same planet. We both have a similar reverence for the craft. There’s so much meaning and attention behind it. And I think we also have a lot of the same, you know, for lack of a better word, psychosis. Demons. It’s a really big blessing to work through that with someone.
Caroline: You’ve never said that before. That’s so funny.
Olivia: The music is a great vehicle to be able to face those things, and not be alone, you know? To face it with your best friend.
Caroline: To really feel seen. That’s where the name of the EP [Mirror Mirror] comes from, along with it being a song on the EP. It really does feel like the two of us are going through our early 20s… mid-20s now. We’re working through all this stuff together, and it really does feel like a blessing.
How does this relationship work with songwriting? Do songs just happen when you’re together? Do you have the same ideas at the same time? How does it work?
Caroline: This is a fantastic question. I think a lot of it is just for the moment. Maybe one of us will have an idea? Maybe one of us will have a journal entry? One of us will just have a phrase like “Top Dog.” Olivia just came out with “Top dog, down,” and we were like, “Yep, that’s a song.” And I came up with that guitar riff. So we just created that together.
Olivia: I am constantly amazed. There’s a part of my brain that sometimes takes a backseat when we’re writing. It’s just so cool to experience the cohesion of our writing styles because we really do do everything together.
Caroline: Everything.
Olivia: Sometimes we hunt for the lyrics, and it takes a month, like in “Oh, What a Weapon.” “Roadkill,” however, was born out of a writing exercise. We were in the back of the van and we were just going back and forth, writing lyrics.
Caroline: One line at a time.
Olivia: To distract ourselves from being carsick.
Caroline: And although I’m playing the instruments a lot of the time, that by no means means that I write the music. Olivia has an incredible ear for melody and chords. She’ll sing something to me and be like, “Can you play that?” And I’ll be, “Well, I guess I’m figuring it out now.” Everything is collaborative. There isn’t one person who does one thing.
I don’t think there’s a lot of that going on. Maybe there’s a lot of people in the room in Nashville, but they’re not in sync with each other the way you are. Everyone is adding their own perspective drawn from their own experiences, so the song becomes homogenized. It fits the singer’s “brand.” I miss when songs were written like you write. You can write about anything — even “Roadkill” — and it’s genuine. Authentic. Real.
Caroline: I think that goes back to a time when music was just music. Before brands and before MTV.
What about harmonies? The harmonies are ridiculously tight and so wonderfully complex. How do you come up with them? Do they just happen, or do you have to work them out?
Olivia: I think it’s a blend of both intuition and musical theory. I always love to make this joke when we’re on the road. The reason we didn’t really know each other until our senior year of college was because Caroline was always in all the smart people classes. She has spent years training in music theory, and her ear is so refined and so sharp, and so impressive. And she’s so humble about it. She can just sit down on the piano and sight read and do all this stuff that I am in awe of. She can kind of speak the language of chords, and all that stuff is amazing. I know without a doubt that a lot of that training has fed her intuition, her impulses, and her ears. I know a little bit. So the joke is that I have—
Caroline: Raw talent. Honestly, I feel like we come up with cooler things because Olivia doesn’t say, “Oh, we need a Bm7b9 chord here.” That isn’t how her brain works. It’s more like, “You know, it would be really cool if we added this texture that makes it feel like something needs to be released.” It’s about the feeling of the music. I think that is why we collaborate so well. We are able to translate from the feeling into actually making it happen.
Do the two different approaches ever create a language barrier? Or do you always intuitively understand each other?
Olivia: Complete transparency. I do think there’s been a few moments where we’ll be like, “Okay, what are you trying to say?” But we always figure it out.
Caroline: And it never takes very long.
Olivia: I’ll hear a chord and I’ll have to sing the chord instead of saying, “Can you play a diminished 5th?”
Caroline: Or a Bm7.
Olivia: So, I’ll sing something, and then Caroline will be like, “Oh, that’s like da da da da.”
Caroline: It’s so gratifying — and we say this about our lyrics — when you have to work for something. It makes the payoff so much sweeter. We come out of it and we’re like, “We found that together.”
Do you ever question it if something comes too easily?
Caroline: That’s a good question. I think sometimes we have. We had a writing session last night, and something Olivia always says is, “Okay, but let’s beat it. Let’s beat it with something else.”
Olivia: I always say, “Let’s see if we can beat it,” because what’s the loss, you know? It’s the “let’s see” experimental mentality. We can always go back to [the original idea]. It’s the same with harmonies. We’ll create really cool harmonies, but Caroline will say, “But it could be this.” Then she’ll do this crazy harmony and—
Caroline: I have a pet peeve about things sounding clean.
Olivia: And too simple.
Wait. I would describe your music as pristine. Am I getting it all wrong?
Together: No, it’s a trick.
Olivia: It’s a trick of the ear because it still needs to sound good and palatable and pretty, but also unique and strange and otherworldly and new, but also ancient. Those are the things that speak to us.
Caroline: What I mean by clean is I don’t want us to just be singing major thirds and be so—
Olivia: Predictable.
Did you learn anything in the studio while you were recording this EP?
Caroline: Absolutely. There are things that you can learn in the studio that you can’t learn anywhere else. It’s just in the doing. I think we learn something new every time we go in there. It could be something like learning Pro Tools or learning mics and different sounds of instruments. Or it could be learning how to be on the mic and about stamina and how to work with people. We’re so blessed with some incredible collaborators and people who have really been massive mentors to us, like Mikal Blue (OneRepublic, Colbie Caillat, Jason Mraz) and everybody at Revolver Recordings. We could not have asked for a kinder and more talented bunch of boys.
Olivia: Mikal’s career is very impressive. He’s worked with some incredibly talented and successful artists. But I think that success partially comes from Mikal’s ability to hear every artist’s own individuality. He really gave us space to experiment. But it’s also very collaborative. He is definitely part of every single song that we wrote and or every single song that we produced.
Is there anything that you want to bring up that I missed?
Caroline: Something that I always really need to emphasize is that this whole thing is about our friendship. We’ve always said our friendship is the real lifeblood of this collaboration. Without it, this music wouldn’t exist. It wouldn’t have the magic, the spark that it does. And our ability to be soundboards for each other, our ability to fall and to fail in front of each other and still know that we’re there for each other… all of that. I think that every single bit of that comes through in our music, and I hope people can hear that it really just comes from a love for this girl that has become like my sister.
Olivia: The music is a product of this extremely special friendship and sisterhood that we have. And that’s why it feels so fated. I think it’s really, really rare that you meet somebody and you think, “I’ve just known this person my whole life.” I feel insanely lucky to have Caroline as a friend and as a human, let alone a bandmate. It gives me so much bravery because I believe in her so much. I believe in her as a human, as a musician, and I believe in her in so many different ways. It just gives me permission to be myself and to go to places that I don’t know if I would have the courage to go alone.That’s the beauty of this friendship.
Caroline: Very well said. Ditto.
A Preview of Lace and Lee’s Upcoming EP: ‘Mirror Mirror’
Besides being the opener on the Five for Fighting With String Quartet Tour, Lace and Lee are releasing their debut EP. It’s called Mirror Mirror and it has 6 tracks. According to Olivia, the title represents the notion that we are all mirrors of each other, and the more we choose each other, the more we choose ourselves and vice versa. Caroline added that the title is the feeling of being seen fully by another person, flaws and all. And seeing yourself in them as well.
The music and musicianship on this EP are phenomenal. Every note on this release feels like perfection. The timing is flawlessly crisp, and the production is pristine. Olivia and Caroline’s voices rise and intertwine like two mystical serpents ascending towards enlightenment. The angelic sound is immaculate. But it is also filled with intrigue, surprises, and the hint of something darker possibly lurking in the periphery.
Lace and Lee’s lyrics read more like poetry and explore topics such as narcissism, dreaming of escape, and growing up. But just when you think the mood is getting a little heavy, the two enchanting troubadours drop a track about “buying strawberries in the bowels of a Penn Station Walgreens.”
Mirror Mirror sizzles with magic. It is a wondrous journey through an otherworldly soundscape that shimmers with arcane beauty.
Track List for ‘Mirror Mirror’
- “Oh, What a Weapon”
- “Top Dog”
- “Olivia’s Song”
- “RoadKill”
- “Dream”
- “Penn Station Strawberries”
Release Date for ‘Mirror Mirror’
Lace and Lee will release their debut EP, Mirror Mirror, on Friday, November 27, 2026.
Lace and Lee 2026 and Early 2027 Tour Dates: Opening for Five for Fighting
East Coast Dates (ticket links below)
| Sat., Sept. 19, 2026 | Clayton, NY | The Clayton Opera House |
| Sun., Sept. 20, 2026 | Newton, NJ | The Newton Theatre |
| Tue., Sept. 22, 2026 | Rutland, VT | Paramount Theatre |
| Thur., Sept. 24, 2026 | Portsmouth, NH | The Music Hall |
| Fri., Sept. 25, 2026 | Concord, NH | Capitol Center for the Arts Bank of New Hampshire Stage |
| Sat., Sept. 26, 2026 | Stowe, VT | Spruce Peak Performing Arts Center |
| Sun., Sept. 27, 2026 | Natick, MA | The Center for Arts in Natick |
| Tue., Sept., 29, 2026 | Fall River, MA | Narrows Center for the Arts |
| Thur., Oct. 1, 2026 | Gardiner, ME | Johnson Hall Opera House |
| Fri., Oct. 2, 2026 | Brownfield, ME | Stone Mountain Arts Center |
| Sat., Oct. 3, 2026 | Rockport, MA | Shalin Liu Performance Center |
| Sun., Oct. 4, 2026 | Hartford, CT | Infinity Hall Hartford |
| Tue., Oct. 6, 2026 | Troy, NY | Troy Savings Bank Music Hall |
| Thur., Oct. 8, 2026 | Tarrytown, NY | Tarrytown Music Hall |
| Fri., Oct. 9, 2026 | Riverhead, NY | The Suffolk Theater |
| Sat., Oct. 10, 2026 | Port Washington, NY | Landmark on Main Street |
| Sun., Oct. 11, 2026 | New York, NY | City Winery |
| Tue., Oct. 13, 2026 | Red Bank, NJ | Count Basie Center for the Arts – The Vogel |
| Wed., Oct. 14, 2026 | Fairfield, CT | Sacred Heart Community Theatre |
| Fri., Oct. 16, 2026 | York, PA | Appell Center for the Performing Arts |
| Sat., Oct. 17, 2026 | Sellersville, PA | Sellersville Theater |
| Sun., Oct. 18, 2026 | Annapolis, MD | Rams Head On Stage |
| Tue., Oct. 20, 2026 | Alexandria, VA | The Birchmere |
| Wed., Oct. 21, 2026 | Richmond, VA | Tin Pan |
Canada Tour Dates (ticket links below)
| Tue., Dec. 8, 2026 | St. Catharines, ON | FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre |
| Wed., Dec. 9, 2026 | North Bay, ON | The Capitol Centre |
| Thur., Dec. 10, 2026 | Kitchener, ON | Centre In The Square |
| Fri., Dec. 11, 2026 | Richmond Hill, ON | RHCPA |
West Coast Tour Dates (ticket links below)
| Tue., Jan. 12, 2027 | Port Angeles, WA | Field Arts & Events Hall |
| Wed., Jan. 13, 2027 | Vashon, WA | Vashon Center for the Arts |
| Thur., Jan. 14, 2027 | Portland, OR | Aladdin Theater |
| Fri., Jan. 15, 2027 | Bend, OR | Tower Theatre |
| Sun., Jan. 17, 2027 | Modesto, CA | Gallo Center For the Arts |
| Tue., Jan. 19, 2027 | Napa, CA | Uptown Theatre Napa |
| Thur., Jan. 21, 2027 | Saratoga, CA | Montalvo Arts Center |
| Fri., Jan. 22, 2027 | Livermore, CA | Livermore Valley Performing Arts Center |
| Sat., Jan. 23, 2027 | Thousand Oaks, CA | Fred Kavli Theatre – Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza |
| Sun., Jan. 24, 2027 | San Luis Obispo, CA | Fremont Theater |
| Tue., Jan. 26, 2027 | Solana Beach, CA | Belly Up |
| Wed., Jan. 27, 2027 | San Juan Capistrano, CA | Coach House Concert Hall |
| Thur., Jan. 28, 2027 | Solana Beach, CA | Belly Up |
How to Buy Lace and Lee Concert Tickets
Lace and Lee begin their tour with Five for Fighting on Saturday, September 19, 2026. Stops include cities on the East Coast (September and October 2026), in Canada (December 2026), and on the West Coast (January 2027). The best place to buy tickets is on the official Lace and Lee website.
How to Follow and Support Lace and Lee Online
Official Lace and Lee Website • Instagram • YouTube • Spotify
Featured photo: Elizabeth Elder.
Entertaining Options 