Flashback: Listen to Oscar Winner Brie Larson’s Pop Star Past
Just over a decade before Brie Larson won an Oscar for her emotional performance in Room, the actress was once a teen pop star in a post-Avril Lavigne world. Watch the clip for her single “She Said” — off 2005’s Finally Out of P.E. — above.
Before her brief stint in music, Larson had begun her acting career at age 10. She made appearances in movies like 13 Going on 30 and Sleepover and the TV show Raising Dad before getting signed to Casablanca Records after posting clips of her songs online.
On P.E., Larson channels bubblegum pop-rock, wielding an electric guitar while belting angsty, high school-centric lyrics. Over half of the album was co-penned by the then-teen, but the album also features co-writes from songwriters like Blair Daly (Kip Moore’s “Beer Money“), Pam Sheyne (Christina Aguilera’s “Genie in a Bottle,” Dream’s “He Loves U Not“), Lindy Robbins (Jason Derulo’s “Want to Want Me“) and Holly Brook, who has sung on Nicki Minaj’s “Bed of Lies” (as Skylar Grey) and Fort Minor’s “Where’d You Go.”
Larson’s debut and sole album ended up not selling well, although she continued to promise fans more in the future. “I have been writing. I have been playing. I just found that I was completely disenchanted with the whole ‘thing,'” she wrote in a 2010 MySpace post discussing her dislike of the music industry. “Being on Universal brought me to some amazing places and met, for one, all of you beauties. But what went along with it I didn’t enjoy. I wanted to write all my own songs, and they were afraid of that. I wanted to wear sneakers and play my guitar — they wanted heels and wind blown hair.”
New music has yet to come from Larson, and her last public “performance” as a singer occurred in 2010’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, in which she performed “Black Sheep” with the band Metric as the fictional band the Clash at Demonhead. Around the same time, Larson’s acting career was growing exponentially thanks to her role on Showtime’s The United States of Tara along with appearances in films like Scott Pilgrim and 21 Jump Street. Along with her groundbreaking role in Room, Larson also appeared as Amy Schumer’s sister in Trainwreck.