Some songs feel like a red-carpet arrival. Veronica Powers’ “Old Hollywood” is one of them: electro pop and alt pop dressed in sequins, with one foot in classic Hollywood and the other firmly on a modern Los Angeles dance floor.
This is the first single from her upcoming debut EP, and she recorded it at RealSongs, the Hollywood studio founded by songwriter Diane Warren. That setting fits. Powers is a Los Angeles native and SAG-AFTRA performer who has been in entertainment since she was seven. Acting, music, comedy, improvisation, voice-over, content, production: she treats all of it as one toolkit. She graduated Summa Cum Laude from USC and trained at NYU Tisch through the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. The résumé is stacked, but “Old Hollywood” is not a résumé track. It is a love letter.
Entertainment is family business here. Her father, Emmy-winning sound designer and composer Travis Powers, put her in rooms with microphones early. Her maternal grandmother, Jeanne Gray McDonald, was an Old Hollywood actress and singer, and the first woman to host her own radio show, The Jeanne Gray Show. She later created, wrote, produced, and hosted The Woman’s Voice and earned an Emmy nomination. Powers’ great-grandfather, Patrick Murphy, worked special effects in the silent era, including on Charlie Chaplin’s sets. She never met her grandmother or great-grandfather. Photographs and family stories did the rest. Growing up in L.A. with that archive in the background is the spark behind the song.
Powers has said she has always felt born in the wrong era. The glamour, the artistry, the slightly over-the-top magic of golden-age Hollywood felt personal because of Jeanne Gray McDonald. “Old Hollywood” holds that fascination with the women, the fashion, the films, and the larger-than-life personalities, then plugs it into contemporary Los Angeles energy. Her listed influences stretch from Audrey Hepburn, Lucille Ball, Marilyn Monroe, and Dolly Parton to Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Ariana Grande, and Whitney Houston. That mix makes sense for electro pop that wants both sparkle and bite.
The thesis she gives the track is simple: embrace who you are, dream big, be unapologetically extra, and pull a little Old Hollywood magic into the present. Confidence, glamour, humor, self-expression. That same thread showed up when she wrote her first song, “You’ve Got Something,” as a self-belief anthem and later performed it for the Special Olympics.
The rest of the EP is already mapped as rooms in the same house. “Don’t Disturb” and “Drama Queen” will show other sides of the same personality. Music producer AC Burrell and industry veteran CeCe Sammy discovered her; she is recording the project at RealSongs now. Because she also acts, improvises, and does voice-over (including ADR as baby Maggie Simpson and the lead role of Julia in Netflix’s Misfit: The Series), she writes songs like performances: character, timing, humor, visuals, the world around the hook.
That multi-hyphenate lane is having a moment in electro pop and alt pop, where artists treat singles like short films and personality as production. Powers already lives there. Viral content, work alongside names from Conan O’Brien to MrBeast, more than 30 live-action dubbing projects for Netflix and Amazon, a recently wrapped feature called Tecie: the music is arriving after years of building a face, a voice, and a point of view.
“Old Hollywood” is the door opening on that world. A tribute to Los Angeles and a family that helped invent the town’s sound and image, and a statement that Veronica Powers is not visiting the present. She is claiming it.
If you are an independent artist ready to get a debut single onto the same platforms listeners already live on, DistroKid keeps distribution straightforward, and you can take 7% off your membership with this link: https://distrokid.com/vip/seven/2058328. More reach, more of your earnings staying yours.
What do you hear first in “Old Hollywood”: the vintage glamour or the modern pop punch? Drop it in the comments.
