About
Hello, I'm Laila.
I'm a musician from London. This site is my personal blog — a place to share everyday life, work in progress, and longer reflections on identity, culture, and growing up.
Some posts focus on my everyday life and my career; others are longer essays and thoughts about life, growing up, and identity. I work freelance as a musician and writer, so the days are wonderfully varied — from rehearsal rooms and recording sessions to writing in cafes across the city.
Thank you for stopping by. If you'd like a quick tour, the Music page covers my solo recordings and the band Quizcats; the Blog holds the full archive of posts; and Essays collects longer-form pieces.
Things I love
The TAPE PARADE homepage greets visitors with a brief personal introduction from Laila, a London-based musician who frames the site as an extension of her everyday thinking. Rather than presenting a polished press kit, the opening lines read like a friendly wave from a familiar voice, inviting readers into a space where music and ordinary life overlap. The tone is informal and welcoming, suggesting that the content ahead will favour honesty over formality and treat the audience as a companion rather than a crowd. This introduction sets the emotional baseline for the rest of the site, where personal reflection and creative curiosity sit comfortably side by side, and where each new post is offered as a small, unhurried moment of connection between the writer and whoever happens to wander by.
Beyond the welcome, TAPE PARADE carries the marks of a personal blog shaped by long-running habits of writing and sharing. The vocabulary woven through the homepage hints at recurring themes such as birthdays, friendships, relationships, dating, family, and the slow passage of time across the calendar year. Alongside these human-scale subjects sit keywords about blogging itself, including posts, comments, views, followers, and the various social platforms where readers might also encounter the work. This blend suggests a site that is as interested in the practice of writing publicly as it is in the subjects being written about, treating the act of posting as a daily ritual rather than a promotional strategy.
The homepage keywords also surface a strong sense of place, particularly London and Wales, along with imagery of farms, goats, sheep, and cows. This rural and urban pairing hints at a writer whose life moves between city streets and countryside visits, and who finds equal inspiration in both environments. Words like vintage, feminist, language, and culture suggest the writing leans toward thoughtful observation rather than gossip, while terms such as controversy, shame, and harmful point to a willingness to engage with harder topics. The overall picture is of a blog unafraid to mix the personal and the reflective, the everyday and the considered.
Music remains central to the identity of TAPE PARADE, with references to gigs, musicians, and the broader musical life of a working artist. The framing of Laila as a musician from London positions the blog at the intersection of creative practice and personal narrative, where rehearsal schedules, performances, and songwriting sessions become part of the same story as friendships and quiet afternoons. This integration of art and life gives the site a diary-like quality, where a post about a difficult gig can sit next to one about a walk through the city, and both feel equally valid expressions of the same ongoing conversation.
Visually, the site supports this intimate, archive-style approach through a dark, understated palette and dense, grid-driven layout. Near-black backgrounds and off-white text create a calm reading environment, while small touches of brighter colour on tags and links guide the eye without overwhelming the content. The compact spacing and slightly rounded edges of the thumbnail cards give the impression of a well-tended media library, where each post is treated as a small, labelled object in a larger collection. Together, the design choices reinforce the sense that TAPE PARADE is a long-running personal project, organised with care and meant to be browsed slowly.