The aspiring singer opens up about growing up Lohan.
You might remember Aliana Lohan as Ali, the tween-aged younger sister of Lindsay Lohan, but the aspiring musician is all grown up now and she’s ready to forge her own career outside of her sister’s shadow. The 22-year-old opened up to Cosmopolitan about growing up Lohan, calling out Jennifer Lawrence on Twitter and almost everything except Lindsay.
Aliana grew up in the public eye as Lindsay's career soared and stumbled. "Being born in a family that's public, that's just been my life," she told Cosmo. "I've never gone out of my way for attention."
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But when you're a Lohan, sometimes you can’t escape the attention, as was the case when Jennifer Lawrence joked in a Dec. 2015 interview that she gets "Lindsay Lohan-grade exhaustion but without any drugs or alcohol." Aliana shot back on Twitter: "I never breathe life into negativity. But I stand by my family. Disappointed in Jennifer Lawrence. Not cool."
"That was literally something that came over me where I was like, 'You know what, that's my sister. I gotta say something,'" she explained. "At first, I was like, 'Sh*t. Are people gonna jump on this?' I'm like, 'You know what? It's OK.' Because I just wanted her to know that you should stand up for other women, you should help people and not put them down, ever."
Aliana also revealed that, at 17, she moved to South Korea for eight months to pursue her modeling career full time -- leaving her famous last name behind.
"I was modeling using just my first name in the beginning -- I didn't want to be taken a different way," she said. "When I was there, I was alone, so I was just getting to experience another place around the world and really taking that in. I was like, 'Wow. This is cool' -- free bird."
Now Aliana is back in the U.S. and has moved from New York to Los Angeles to work on her music career and record an album. She describes her sound as "Western emo" and says her influences include Nancy Sinatra and Johnny Cash. "This is what I wanted to do since I was eight years old," she said.
But even though Aliana is reinventing herself as a serious musician, she's not embarrassed about her prior foray into the pop world -- her 2006 album, Lohan Holiday, recorded when she was 10. It's all part of the journey. "I believe everything happens for a reason," she said. "Like, everything."
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Although the subject of Lindsay hovers over the interview, Aliana is -- perhaps understandably -- quiet on the matter. She brushed off a question about Lindsay's recent live chat announcement that new music was being delayed because, "as much as I want to sing every day, I don’t want my sister to hate me." Aliana's response: "I think some things were twisted around."
Meanwhile, Lindsay is back in the news lately for her on-again, off-again relationship with estranged fiancé Egor Tarabasov. Find out the latest in the video below.