Empress Of Turns the Loss of Her Childhood Home Into ‘Dream House’ Album (Interview)

Before Empress Of could imagine rebuilding her family’s Altadena home, she imagined a new one in song. Sitting at a piano after the L.A. wildfires destroyed the house, the Honduran-American singer, songwriter, and producer—whose real name is Lorely Rodriguez—wrote a promise to her mother: “I want to build a dream for you just the way you did for me.” Her new album, Dream House, released on September 18, traces what came next: grief, rebuilding, and a transformed understanding of where home can be found.

For Rodriguez, the house her family lost was never simply a physical structure. Her family had lived there since she was six, and it held her childhood, family history, and the community that surrounded them. Altadena itself carried deeper cultural significance for her family: It was where her Honduran mother, a single parent of four who worked as a house cleaner and nanny, could buy a home and build a life for her children.

“When the fires first happened, I think a lot of people that don’t live in LA equated LA with celebrity and Hollywood,” Rodriguez tells HipLatina. “And so a lot of people didn’t know the history of Altadena, and Altadena being so diverse, a place where my mom, who was a nanny and a house cleaner, could buy a house. Our neighbors—everyone—came from different backgrounds and different histories.”

That sense of community became even more apparent after the fires. While Rodriguez lost the physical place where she grew up, she began to recognize how home had existed beyond its walls all along. For many Latine communities, home is often carried through the things that connect us to our families and cultures: the food we eat, the languages we speak, the music we listen to, and the people who remind us who we are.

“Whenever I’d be on tour, at a red carpet, or at a photoshoot or whatever, when I would come home in the past, I’d eat my mother’s food, and if she made a baleada or caldo, it’s like I immediately knew who I was again,” Rodriguez says. “I am this artist. I am this entertainer. But when you strip all that away, and I’m just home—it’s a very grounding experience. So, not having had that for the last year, I’ve had to find home.”

Without that physical grounding, Rodriguez found home in her community, her family, and eventually, new music. Dream House became a place to hold the memories tied to the house while making room for what might come next.

“I’ve been actually thinking about this. I’m like, ‘Wow, I’ve already been gifted so much by the album that releasing it and having other people hear it is just added blessings,'” she says. “Just a lot of gratitude and learning a lot about myself and making this album feel like home.”

Rodriguez even incorporated snippets of her mother speaking throughout the album, turning Dream House into a multigenerational record that reflects not only her experience of losing her home, but also the resilience of the woman who built it in the first place.

“I use this album as a way to share a multigenerational experience of not only my experience of losing my home and things I identified with my entire life, but also to share my mom’s story,” she says. “It’s just the resilience and the determination that she’s always had her entire life. There are just moments where we talk about believing in ourselves, and my mom believes in herself so much.”

Her mother’s determination also drove the family’s literal rebuilding. After the fire, she returned to permit offices week after week and eventually served as the contractor for the new house herself. The woman who had first built a life for her children in Altadena was now rebuilding their home—and giving Rodriguez a model for creating a future after loss.

The process also changed the way Rodriguez thought about the album itself. She first had to allow herself to grieve, writing intensely raw songs before realizing she wanted the record to move toward rebuilding.

“And when I decided to start making music about this experience, I wrote a bunch of songs that nobody should ever hear, and it’s just me just crying into a microphone,” she says. “And then I started to write songs about the optimism of rebuilding, which felt more in line with the energy that I wanted to give myself.”

That optimism is at the heart of the album’s title track, “Dream House.” Rodriguez wrote the song before her family had rebuilt their home, imagining what she wanted her mother to have after everything she had done for her children. The song ultimately became the emotional blueprint for the entire record.

“When I wrote the song ‘Dream House,’ we hadn’t built our house yet, and I was sitting at a piano, and I was thinking about all of the things I wanted my mom to have, and how she had built a dream for me already,” she says. “The opening lyrics of that song are, ‘I want to build a dream for you just the way you did for me.’ And I think a dream house is all the possibilities.”

The song connected two acts of creation: the home her mother had made for her children and the future Rodriguez could now imagine for her.

The house has been rebuilt, but Rodriguez says losing it taught her that the things that make us feel rooted often become most precious when they’re taken away.

“I mean going back to that earlier feeling of what those familiar things that make you remember your identity, specifically to my Latinidad, is just those things,” she says. “In the moment you know how comforting they are, but you know even more when they’re not. So it’s like everything means more now. Everything has a bigger smile, a bigger affinity, a bigger familiarity, because I understand what it meant not to have it.”

Ultimately, Dream House asks what remains when the physical markers of a life disappear—and what we’ve carried with us all along. For Rodriguez, music became a place to transform a frightening experience into something communal and hopeful.

“I can never control what someone’s going to get out of this music,” she says. “Because they could just be like, ‘Oh, I need to have a good time.’ But for me to use music as a healing tool and to talk about something that was a scary experience for me, it took a lot of bravery, and I hope that someone can see that and be like, ‘Well, if she did something she was afraid to do, I can as well.'”

After a year of learning to find home beyond a single place, Rodriguez leaves the album—and her listeners—with the belief that carried her family through rebuilding: “There’s always tomorrow.”

This feature is part of our 2026 Latina Heritage Month series, Latina Maxxing.