Tucked along the east edge of Washington Square Park is the Grey Art Gallery, part of New York University’s Silver Center – on an early April afternoon, the gallery is empty aside from me and Lauv.
“I played a gallery like this at Art Basel in Miami” says the pop star to be as we wander through early 20th Century American lithographs. Lauv, real name Ari Leff, is only 21 but he’s been making music for almost as long as he’s been alive. Deep digging on Myspace music reveals a middle school aged Leff with nearly 34,000 followers, releasing music as the pop punk scene artist named Somersault Sunday. Other digging through Lauv’s Soundcloud reposts leads to the electronic production artist named Epique, another pseudonym of Leff’s.
Of his many musical projects, the name Lauv is a tribute to his Latvian roots, meaning ‘lion’ in Latvian. Despite his musical explorations, the themes of love and loss characterize Leff’s music no matter what name it is recorded under.
“A lot of it is in the world of relationship type stuff. It’s not a complete tonal shift” he says of his second EP which he hopes to put out this summer. The first Lauv release’s success came as a shock to Leff. The project was recorded in his hotel room in Prague while he studied abroad last spring; though the lead single “The Other” was first released online as a stand alone track, since then a whole five song EP titled “Lost In The Light” was released and Leff even signed a publishing deal with Prescription Songs.
The publishing deal, more than anything else can be interpreted as a vote of confidence from the music industry. While a traditional record deal is a sign that the label believes in that artists’ future success, a publishing deal says more that they believe in the content that artist can produce. Anytime an artist signed to a publishing deal sells a song to another artist or is used in advertisements or other media, publishing money is made.
Besides writing songs which he calls a “daily routine,” it’s been a hectic few months for the budding artist. Between the final preparations for graduation from New York University to playing sold out shows on both the West and East coasts, Leff is living a life that most 21 year olds can only dream of. In between his jetting though, he’s managed to find the time to record new music, if not release it quite yet.
“I’ll write from the past or about about feelings I’ve had for a while about something” says Leff, part of what makes his music so appealing across audiences. At his first headlining show in New York on April 14th, the crowd is equally dressed in college prep wear as it is industry insiders; more than half the crowd knows the words to every song. Guys extremely at home under a bench press belt out lyrics like “Could I ever do enough to make you feel the way you want to feel?” next to girls fresh out of their high school prom dresses. The universally relatable themes on “Lost In The Light” point to an artist beyond there maturity typically expected of someone at this point in their career.
With his personal life in such upheaval in the coming few months, it’s unlikely that there are any release under Lauv upcoming but there are special things planned for the second EP. In the meantime, you can catch Lauv opening on tour for Travis Mills in Philadelphia and New York in April and in early May, you can catch him in San Francisco, LA and Phoenix. It’s almost a certainty at this point that you have not heard the last from Lauv though.
-Ross M. Perkel
Photo Credit: Morgan Russell