Karla Anderson grew up in the Coachella Valley town of Palm Springs, California. Obsessed with music from an early age, it wasn’t until middle school when, after seeing Lita Ford shred her axe on MTV, she finally convinced her dad to dig one of his old guitars out of storage. She learned a few basic chords and began writing lyrics.
After high school, knowing she was expected to attend college in the fall, she naively decided to pursue a major in music and began taking classical guitar lessons. She somehow muddled through, repeating a year of written theory and aural perception classes and struggling with debilitating performance anxiety. In 1997, she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Music from University of Redlands.
A year after graduation, she gave birth to her daughter and focused on raising and supporting her. In 2015, when her daughter was in high school, they went to see the Babes in Toyland reunion show at Pappy and Harriet’s in Pioneertown, California. A surreal experience, it reawakened the muse inside of her.
She posted on social media that she was looking for local musicians to jam with, and a childhood friend asked her to audition for her all-girl Dead Milkmen tribute band, aptly named The Dead Milkmaids. A few months after joining the band, however, the project fell apart. A week later, she and the drummer, Ali Saenz, decided to form their own band. They recruited local singer Esther Sanchez and her sister, bassist Serene Noell, and formed The After Lashes.
In the fall of 2016, after her mother’s cancer diagnosis, Karla decided to leave The After Lashes and once again focus on family. After her daughter graduated high school and left for college, she began playing and writing again.
In 2019 she began getting together regularly with bassist Travis Rockwell. Karla knew Travis through his wife, Alana, bassist for The Dead Milkmaids, and through his band The Hellions. She made another social media post looking for a drummer. Several mutual friends tagged Crystal Hernandez, who Karla had known as the frontwoman for local band Fight Like a Girl. (Fight Like a Girl later became Nein Lives, then later, Desert Crystal, with Karla on bass.)
In the summer of 2020, in the midst of the COVID pandemic social distancing madness, Karla and Crystal decided to form a riot grrrl inspired punk band, and Travis was on board with the idea. They called themselves Labia Minora, a hat tip to the magical, wizardly spellbound sounds of the anatomical names of female genitalia. Karla designed their logo by taking a photo of two unwrapped o.b. tampons shaped into a heart. In December of 2021, they began playing shows regularly around the Coachella Valley. At the end of 2022, Crystal relocated to New York with her wife Molly. Jasyn Smith, who also plays in local bands Matt and The Kings and Salton City Surf Club, took her place.
In the spring of 2022, at the urging of a good friend, local singer-songwriter Courtney Chambers, Karla finally mustered the courage to begin performing some of her other songs in a solo acoustic format. Her first performance was a Mother’s Day show at Coachella Valley Brewing Company benefitting Shelter from the Storm, a local shelter for survivors of domestic violence.