full name: zoe natalie edmiston neé lavoie stage name: lavoie birthdate/age: 11/21/87 & 26 hometown: vancouver resides: los angeles & seattle occpation: musician (credits of lights) status: married as of 3/5/14 to cole edmiston children: colton axel and connor sawyer edmiston (b. 8/27/14) pets: zeus the french bulldog biography: When Zoe Lavoie was born, she wasn't the most looked after child in the world. Her mother was too occupied with her career to care too much about the child she'd just had to a man she didn't even know. She had not always been that terrible of a person and she really did love her daughter, it was just that she had to take care of everyone and that she was too busy working to keep her child fed that she couldn't exactly take care of her completely unplanned daughter. Welfare only took her so far and she didn't want her child to be the one to pay for her own mistakes. It wasn't an easy life in Vancouver, that was for certain, at least not for the two of them. They didn't live in a big fancy house with a car in the driveway and really anything other than the complete necessities, living from paycheck to paycheck. They had food on their plates and clothes on their backs; of course, they did have to pilfer a few things here and there on their own, but it was the life that they lived. Zoe, being the only child (at the time) of Rachelle Lavoie, was the one that was able to sustain herself by doing absolutely nothing, not being old enough to really do anything anyway. She was just too young at the time to go out and try and provide for herself. By the time she was three years old, Zoe could read a little bit, write, say her ABCs and count to 20 which was more than most children her age could do. It was a feat and she was blessed but it didn't get her far. Despite the fact that Zoe was such a smart child, she didn't always opt to be the smartest and did not make the most intelligent decisions, even at such a young age. Because her mother was too busy working to be able to take care of her, it often left Zoe to get into her own little bit of trouble. At the age of six years old, Zoe had started smoking and stealing liquor from her mom's liquor cabinet to sell to her friends. It didn't interest her, at least not at the time, though she wasn't shy about the fact that she was so young and smoking already, having bragged about it to many different people more than once. She'd had to hide her habit from everyone but was only discovered doing it once she was eight years old -- two years after she was hooked on the minor substance initially. It wasn't exactly the best thing to discover about your child, but Rachelle had to do something about it once she found her child doing something so awful. To make matters worse, her mother had decided that she was becoming too much of a heartache to keep around her home in general. She had begun rebelling at school, not doing her homework if she ever went to school, not to mention her pilfering habits had become worse over time. Zoe Lavoie was nine years old when she was sent off to boarding school, which was taken care of by her grandparents (her mother came from money, having a well-to-do businessman of a father in Toronto), despite the fact that they had offered and wanted to take the child from their struggling daughter to see if all she wanted was some attention, to see if that would help her get beyond her rebellion and would help straighten her out; however, Rachelle had decided that the best thing to do would be to put her through boarding school instead to see if that would help her problems at all. It seemed like a better option than letting their child become the spoiled rotten child that she'd always feared her children might become if they were to ever try and live off of Rachelle's parents. Needless to say, it worked to a degree, because Rachelle wasn't about to let her daughter do anything that drastic. To this day, Zoe is the most thankful for that little fact. Zoe's time at boarding school hadn't been a loss, either. She'd met friends, other girls that were much like her but were trying to break their ways and become something new, something else, something better. It's something that she contributes to her life today. But back then, at first, she had really loathed being there and thought that it would never change her, but the ways that people were acting toward her was so... different. They weren't mean and they didn't look at her like she was the troubled child that she really had been growing up. Nope! Instead, they had looked at her like she was a normal human being, that she was just a child that needed help but who also needed discipline and a right way to go. She'd gotten some of that from her parents, but they weren't around enough to change her too much, not enough that would mean something in the long run. But over the next three years, that was exactly what happened. When she came home at the age of fourteen years old, she was a new person. There were a few small habits that remained but she was overall a much better person for learning those life lessons, not to mention that she'd met so many people and made so many friends that she finally had a reason to keep going and being the new person that they'd uncovered. While Zoe was away at her boarding school, she'd picked up the guitar (having written her grandparents, they bought her one and sent it to her as one of her birthday gifts since she said she "really, really, really" wanted to learn how to play the guitar to keep her busy -- and the believed her, why would she lie?) and had begun singing in the school's choir. At first, she had loathed the idea, but it began to ring into something that she thought she could do for the rest of her life. It was one of those things that would comfort her at night when she had nothing other than her thoughts to contain her. Zoe really loved it. She began to write down her thoughts into a notebook that she still has to this day --- still full of the sketches, jotted down words, poems, tiny little stories, everything. It acted as her home away from home diary. It served as so much more than that. It helped her get through times that she didn't think should have been so difficult to get through, though making friends at the school did help. That first week Zoe was home from boarding school for good, she'd nearly acted like a new person. She had new interests, she didn't go around stealing things from others and had even stuck with going to school every single morning. She did her homework, she took her tests. She even placed out of the ninth grade and went straight into tenth. There was nothing her mom was more proud of at the moment that when she learned that Zoe was able to move up a grade. There was a point in her junior year where she could have graduated a year early because of her accomplishments throughout her years after straightening up. Zoe had even been accepted to UBC; (she'd applied for early admission to see if she could get in, and it ended up that she could.) What she didn't really want to do was actually attend college. It wasn't in her so-called "life plan." So, instead, Zoe had taken it upon herself, after she graduated high school, to say goodbye to her family and to move out to Los Angeles. Her dream was to become an actress -- regardless of the fact that she couldn't act her way out of a paper bag. When Zoe arrived to Los Angeles after some time and preparation, she wasn't even sure where to begin. She'd gotten a menial job at Carl's Jr where she took orders at the drive thru and, though it took a little bit of persuasion from her grandmother, Zoe had accepted a small amount of "getting started" money so that she would have enough cash to move into a small apartment for one of her own in LA. It wasn't anything special, but it was hers and no one else's. The small and thankless job provided her with enough money to keep paying her bills as well as keep food on the table since it was all she could afford living paycheck to paycheck, though at one point, she'd thought that perhaps she should just move back home to Vancouver and go to college and get a real job... but that wasn't in the deck, either. Instead, she put her heart to something better: part-time playing small gigs in night clubs and dive bars while working a day shift at Carl's Jr. It wasn't really anyone's dream life, but she was going for what she thought was good. Zoe had attempted to audition for a few tv shows and one movie, but they never called her back (which was mostly because, well, she really wasn't that great at it). It was one of those deals where she knew that she wasn't that great at what she was trying to do and to become. So, she started to focus herself on music instead since it had been her foundation when she was younger anyway. At one point, Zoe had recorded a demo album in a friend's basement that she had eventually taken to the copyright office to put her name on all the songs that were part of it just because, well, they were her songs and her writing, her voice, her guitar and a small piano that she'd gotten from a second hand store, everything was hers and hers alone. It was never released, though she had attempted to take it to a few different record companies but to no avail. They weren't interested in her music, though they thought that she would make a good pop star, though that wasn't what Zoe wanted, not even remotely. She wanted to write her own music, play her guitar and a piano and just be able to create, not have other people do that work for her. For so long, Zoe wrote her music, even went as far as recording a few songs on her laptop, more than just the ones she wrote and recorded for Lights. Maybe it would've been cheaper and easier just to go to a recording studio and do it there, but she wanted to have everything to do with it, even if that meant buying special equipment with the extra money she saved up from working two dead beat jobs, and having to live off of Ramen Noodles for months at a time. In a way, it was all worth it. It took her a while to find a label that would sign her and release her first ep Lights (which she released under her surname, Lavoie), which she'd written and recorded on her own. Wasn't too bad, even if it was merely independent and she had to do most things on her own. A year later in 2009, her first album, The Listening, was released and it was something she considered to be her child and something she loved massively. Now that was awesome to her, because she'd worked for so long to get to where she was trying to go. It was a joyous occasion and enough to celebrate her way into the music business. Zoe really loved the chances that she received with being on a record label. A year later, in 2010, she released a second ep, Acoustic. She'd gone on tour and shared the music that she'd written and just wanted to, well, show it to the world. It was something that she really loved and really wanted to do. Why else would she stay where she was? She had eventually moved back to Vancouver to go on with her music career, doing nothing more than writing and recording when she wasn't contractually required to do anything else. She did get to tour in the US, as well as Europe, when she went on tour so that was also a plus, getting to see other places and playing was something she lived for then and now. She's still thankful that she didn't make it in the acting business! She had released her second album in 2011, Siberia, which had been praised by some for her maturing in some way in the music business from what she had put out in the previous years, and that was a good thing in her honest opinion. Any kind of criticism is a good kind of criticism and that was a good kind, something that she was proud of and proud to say that was hers and hers alone. Zoe had put her all into the things that she wrote, her personal experiences and her feelings, and sometimes they hadn't always been the most well thought out things, but things happened and she wanted to get to something, or anything, that could be liked and if it were just by one person, that would be enough for her. In 2013, she released her technical third studio album, which was an acoustic version of her album Siberia that had been released two years prior. She'd been working on so much that she'd nearly forgotten what was going on. At that point, she was really just ecstatic and happy to do anything and everything. That same year, she'd went on tour to promote the album but it was a short one and soon she'd found herself back to the writing stages, wanting to get to her fourth album but at an eventual point, she had focused herself on something new and something personal. But at this moment in time, she's still trying to write and record for her upcoming album (that she started to record in February of 2014), which is set to be released in the fall with hopeful tour dates starting soon after. discography: the listening (2009) siberia (2011) siberia acoustic (2013) little machines (september 23, 2014) plus various other albums/eps which are located here!