Canadian singer-songwriter Johnny Orlando may only be 23 years old, but he’s already a showbiz veteran. He made his debut as a YouTube sensation at the tender age of 8 and — like his fellow early viral pop pioneers Justin Bieber, Charlie Puth, and Vine darling Shawn Mendes — eventually established himself as a respected musician, earning multiple wins and nominations at the Juno Awards MTV Europe Music Awards, and Kids’ Choice and Teen Choice Awards. But it’s only with the release of his vibey, dancey, largely self-produced and -written sophomore album, Songs for Young Lovers, that Orlando feels like he’s truly arrived.

At Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records, Orlando recently held a private listening session for the deluxe edition of Songs for Young Lovers, out Nov. 6, premiering bonus tracks like the CSS-inspired, indie-sleazy “Praying Mantis” and the dubby, groovy “That’s My Baby.” There, for an intimate audience of superfans, or Orlandonators, he took a deep dive into the creative process behind the album, along the way discussing impostor syndrome, writer’s block, and how he learned to let go and trust that process and trust his gut. Check out the alternately fascinating, frank, and funny In the video above and edited Q&A below.

LPTV: This is your first full-length album since 2022, and people who haven’t been following you lately, or who still think of you as a child star or a YouTube star, will probably be really surprised by this record. I’m hearing a lot of aughts and 2010s indie influences, like MGMT, Foster the People, Tame Impala, Glass Animals, the Neighbourhood…

JOHNNY ORLANDO: For sure. This album was strange, because I only really want to make albums when I feel like there’s been some improvement in my writing or a big change. I kind of don’t back when people have 15 albums — unless you’ve been doing this shit for 50 years, then sure, do your 15 albums. But I just wanted this to be a lot different than All the Things That Could Go Wrong, which was the first one. And The Ride [EP series] feels to me like a very in-between spot and it’s kind of an album, we were kind of calling it an album, but when I look back on it, that was in transit to get to here. … But this album started as something else. It was going to be ’70s revival. I grew up listening to Led Zeppelin, my dad’s favorite band, and so that was where I was going with it. And then I was like, “This sucks. I’m not ready for that concept yet.” So, I scrapped it.

You made a whole album and don’t have any plans to ever put it out? Why did you shelve it?

It felt like I was trying too hard, to be honest. There were some moments for sure where I was like, “It’s too perfect. That adlib is not necessary and it feels too perfect and not raw.” I think I’m just by nature always trying to be perfect and so meticulous. … So, then I go in and I’m like, “OK, how can we make this chorus perfect?” And I add this adlib and then it fucks it up and makes it worse. That kind of sentiment was why I scrapped the ’70s thing. I’ll redo it once I’m better at not ruining things. Honestly, I’ve gotten so much better at not ruining things. Like, “That’s My Baby” is on the [Songs for Young Lovers] deluxe, finally — do you know how hard it was for me to not ruin that song? Because I wrote it three years ago. It’s like a pop song, it’s very fun, and if I were to have let myself do everything I wanted to do, it would’ve ruined it.

Why didn’t you put that song and the other new bonus tracks on the original Songs for Young Lovers release? Why’d you hold them for the deluxe? What was the strategy there?

I really wanted to have something special on the vinyl. … The album was done and then I wrote “Novice” and my A&R was like, “I’m going to put you in a session with this guy Grant Saylor.” I was like, “Fuck you. I don’t want to write anymore, dude. I’ve been writing for three years!” I reluctantly went to the session, and it ended up being amazing. I loved the song. I reproduced that one. I got the stems from him and reproduced it, and then we finished it together. I was just messing with that song. I put trap drums behind it. I was just fucking around practicing producing, basically. And then I was like, “Yo, this is dope.” Anyway, that song meshed well enough with “That’s My Baby” that it made sense to put it on the deluxe. I really wanted everything to just be cohesive. It just doesn’t make sense on the record without “Novice” as a bridge from” Get Me High” to “That’s My Baby,” so that’s why it’s there.

“That’s My Baby” has a bit of a reggae vibe, almost a Sublime thing. What’s the throughline between the deluxe songs, if there is one?

Big old drums. With “Novice,” that’s just a drum loop that I got off Splice, to be honest. I was like, “I’m going to redo these drums eventually; I’m just going to throw this loop in there for now.” Which is so lazy, but it works. That’s how “Espresso” was made —  don’t knock it! Big old drums on everything, that’s kind of the throughline. I wanted to get a little more electronic. Honestly, I wanted the deluxe to serve as a little sneak peek of what I’m about to do for next project.

You were talking about your tendency to second-guess or overthink things in the studio. Does any of that come from wanting to be taken seriously, because of the fact that you started so young and there might be preconceptions about someone who broke out via YouTube? Now it’s common for an artist to break out TikTok or social media, but it wasn’t as common back in 2011. Do you have a mindset like there’s a higher standard held for you?

Maybe not so much. I’m just trying to prove to myself that I’m nasty, basically! And my personality is that I want to be really good at everything I try to do. I don’t half-ass anything. It’s taken me my entire life to get to this point in music, and I’m still learning that I’m to fucking things up if I think too hard about it. But I would love for some of these songs to go nuts, and then I can look at the people who have fucked me over and been like, “Ha ha!”

Wait, do you have some nemesis? Nemeses?

Oh, I hold grudges. I’m bad at that. It’s real bad, real bad. I’m petty as hell.

What obstacles have you faced as someone who’s navigated teen stardom? You’re 23 now, your first full-length album came out when you were 19, and you made your YouTube debut at age 8. You’ve been through a lot already, but for some listeners maybe you’re being introduced, or reintroduced, with this latest album.

Every album in my life has led up to that point. And I’ve always wanted to be somebody that could be like, “Ooh, this is a concept album.” Every time I have put out a project or a song or an album or whatever, I’m like, “This is me right now.” And that’s kind of always my explanation. I would write the music and it would be very true to who I was and what I was doing in that moment. It would be like, “Emelia, you’re smoking my weed on my roof in my house, but it’s all cool.” That happened, and then I wrote about it the week after. And I think about it for three weeks just on a human level, not even about music, and then I go into a studio and I realize, “Oh shit, I’ve been thinking about this for three weeks. This has had some effect on me.” And then that’s what I end up writing about. That’s why The Ride was a breakup album, because I went through a breakup. I was such a piece of shit when I was 18. Oh my God. I was every 18-year-old boy. I figured it out, man. I’m an adult now. My parents can’t tell me shit.

Well, there’s a huge difference between 18 and 23.

Huge. And I had no idea. I was hit by a truck in that way. So, that’s what this album is. I think I’ve maybe finally realized that in 20 years from now, I’m not going to feel like a 43-year-old. I’m just going to feel like “John,” and I’m going to still be meeting interesting people and loving people, and I’m going to write about it, and that’s going to be my life.

Do you ever listen to things you wrote when you were, in your words, a piece of shit, and cringe? Or do you just go, “Yeah, that was me then, whatever”?

Oh, when I listen to “Boyfriend,” I’m like, “Yo, dude. What was I doing, bro?” That’s a crazy song.

Are there any particular tracks on Songs for Young Lovers that were particularly vulnerable to do?

“Shelf Life.” That was a tough song to write, to be honest. It was hard to say that shit out loud. Basically, the story is, I was talking to this girl for a while. I knew that she liked me more than I liked her, and I was too much of a pussy to end it, which was the right thing to do. And so, I let it drag on for a very long time, and I felt such immense guilt about it, and that’s what the song is about.

Does the woman who inspired “Shelf Life” know that song is about her?

Yes. I showed her it before it came out.

When you perform these personal songs live, it must take things to a whole other different level of vulnerability, especially if you’ve recorded in your own home which is safe, private space. How does it feel to present them in concert?

There are some songs that get me. A lot of the time I’ve listened to the song so many times that I’m more so reminding myself of what it’s about as I’m singing it. Or, I’m hearing myself sing the lyrics and then it kind of brings me back into it. When I perform “Shelf Life,” I haven’t done that song that many times, but it really brings something out of me. You can kind of desensitize yourself as an artist, I think, by playing a song so many times.

Does it ever feel weird to sing a song from a time when you were unhappy? Like, if you singing about a person you were in love with once, but you’re over it now, you must have to figure out a way to reinterpret that song.

Sure, and that works too. But I think you sometimes have to remind yourself what the song’s about. Obviously the goal is to put on a good show and perform well, and people that have come to this show have been listening to the song in their own time and they have their own story with it. All you can really do as an artist is give them what they want and do the best job. Sometimes it catches you off guard and you start crying onstage. That happens too. Yeah, I well up sometimes. But I don’t think I’ve cried real tears.

When you say you want to give the people what they want… when you’re working on a record, obviously you’re making it for yourself primarily. But since you have such a diehard fanbase that has followed you for years, do you think about what they want or expect, or basically how it’ll be accepted by your fans or the public in general? Does that cross your mind?

I feel like that’s a trap. If you’re in the studio and you’re thinking too much, full stop, I think that’s bad. It should really be a flow. Pharrell kind of talks about it in some weird, esoteric way, like creativity flows through you. But it really does. It does. You can’t force yourself to write a song about something on any given day — and if you can, then it doesn’t mean a whole lot. That’s why I never really have done writing for other people, because I want that control where I’m like, “OK, I’m not making a fucking club song today. I’m just not. I had a rough night.” I don’t want to ever be in that situation.

You’ve talked about not wanting to force things, and about how your career that led up to this album. But I saw recent red carpet interview about how at one time you were thinking of not doing music anymore.

Yeah. The shit is just hard sometimes. In a creative pursuit where everything is so subjective, it’s like there’s no guaranteed output for your input. Give me an example of a job doing literally anything else — if you work hard, you will have something to show for it. And so, there was a time where I had no fucking ideas at all. I had nothing. I remember that interview. It was like Christmastime, when the music industry shuts down. It gets very lonely. People stop texting you! I’m kidding, but it gets a little lonely around the holidays sometimes. And I was home at my parents’ house in Toronto. I had left my record label, that I was with since I was 15, in the summer. I had nothing to show for the last four months. And I was like, “I don’t like this anymore. I don’t like it right now, that’s for sure.” There were no prospects of an album. I had nothing. I had nothing. And it was pretty dark. And also, this shit just happens. I go through phases that I have had forever, where you’re really fighting to get out of bed. Some people get that, some people don’t. So, it was just kind of a perfect storm of all of these things happening all at once. But I haven’t felt like that in a very long time, which is good.

Obviously now you’re on this big creative tear, so how did you get out of that funk?

I think the best way to think when you’re [in that headspace] — and I’ve just figured this out not that long ago — is you just think, “I need to win. I just need to win. That’s all. Give me one fucking win and I’m back. We’re so back.” Honestly, when I booked a movie and a TV show… I was just kind of going through it and I was like, “I need a win, man. I need to win bad.” And then, after literally 10 years of auditioning and getting nothing, my agent calls me. He goes, “Do you want the good news or the bad news first?” And I was like, “The bad news, I guess.” And he goes, “Well, you’re not going to be able to do one of them…” And I was like, “What are you talking about?” And he’s like, “The good news is you booked a movie and a TV show.” And that’s the first time I’d ever booked anything with him. We’d been working together for years and he’s spending hella money and man-hours on me. His assistant’s texting me all the time. He’s invested in this too. So, that was really nice for both of us.

What were the movie and the show? Was this the Finding Her Edge Netflix show?

Yeah, I’m currently filming that until end of the year. And then with the movie, I can’t say anything about it yet, but we filmed that in August. It was really fucking fun. It was so fun. It’s a horror movie. It’s dope.

Do you get killed? Or do you kill people?

I can’t say. There is a bunch of killing, though. It’s crazy. It’s crazy work.

Did you have to scream in the movie? Did you have to practice your scream?

Well, I can’t tell you what the scene is for obvious reasons, but there’s a scene where I get scared. I don’t really scream. I kind of scream. I’m a pretty soft-spoken person. I don’t really yell [in real life], or I try not to, and it’s kind of awkward to yell on command also. It takes a lot for me to yell; I don’t just do that. So on set, I think my line was “What the fuck?” — and it was not good. But we did it a bunch of times. It’s chill.

Have you considered combining acting with music, like being in a biopic playing a famous artist, or doing a movie musical?

There’s been conversations about that! I can’t really get into it.

Who would you like to play in a biopic?

I don’t know. I’ve been told I look like Hillary Clinton, which I don’t think would work. I also apparently look like young Vladimir Putin, and that one’s true — look it up, it’s crazy. But definitely not that.

I was about to say was you kind of look like Jeff Buckley. You could play him.

Oh, that would be fucking cool. That would be really cool. Thank you! He’s handsome.

Can you sing as high Jeff Buckley?

Yeah, I can do it! I’ll train and shit.

Changing subjects, I only recently found out about the whole “Jombr” phenomenon. Fans love it when you and your friend Sombr get together…

We just lived together [from 2023-2024] and we made a bunch of videos together at the time.

Is that the house you’re in now? Because I know you recorded a lot of this new album at home, so I wondered if it was in that house.

I recorded “That’s My Baby” in that house, actually; I rerecorded the verses in that crib. [Sombr’s] Back to Friends” and “That’s My Baby” [are from] the same crib.

We’ve talked about “That’s My Baby,” so let’s talk about some of the other Songs for Young Lovers deluxe-edition tracks.

OK. “Novice” was a rare, rare exception where I was trying to write to a concept. This is not a real story. I guess there’s always elements of it that are real and there’ll be certain lines where I’m thinking about a specific person or a specific feeling, but this was not really a time in life. We were just, I think, trying to write a banger. … That one was fun. I was just trying to write not funny, but with “declining calls from my mother, it will be a while before she meets you,” I was just kind of fucking around. And then it’s so naive to say you want to die young, but it’s romantic to think of. Honestly, that came from when I was 16. Oh, I was so fucking edgy. I was like, “I don’t see myself living to 30.” It was so dumb. It’s so dumb to romanticize death. Life is so beautiful. We all have such a gift to be here in the place that we are. So anyway, yeah, I grew out of that.

When you’re 16, 30 seems ancient.

Yeah, it seems like it’s near death. Now it’s not so far away.

There are a lot of huge rock stars who sadly did die before age 30, when they were still at their peak, so I can get why there’s a mythology there. But then there are a lot of great artists like Paul McCartney who are still touring and making music in their older age. I assume you’re just going to keep doing this until you’re 100?

That would be amazing, but I think there’s a point in every artist’s career where they’re not dope anymore and then you have to stop. You’ve got to hang it up because you’re just fucking up your own legacy. I don’t really believe in legacies. … There’s Johnny Cash, who later in his career had some more bangers, so it’s not hard and fast. But I think the way that you become not dope anymore is you let yourself be “famous.” You can’t do that, because you’ll probably be a dick.

Would you ever really settle down and retire?

Oh, probably not. I’ll always be doing shit. My dad’s the same way. That guy works way too hard. I like doing stuff. I love making things. Maybe if I had a bunch of dough and I didn’t have to do anything in particular, I would just do exactly what I wanted. But I love other people deriving happiness from shit that I do. I don’t want to say I’m a people-pleaser, but…

You’re a people person.

Sure. I’m a people person. I love making things. I’ve been making things forever, not even for money just because I like doing it.

A lot of people your age are only putting out their first record now or getting famous now, and the whole fame game is new to them. But you’ve already been there, done that, and have probably figured out a lot of this stuff by now.

I’ve certainly microdosed it over time. We’re still all just people. I don’t want to sound like fucking Chris Martin, but I’m so incredibly lucky to be here. … When you’re 16 and you’re blowing up for the first time and you’ve got a little dough and you can sell out a venue or two, you feel so sick. But then life humbles you, as it does. And then hopefully if you can hang on and keep your love for music, and if people continue to support you, you just learn to be grateful.

I get the impression that you didn’t approach music as like, “I’m going to be a pop star and I’m going to have my name in lights!” Fame wasn’t the main goal.  

For a time, it certainly was. And I mean, I would love to play massive shows. Playing shows is so fun. And the best part of it for me is I get so much from seeing the audience have a good time. Obviously I’m not playing arenas, but I think when artists make that jump and they play arenas, it becomes a little bit impersonal. You’re so far away, and you’re looking at the screen for most of the time. There’s something absolutely beautiful about stopping at 5,000 or 10,000 tickets.

Let’s talk about my favorite deluxe track, “Praying Mantis.”

OK. Like I was saying before, the drums to me are kind of the throughline, and things are a little synthy as well, which I was super against for a while. But I think there’s a way to do it organically. There are analog synths, so I was like, OK, not everything has to sound like the 80s. You can get a little crazy with it. … So, the last couple months, I was on a shoot and I heard this song by CSS, “Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death from Above.” … I heard it just in passing on a shoot and I was like, “What is that melody?” I obsessively listened to this song for weeks and weeks and weeks, and then I went to Montreal and I was like, “I want to make this song.” That song is so dope. It’s so cool. There’s nothing in that song, and what I mean by that is there’s four tracks: drums, bass, guitar, synth. That’s all you need. I was a maximalist for so many years because I was like, “It’s not cool unless there’s so much shit going on.” But that’s crap. It’s not real.

So, I listened to [CSS] and I was like, “Whoa, you can make a complete song with nothing in it. And also, it’s way cooler if there’s nothing in it.” Anyway, I think this whole renaissance of me trying not to fuck shit up came from this, from listening to that song and being like, “This is a complete song. It’s so cool. It’s so busy, and yet there’s just four things happening.” That’s how you know shit is AI, because every riser is in the right place and every adlib is perfect. The opposite of what AI does is some really, really dope, tasteful shit with not that much going on, but it still gets it out of you. And so, that’s what I tried to do with “Praying Mantis.” It’s maybe my favorite song ever of mine. I’m so proud of that song.

“Praying Mantis” reminds me of LCD Soundsystem too.

Yeah, I think the cool thing about LCD Soundsystem is that it “sucks” and it’s not “good,” but that’s why it’s so good. That’s why it’s so good. It’s not overthought. And it might be, but it sounds like it isn’t. They’re obviously incredible musicians, but it sucks and it’s so good. And so, right before the second [“Praying Mantis”] verse, it gets so loud, and I was like, “That needs to be so loud that it hurts and you want to turn it down,” because it puts everything else into context. And on the second chorus, there are adlibs that are a bar ahead, and that was a mistake: We copied them over from the first chorus. I recorded them there and then we copied them and Soran, who produced it, put them in the wrong place. And I left it because I was like, “I don’t want to move this. It’s going to fuck it up.” And I mixed this song, which also… why did I do that? But everything that went into this and all the decisions not to do things are what made that what it is. And I like it.

One music critic recently described powerpop legend Bleu’s Sargeant Pepper Grinder as one of the best albums ever made about grief, but it’s not exactly Sufjan Stevens’s Carrie & Lowell, Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree, Eels’ Electroshock Blues, or Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night. It actually might be the funniest album about grief as well.

So, it totally tracks that during his LPTV interview, when he’s not ruminating about death and loss, self-confessed “unabashed nerd” Bleu is randomly and hilariously debating whether Oasis or Extreme can be considered powerpop, expressing his fandom for The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years, or singing the praises of Mutt Lange and Max Martin (as seen in the full interview video above).

And the fallen friends that inspired Sargeant Pepper Grinder wouldn’t want it any other way.

“This whole record is a tribute to some friends of mine who have passed, so I think everything surrounding this record is very emotional. And today was definitely no exception,” says Bleu, aka William McAuley III, as he relaxes at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records after celebrating Sargeant Pepper Grinder’s release with his first live show in about four years. (He admits that performing in public after such a long hiatus made him “super-nervous,” although he plans to play out more in the future, including a gig in his old home city of Boston on Nov. 20.)  “But the approach I took is maybe a little bit different, in that I wanted to write songs that they would have liked. That really was my goal. And both of them liked upbeat, rockin’, exciting music. I think that’s what makes this record maybe a little bit different than a lot of the grief records.

“They were both very funny people, and we shared humor. When we got together, we were mostly laughing. A vast majority of the time that we were together and we spent a lot of time together was laughing,” he continues. “It just didn’t make sense to me to write this down, depressing record, because that’s not what they would’ve wanted and that’s not how they would’ve wanted to be celebrated. … I’ve already gotten so many comments from people saying that either Scootch or Ducky would’ve loved and been proud of the record and these songs, and it would have amused them.”

McAuley is referring to two longtime collaborators: his college friend and frequent cowriter Alex “Scootch” Scutro, who officiated McAuley’s 2017 wedding, and his studio partner Ducky Carlisle, a three-time Grammy-winning drummer/engineer/mixer and “rabblerouser” who was McAuley’s best man. Carlisle, “an amazing person and incredible friend who knew how to inspire and encourage people,” who McAuley worked with from the very beginning of his career, inspired several Sargeant Pepper Grinder tracks. But the one that probably would have amused Carlisle most is “Start a Band.”

The groovy boogie-rock of “Start a Band” is as earwormy and infectious as one would expect from a veteran songsmith like McAuley. After all, along with his own eight acclaimed Bleu albums, he’s written for Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato, Hanson, the Jonas Brothers, Big Freedia, Michelle Branch, Kate Pierson, and K-pop boy band NCT DREAM, and has received multiple Emmy nominations for his screen composing. “Start a Band” even boasts a “D.U.C.K.Y.” singalong that ought to inspire an arm-spelling dance a la “Y.M.C.A.” or Chappell Roan’s “Hot to Go!” But, characteristic of the gallows humor that runs throughout Sargeant Pepper Grinder, the powerpop bop comes to a dead (pun intended) halt when McAuley sings: “He always wanted to start a band… but then that fucker died!” When McAuley blurts that line and then pregnantly pauses for effect during his Licorice Pizza performance, a few awkward giggles can be heard throughout the store — before the music resumes and McAuley insistently sings, “He would have thought that was funny!”

“Start a Band” is about a very funny dream, which Carlisle never fulfilled during his lifetime, to form a monkeys-themed (as opposed to Monkees-themed) tribute act. There’s even a line in the song in which McCauley imagines this band singing, “Hey, hey, we’re the Shock the Monkeys!” McAuley chucklingly reflects, “[Carlisle] was obsessed with this idea that so many huge bands have songs about monkeys! I mean, the Beatles have ‘Nothing to Hide Except Me and My Monkey.’ The Rolling Stones have a monkey song [“Monkey Man”]. George Michael had a ‘Monkey’ song. There’s [Peter Gabriel’s] ‘Shock the Monkey.’ He had this exhaustive list. What is this rock ‘n’ roll obsession with monkeys? Anyway, that was his point of reference, and he had always wanted to start a cover band that just did all of those songs. It was a funny thing that he always talked about. As I was in the horrific process of cleaning out his house with another friend after he died, that was one of the things that I was thinking about — the idea of this song, to sort of cheer myself up to help me get through it.”

When LPTV suggests that, possibly to celebrate Carlisle’s birthday or commemorate the anniversary of his passing, McAuley play an all-monkey-song tribute show at Licorice Pizza – and maybe even broaden the concept to include the actual Monkees, Arctic Monkeys, some Gorillaz’ hits, or Troy McClure’s Planet of the Apes musical from The Simpsons — McAuley enthuses, “Absolutely! I mean, if you open it up to all primates, we could do a five hour-set of this.”

“Shiny Dimes,” which guest vocals from Bleu’s son, is a more sentimental and less silly Carlisle homage. “It is about this myth that a lot of people don’t share now, so a lot of people don’t necessarily know about this,” McAuley explains. “I say ‘myth’ loosely, because I really believe in it. It’s about people who have passed leaving shiny dimes for us from the afterlife. I find shiny dimes all the time since Ducky has passed, so I do believe that he is sending his love and appreciation from the afterlife. He had such a huge laugh, and I can still hear it. I can still hear him laughing at all the stupid jokes.”

Scutro obviously inspired the eponymous Sargeant Pepper Grinder track “Scootch,” which cold-opens with the blunt refrain, “Alex woulda liked this song… but he’s dead, so he can’t hear it.” Later in the almost jarringly, relentlessly cheerful tune, McAuley deadpans (again, pun intended): “A bit too clever, but you liked it that way/‘A bit too much is on brand,’ you’d say/But you’re a bit too not-alive today.”

“Alex was incredibly smart, too smart for his own good, some might say. He was incredibly funny, insanely charming, and he was a complicated person. I really appreciated about that. I didn’t even really understand how complicated he was until after he died, to be honest. I felt so lucky that we had such an uncomplicated and unfettered relationship for so long. It’s making me really emotional,” says McAuley, pausing to collect himself.

“It’s OK. I’m glad that I can still be emotional about these guys,” he continues. “In a weird way, it’s like [Scutro] kind of chose me. I was his person that he chose to always stay best friends with, and it means the world to me. It really still does. He was always there for me. Being a full-time professional musician for as long as we’ve done this, it has a lot of ups and downs, and he always knew the right thing to say to keep getting me back on the horse.”

After a quarter-century in the business, making music on both major labels and with his own self-contained indie projects (sometimes crowd-funded, thanks to his cult-hero status in the powerpop world and his diehard fanbase), McAuley also does a lot of his own mid-life stock-taking on Sargeant Pepper Grinder. There’s the sardonic and psychedelic ballad “This Song Won’t Sell,” in which he parrots back jaded industry advice that, ironically, he’s “not supposed to write a sad song.” Consider it a companion piece or sequel of sorts to “I Don’t Hear A Single,” a 2008 song by a supergroup comprising McAuley, Mike Viola, and Carlisle called the Major Labels.

And then there’s “Deathbed,” in which McAuley, who was a “massive, massive hair metal fan” in his youth, looks back to his teens when “White Lions roared and Black Crowes soared” and muses: “On my deathbed looking back/How will I remember that?/Rose-colored glasses or cataracts blurring the past.” The album comes to a poignant close with the resigned yet triumphant survivor’s anthem “I’m Not Dead.”

“I am getting more used to and more comfortable with just being like, ‘It’s OK. I’m a 50-year-old guy, and this is who I am and I can’t change it. And a lot of you people who are watching this [interview] are 50 too, and here we are, just trying to be ourselves and enjoy our life together, right? Becoming comfortable with what that is really big for me. But I am also happy to say that we’re seeing such a resurgence back into physical media,” says McAuley, who pressed his new album’s vinyl at Licorice Pizza. “This idea of consuming records also seems to be coming back, even more so with some of the younger generations, so it does feel good to be still swimming in those waters and to know that this idea of real blood, sweat, and tears put into making longform, human records… people are still passionate about that.”

Bleu obviously felt passionate about his friendships with Scutro, who died in 2022, and Carlisle, who passed just one year later — “These people were just so important in my life that when I lost them, I needed to write songs about them” — but he was still processing and reeling from those two losses and finally “fully ready to release” Sargeant Pepper Grinder” when “another huge tragedy happened.” He says he’s “not really comfortable” talking about it just yet, but this ended up delaying the album for another year. However, he now realizes, “In a weird way, I think there is some subtext [about the third tragedy] there, for sure. It has been many years, but I think the advantage of that is that I am able to laugh more than cry now, if that makes any sense.”

Now that Sargeant Pepper Grinder is finally out in the world and he’s starting to play Bleu gigs again, McAuley believes “it all happened the way it was supposed to happen, and I’m glad that it’s happening now. In a weird way — because it’s been so many years, because the memorials have passed, all of the tributes on social media are long gone at this point — for [this album] feels like such a nice way to continue to keep [Carlisle and Scutro’s] memory alive. And that’s something that I’ll never stop doing, but this is obviously the most meaningful way that I can do that.”

“The very first thing you hear when you play the album is a soundbowl, and it’s in the frequency of love. Literally. It’s 528 Hertz,” says R&B diva and singer-songwriter Victoria Monét. “We kind of set the mood there, and then it goes into picking up the story where I feel like maybe the world left off with me, which was probably on the Grammy red carpet where my daughter was a meme and her dad was right next to me with family photos. We were already separated at the time, but [I was] discovering and being OK with the fact that Hazel is really all the love I needed. I needed to express that and the frequency of love, tuning into that frequency, reminding myself why I’m doing this.”

Monet is sitting with an intimate gathering of super-fans at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records on the eve of her long-anticipated sophomore album, previewing the double-disc, 22-track opus Frequency of Love, which features collaborations with SZA, Bruno Mars, Bryson Tiller, Chloe, Lucky Daye, Leon Thomas, and her 5-year-old daughter, Hazel Monét. Hazel, who inspired tracks like the mood-setting “Come Back to You,” which Vicotria says is about “the sacrifice I have to make in order to provide,” is actually in attendance, along with Victoria’s mother, L’Tanya Chestang Cubit, the woman who inspired Victoria’s Jaguar II breakthrough hit “On My Mama.” Suffice to say, there’s a lot of love in the room.

At one point during Licorice Pizza’s Frequency of Love listening session, Hazel even joins Victoria for the playback of “You Mean the World to Me,” the track featuring Hazel with Thomas. It’s an adorable mother/daughter moment as Victoria tells her, “Let’s start with saying, Hazel, I’m so proud of you. You did such a beautiful job on this song. To hear you sing really melts my heart, and so I’m so happy to have you on this album. Thank you for your understanding when Mommy couldn’t be home to make this album. … You really do mean the world to me.”

Much has happened since Victoria — who was already a success behind the scenes as a pop songwriter (her multiple Ariana Grande credits alone include “Thank U, Next” and “7 Rings”) — became a solo star with Jaguar II. She won three Grammys, most notably Best New Artist, beating out the likes of Gracie Abrams, Jelly Roll, Noah Kahan, and the War & Treaty. (Addressing any complaints that she shouldn’t have been nominated in that category because of her previous industry experience, she chuckles, “I’m so thankful for my award… and I’m not giving it back!”) Hazel also received a Best Traditional R&B Performance nomination for a Jaguar II Earth, Wind & Fire collab featuring her vocals, “Hollywood,” which made her, at age 2, the world’s youngest Grammy nominee. And judging by the critical acclaim that Frequency of Love has garnered so far, Hazel might be on track to become the Grammys’ youngest two-time nominee.

“Yes, she was born into greatness. I always say I’m really here for that type of nepotism and trying to push her forward,” a proud Victoria laughs.

However, while Victoria’s professional life has been thriving since 2023, in her personal life, she split up with Hazel’s father, John Gaines, who she’d been with three and a half years, just a few months after Jaguar II’s release — forcing her to juggle co-parenting with her newfound superstardom. “Now, I’m not a single mom, but I’m a mom that’s single. And I have to be, of my household, the provider. So, I have to express myself that way and let my daughter know I’ll always return,” she explains. “Even in the interim of Jaguar II and Frequency of Love, I wrote a children’s book [Everywhere You Are] that kind of shares that same sentiment, where I’m letting her know that we’re still connected no matter if I’m at work or separated. And I often try to bring her to my work experiences.”

While only three years have passed since Jaguar II, Victoria acknowledges that in this fickle business, there was an expectation that she would rush out a follow-up. “I think any time you experience success, the thing you do right after will include pressure. And sometimes it’s self-inflicted,” she muses. “But I don’t view success as a linear thing that just keeps repeating itself no matter what. It does take a lot of hard work and culmination of all of the energy, the self-healing, the workload, but also a little bit of timing and luck. … So, I did have to unlearn some of those pressures. And some of that takes time to do, which I think is human, and that’s OK.

“I can’t type in a prompt and create masterpieces. I have to have lived experiences. I have to edit things. I have to try and tweak things. I have to be honest. I have to re-cultivate,” Victoria continues. “There’s so many things that have to take place in order to make something that you’re proud of. So, the three years, I hope, were worth the wait — which is kind of one reason why I think I was even more OK with putting out a 22-song album!”

During her dimly lit Licorice Pizza listening party, Victoria repeatedly urges her fans to go home and listen to Frequency of Love from front to back, giving a preview of that seamless at-home experience by playing its first three tracks uninterrupted: the soundbowl-chiming “All I Need,” “Come Back to You,” and the gorgeous “Care for Somebody (Interlude)” an old Hollywood Dorothy Dandridge cover that one could easily imagine Victoria performing with the Los Angels Philharmonic at Disney Hall. Victoria understandably labored over the album’s song order, to create the right vibe.

“Oh, I was back, back, forth and forth, like I was Aaliyah! There was so much thought into the process of sequencing. It’s an important part of how I feel a listen should happen,” she tells the attending fans. “For the first listen, I want you to understand what the story is, and also contextualize each song with what it’s enveloped in between. So, there’s a lot of consideration that goes into it. But also, then I’m OK with you putting all these songs on a playlist and rearranging it. This is your album now. … And I hope that you find yourselves within the album. The moments where you don’t have the words, I hope this album is there for you, and as you grow as a person or experience different things, that different songs will resonate even more with you at those times.”

Victoria, now 37, has grown so much, personally and professionally, to get to this moment, and as someone who didn’t become a household name until she was in her thirties, she says “the timing was perfect” for this phase of her career. That is why gratitude is such an overarching theme of her new album.

“There is no mistake when God had his hand on the timing. I thought I wanted it at 20, 21, 22, 23 — all of these moments where maybe I wouldn’t have been ready or handled it this way, or the music just wasn’t right yet,” she says. “I’m so thankful that I had to climb uphill to get there. It made me appreciate it even more.”

On Monday, Chilean-American singer-songwriter Marilyn Hucek auditioned for The Voice Season 30 with her own take on Latina superstar Shakira’s dancehall crossover hit, “La Tortura.” OG coach Adam Levine praised her for pulling off such a tricky and vibrato-heavy song, and she ultimately joined Team Adam.

Hucek made it to the Battle Rounds — also turning the chair of new coach Queen Latifah, who told her, “You managed to capture that cadence, that pocket, and you did it your way” — on the strength of her performance alone, without relying on any sob story. But when she sat down for an LPTV interview last year at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records, on the night of her vinyl release party for her debut album MARILYN, she opened up about her first, unsuccessful Voice audition, which took place way back in 2017.

“I went to a convention center, and there were thousands of people and I waited in line all day. It was not at a time when I felt I was at my best artistic level, so I’m not surprised it didn’t work out,” said Hucek, who didn’t make it far enough in the casting process to actually sing in front of those four big red chairs. At the time, she didn’t even tell anyone that she’d auditioned.

“I kind of felt like I was a closeted artist, so to speak,” Hucek mused. “I never would sing in front of people. There was a time where I stopped singing in front of people, because I think I was taking it too seriously.”

Hucek confessed that she truly had no idea how to break into the music business, which is why she answered NBC’s open call. “It was kind of funny because I was like, ‘Oh, this is how you make it! You have to audition for The Voice and you have to get on the show,’” she chuckled. “It’s really not the case anymore, but that’s how I felt: that this was the only way to do it. And then I was like, ‘OK, well, I auditioned for The Voice, so I can put my dreams to rest and move on.’ But the truth is, I could never move on, and it was always in me. It was like I had locked my dream in this Pandora’s box and just tucked it away. It was always in there beating, trying to get out.”

Hucek continued to focus on her career as a fashion blogger/buyer in New York, until her musician father’s long battle with early-onset Alzheimer’s — another personal-life detail that she opted not to mention on The Voice this week — inspired her to reopen that Pandora’s box. And in 2020, she made the bold and risky decision to leave her cushy job at Ralph Lauren to pursue her long-deferred musical dream.

“It wasn’t until around the pandemic, when I started writing my own music, that I felt more confident in my artistic self, and that’s when I started releasing music and really going after it,” she explained. “Before that, it was a lot more just singing covers. … And I think that singing covers, you kind of compare yourself to other artists, and you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m never going to sound like them.’ Well, of course you’re never going to sound like them! Because you have your own voice and your own unique ability to just be yourself, which is what I learned.”

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Ironically, Hucek will be singing cover songs again on The Voice (which, unlike rival talent show American Idol, doesn’t regularly allow contestants to do originals), so she won’t have the opportunity to perform her deeply personal tracks from MARILYN — many of which were inspired by her father, who died in 2023. But at age 34, Hucek returns to the show with much more professional experience, as well as life experience. She has attended New York University’s summer songwriting workshop, the female artist development program New Roots Nashville, and a nine-month course at the Los Angeles Academy for Artists & Music Production (LAAMP), which was co-founded by Norwegian super-producers Stargate and is executive-directed by industry veteran Chris Anokute (who has worked with Katy Perry, Rihanna, Fifth Harmony, Zara Larsson, Bebe Rexha, and Joss Stone). So, she is clearly ready for battle.

“I don’t think I’ll ever not continue to hone my craft,” Hucek asserted. “I’m the type of person who always wants to get better and always wants to learn.” Surely she has made her late dad proud, and he will be watching over her as she continues her Voice journey. Read more about that journey in the LPTV video above and the Q&A below.

LPTV: Before making music your full-time career, you were a successful fashion blogger with The Lunar Phase, and you had a day job as a fashion buyer in NYC. Why didn’t you pursue music seriously before?

MARILYN HUCEK: Honestly, I will say that I’ve always had a passion for music very early on… but it wasn’t until 2020, when the pandemic happened. My late father had been suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s for a very long time, and he got COVID and he was in the nursing home, and we weren’t able to go visit him. It was so tough and painful. I ended up writing a song in his name [“Memories”], and I felt compelled to release it into the world. And ever since then, I haven’t looked back. That’s when I took that leap of faith. So, now more than ever as an artist, I feel like I have this dual purpose of not only pursuing my dream as a musician, but also using my platform to raise Alzheimer’s awareness. … In fact, $3 for every [MARILYN] vinyl record sold is going to the Alzheimer’s Association, and five percent of the royalties for [the MARILYN track] “Neil Young” are going towards the Alzheimer’s Association. I hope to make a bigger impact as I grow.

When you quit fashion to pursue music, was there any self-doubt? Or were other people, maybe even family members, saying, “What are you doing?” Music is not the most stable vocation, after all.

Interestingly enough, no one that I spoke to questioned it, which is funny. But no, I didn’t have any doubts. I think that’s how I knew it was the right thing to do, because as soon as I started pursuing music, it felt like I’d found that last piece of the puzzle. I was like, “Yes! I have found my purpose!”  I think when I was working in corporate fashion, I was searching — and I didn’t know for what.

Are you from a musical family?

Interestingly enough, my parents met through music. My mom is Chilean, and she was in Chile studying to be a musician. My dad was a piano hobbyist. He actually was a scientist, working for NASA, but he really enjoyed the arts. And they met in the piano room.

When you wrote “Memories,” was your father able to hear it and realize it was about him? Did you play it for him?

Yeah, I played it for him a lot. Music was always something that connected us through the years.

In “Neil Young,” there’s the standout line: “You don’t even know I’m a singer now.” I’ve read that musical therapy can help people with dementia, Alzheimer’s, or brain injuries, because music holds such deep core memories. And I know you used to play Neil’s Harvest Moon for your father.

Exactly. And at the time that I decided to take that leap of faith, I’m not sure if he knew [that I had become a professional singer]. I can’t be certain. But that’s where that line came from. … It’s a very heavy song, about how he eventually forgot my name. But with music, if I played him his favorite songs and his favorite artists… the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Eagles, Bob Marley… he’d come to life.

Are there any other especially meaningful or emotional MARILYN tracks you’d like to discuss?

I would say one of the toughest songs to write was “Love to Hate You,” because it revealed the messier sides of me and the character traits that you don’t really want to brag about. But the comforting thing about that song is now people are like, “Oh, that’s my favorite song. It’s really relatable.” And I’m like, “Oh, thank God I’m not the only one!” … I wrote that song when I was at LAAMP and got a lot of great feedback, so it was very encouraging. But during the week that I was writing it, it was torturous, because I was really just digging into my soul, just trying to get at the heart of my feelings. Now that I’ve gotten it into a song, when I’m singing it and performing it, I feel like I’m healing from that experience, which has been great.

Is it ever hard for you to perform these songs live, especially in an intimate setting like Licorice Pizza Records?

Yeah, it depends. I recently was performing at the Annapolis Songwriters Festival, and it was broad daylight, and I had all these faces looking at me. In the past, I haven’t had an issue, but it’s really day-to-day or show-to-show, because I remember in that moment I was like, “Oh my God, all these faces!” I was like, “I’m just going to close my eyes for a second.” Usually, I try to just do the songs justice and perform them so that people can experience them how I want them to. But sometimes, it’s unpredictable.

Sadly, watching a parent suffer from Alzheimer’s is something many adult children have gone through. I imagine you’ve had fans reach out with stories about how your music has helped them, or that they relate to your story.

Yeah, absolutely. People DM me or tell me after shows that they have a loved one, or that someone in their family has gone through Alzheimer’s; they’ll tell me the music has connected with them. It’s touching and it’s sad to know that other people are going through it, but that’s the reality. I just think the more we can talk about it, the more we can make a difference and heal and educate people.

Did making your MARILYN album help you heal?

Well, songwriting is my therapy, through and through. Even growing up, I would just do poems and stuff whenever I was in my feels. And yes, I think that it’s been very, very healing, especially with this album, because it’s so personal and so introspective. It’s gotten me through a lot of adversity on my emotional rollercoaster.

When alt-pop chanteuse and TikTok superstar Nessa Barrett was just 17 years old, she experienced a “divine intervention moment,” ran away from her New Jersey family home in the “middle of the night,” and landed in Los Angeles — in the middle of a pandemic. And she never looked back.

“COVID hit and I didn’t know how long we were going to be stuck in lockdown, and I was like, ‘I need to get out, or else I’m going to lose all the dreams that I’m trying to chase. I’m going to do it, and I’m going to make it work.’ I had no plan, but it was or-never moment,” she recalls, sitting at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records on the release day of her aptly titled third album, Tough Love.

“I was really impulsive. It was a crazy night, but I just got a one-way plane ticket to L.A. and I left without anyone knowing,” she continues. “It was really scary and a lot of people were upset by it. … I just remember putting my phone off of Airplane Mode and my parents away blowing me up. The cops were after me, trying to find me apparently, because I was a runaway. Yeah, it was crazy.”

Things could have gone very, very wrong for Barrett, but it was easy for her to find friends and resources on the West Coast because of her already huge social media following, so she never returned to Jersey — other than one day to get her high school diploma, before immediately flying back to Los Angeles. Now at age 24, she muses, “I think that how far I’ve come, it’s really shocked everyone.” But she always believed in what she was doing.

“There was not a doubt in my mind,” she asserts. “I was so passionate, and I was just like, ‘This is a life I want to live and I’m not going to stop until I get it.’ I feel like when I had that powerful force in me, there was not really a sense of doubt. I didn’t let myself believe that there was going to be a plan B, ever.”

Barrett may seem like a superhumanly confident baddie when she’s discussing her career goals and her wild runaway story, and Tough Love boasts tracks with titles like “Bad Girls Never Die” and “Too Fast to Live, Too Young To Die,” delivered with the sexy, steely allure of a film noir femme fatale. But there’s still a certain fragility and guardedness to Barrett. She’s a tiny slip of thing, at only 4-foot 9, and while she’s always been open about her mental health issues (including borderline personality disorder, bipolar II disorder, anxiety, depression, and eating disorders), she’s also very soft-spoken, almost timid, giving the sense that she’s holding back.

But Barrett is nothing back on Tough Love, her most startlingly vulnerable work yet. That’s particularly true on track 1, “Candy,” which Barrett says is her “most raw and painful song to this day” — a sadly all-too-relatable confessional about sexual exploitation that has resonated so intensely with her fans, she has often been “in tears” when reading her comments.

“It just makes it so worth it when I see so many people connect with it. It makes me feel seen,” Barrett says with a shy smile. “I was really scared [to release “Candy”], because I’d never really touched on that sort of topic before or been honest about that dark part of me. Seeing so many people feel seen too, it makes me feel like I’m not alone, which is amazing.”

On that gut-punching album-opener, she croons dissociatedly, “Had me on my knees, I did my best work/Gave it up for free, and still I get hurt/If I charged a fee, I might feel better/Silly little me, thinking love was more than sex work.” While Barrett understandably declines to reveal the lover(s) or encounter(s) that inspired “Candy” (“There is a really fine line that I walk on when writing, to make sure that I’m not being too personal or giving up too information — because that’s when it kind of gets a little dangerous,” she explains), she does confess, “I think in my head I struggle with intimacy problems, so that’s kind of what that song is about.”

She elaborates, choosing her words thoughtfully: “It’s that feeling of feeling dirty and used and shame. I feel like when I had to be intimate in those moments, that was kind of a character that I was playing. And so, that’s where ‘Candy’ comes from — from trauma and just I guess how I see myself in the mirror. I’ve always really struggled with being intimate, even with someone that I feel comfortable with, and I guess it is something that I’m really struggling with right now. I feel like in the past year it’s been something that has been really hard for me, and I’ve been working through it. But yeah, it’s tough.”

Tough Love is a loose concept album of sorts about all different types of love — “love that’s hard to find,” but not necessarily only the romantic kind. “I feel like my whole life, all forms of love were really tough and hard for me,” Barrett reflects. “I do feel like my mindset and my thought process and how I approach my relationships and other forms of tough love, that stems from my relationship with my family too. I guess it’s all one big thing.

“There are so many different types of love,” she points out. “I have the songs ‘Glamorous’ and ‘God Gave Me Expensive Taste,’ about the love I have with fame and success in the music industry and Hollywood in general. … But I feel like the most important love is the love I have for myself. And I think that’s something that I’ve been really working towards recently, and something that I’ve really learned while writing this album.”

Barrett is “still learning how to adjust” to life in Los Angeles, and she admits that trying to find true love in the city has been difficult. But she has, overall, thrived in L.A., where she has found a home, chosen family, and “so much inspiration in the air. … I feel like I owe everything in my life to this place.” And finally, her sense of self-image/self-love is catching up with that fierce self-belief that she had at age 17 about her career and music.

“I was really able to separate what I wanted and my passions and my talent and my love for music from myself. I think how I felt about myself and how I was treating myself, it was almost like I was really able to separate that,” she explains. “Only up until recently was I really was able to see myself as a whole, and really take care of myself as a whole. I love this music so much, and I can also love myself, and that has become so special, because it really starts to bleed into everything else that I’m able to do. I think as soon as I really found that self-love within myself, that’s when I started to love my music even more. And I really started to believe even more in this future that I really want.”

A little more than a quarter-century ago, Mexican musician Leonel Garcia and Argentinian-Mexican artist Noel Schajris were pursuing individual solo careers when their shared record label, Sony Music, set them up on a blind date of sorts. And as soon as Schajris got a look at Garcia’s CD shelf, it was clear that these two soul music fans were creative soulmates. And thus, the duo Sin Bandera was born.

“That was the way you get to know someone back in the day. [You see someone’s] the record collection and you’re like, ‘I think I’m going to get along with this guy,’” Schajris chuckles, sitting with Garcia at Los Angeles’s Licorice Pizza Records to promote their most emotional album yet, Escenas, and their current tour, which includes a date at L.A.’s Forum on Sept. 27. “When I arrived at his home, he had his CD rack and he had a Kevon Edmonds CD. And I said, ‘How do you have this one?’”

“It was weird,” Garcia laughingly recalls. “They told me, ‘There’s this guy that sings R&B like you, in Spanish.’ That was weird because we’re talking about ‘99, 2000, and in Mexico, that was not a common thing to see — someone listening to Maxwell or Babyface’s MTV Unplugged at that time. Not too many people [in Latin America] were into R&B.”

“So, from the get-go… it was not, ‘Oh, how are we going to make this work?’ No, no. [Sin Bandera] was born like that,” Schajris asserts.

“It was like something that happens for a reason. I’m not very into the mystical side of things, but when you enter somebody’s house and they have the same albums you have in a very weird manner, you feel there’s something you have to investigate there,” says Garcia. “That was the first thing that made us think we could do something.”

Garcia and Schajris ended up writing three songs on that fateful day, and by 2001 they were releasing Sin Bandera’s self-titled debut album, which sold more than 1 million copies worldwide. They went on to earn seven Latin Grammy nominations (winning two), and they eventually even got to collaborate with some of their R&B idols, like Brian McKnight (which made them “super-nervous”) and John Legend. But they initially faced much industry resistance, because they didn’t neatly fit into one radio genre.

“It was a nightmare for the promoters. … They didn’t know where to put us,” Schajris recalls. “It was kind of the challenge of doing that kind of thing because it was unheard-of, but also it was a thing that make us special. … We were like the Simon & Garfunkel Latinos!”

Garcia thinks Sin Bandera have always been more like Latin America’s answer to Air Supply, because “the kind of audience we have that is very romantic, soft music.”

“There have been a lot of birthing situations because of our songs,” Schajris jokes.

“Yeah, if you need a population [boost] in your cities, just take us there,” Garcia laughs.

It makes sense, then, that Sin Bandera scored their first real hit, the romantic “Entra En Mi Vida,” not through traditional radio airplay but through a sync in a Mexican telenovela, Cuando Seas Mía. (“It was a remake of a Colombian soap opera about a coffee plantation. They did it around the coffee beans,” Schajris quips.) But something larger — a real movement and culture-shift in Latin music — was going on at that time.

“I remember examples of people starting to do [R&B-crossover music] in Spanish, like with Christina Aguilera with Luis Fonsi. They had this beautiful ballad ["Si No Te Hubiera Conocido"] together in 2000, and that was very influential and very important for us. They kind of set the way of where to go; we said, ‘There’s a path,’” says Garcia. “It was a group of artists — for example, Luis Fonsi coming from Puerto Rico, David Bisbal from Spain, and us from Mexico and Argentina. There was a Brazilian guy, Alexander Pires. It was moment where a group of [Latin] people were singing R&B-ish stuff, a little more contemporary. It was very exciting. … And I think what we did gave a lot of courage to people that had thought it was impossible.”

“That’s probably one of the biggest moments in our lives,” Schajris says proudly. “We kind of opened a new door.”

Twenty-five years later, Sin Bandera are still confounding expectations in a post-radio digital age; Garcia says Spotify and other streaming services usually categorize them incorrectly because they’ve “always been misunderstood,” and Noel says, “I think not even the algorithm gets us. We confuse even the algorithm!” But in a streaming era when young genre-fluid music fans listen to a bit of everything, this is working in Sin Bandera’s favor — with people of all ages, including many Gen Z concertgoers who learned about the duo from their parents, coming to their shows.

“I think there’s a strong point in our music that we’re better live than in the recordings,” notes Garcia. “That’s a characteristic of R&B and jazz — that you never repeat the same show two times.”

“We love Brazilian music. We love bossa nova. These genres are improvising a lot, always changing melody, making it differently,” Schajris elaborates. “Music happens in the moment. I think that’s life too. And music is life; its vibration is right now. So, when you buy a ticket, you’re paying for a ‘right now’ moment. … Sometimes we are even surprised ourselves! We look at each other [onstage] and it’s like, ‘Whoa, man. That was awesome.’”

The world is finally catching up with Garcia and Schajris, who are in their fifties now, and the partnership they forged long ago over a shared love of R&B and jazz is still going strong — ever after a breakup in 2007, followed by an eight-year hiatus during which they resumed their respective solo careers. They seem to appreciate what they’ve built together more than ever with the release of Escenas and the kickoff of their potentially population-boosting tour, with hopefully another 25 years of creativity ahead of them.

“I think we still have a lot of affinities, and we can talk about those, and we can talk about time and death and the end of the story and what we can do,” Garcia muses, looking back on how Sin Bandera’s music has evolved. “We’re still here, and stuff that was not there in the beginning of our careers appears later when you have a kid, when you have a wife, when you have responsibilities, and you start getting older and all this. The horizon starts to come closer, and you start to write different when you have less distance [between] the end and the beginning.”

“It’s probably because of that that we’re still so passionate,” adds Schajris. “Because it’s not forever.”

“It’s not forever. And we love that experience inside of our music,” Garcia continues. “We are trying, and I think we’re succeeding, to not to see age as a negative. We learned from artists that we really admire that are 60, 70 and they’re touring, and they’re amazing live — because they are older, they are even better. We’re trying to follow that path, staying away from the idea that youth is a necessity to be an exciting artist.”

Nick Carpenter, aka Medium Build, was working on “It’s Not Easy (Falling In Love),” a standout track on his fifth album King of Having Fun, with superstar pop producer Julien Bunetta when he experienced a midlife crisis of confidence of sorts. And he started to second-guess himself. As an artist who’d never quite fit into any specific genre, and up until then had never worried much about success or playing the showbiz game, he suddenly felt — as he’s amusingly mentioned in his own official press release — like a “washed-up thirtysomething.”

“The day I ended up in Julian’s studio, I was maybe a month sober,” says the 35-year-old Americana singer-songwriter, sitting at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records getting ready to perform for a packed store of fans of varying ages (an impressive turnout that proves he never had anything to worry about). “I had just been on a tour opening up for this pop boy that was blowing up [Role Model]. At the time it was like ‘Sally’ was just starting to go viral. He hadn’t fully stepped into his sleazy-dad rock-thing. He was really just still on the verge of trying to be ‘white boy who’s aware of Frank Ocean’ — which, hey, all of us fell into that for a while! … So, I came from the Role Model tour, and I’m like, ‘OK, whatever’s working, it’s not working for me. I don’t have these 20-year-old girls. No Medium Build fans are making TikToks. And that was what the labels tell me: They’re like, ‘We need your people to start making TikToks.’”

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Carpenter was already a critics’ darling with a devoted cult audience, but as he points out, “What [labels] notice is fanbases that go crazy and grow quickly. … My fans were kind of gatekeeping me. My fans are big fans, but they’re sitting in their room just listening to me and not really telling anybody. So, I’m like, ‘OK, how do I get the young people?’ And so, then my brain starts going to pander-y places. Do I need to lose weight? Get more tattoos? And I ended up in Julian’s studio. I’m a month sober. I feel like shit. I feel like I have nothing. And I’m like, ‘What do I do? You know Harry Styles. You know Sabrina. What’s wrong with me?’”

Carpenter expected Bunetta to tell him to do just that — shed some pounds, get some new ink, or undergo some other sort of glow-up to youthify his image and increase his Gen Z appeal. But, surprisingly and refreshingly, Bunetta offered the opposite advice. “He’s like, ‘No, you have experience. You can talk to the pain that these kids haven’t gone through yet.’ And so, that was a really empowering conversation, from a guy who’s seen a lot of eras of people and watched a lot of people try to reinvent themselves,” Carpenter marvels. “He’s like, ‘You can just talk from where you’re at. You don’t need to pretend to be young. You don’t need to pander. You have this wisdom.’ That was helpful for me.”

The result was what was Carpenter now considers the best and most important album of his career. “I’m just really proud of this record. I feel like I was present the whole time,” he gushes. “I don’t think I always had a plan; I’ve made music out of urgency, boredom, curiosity, playfulness, exploration. … Usually I’m just like, ‘Oh, here comes this urgent feeling. I’ve got to go to the piano and find it!’ And then I puke it out and I’m like, ‘Well, this is what I made.’ It’s kind of like the kid brings the art to Mom, put it on the fridge. Everything I wrote for years I would release. For this record, we really got a little more big-boy britches — like, everything we record, we’re not going to release. We’re going to really pressure-test them and see. I remember in high school hearing that they recorded 200 songs for Thriller and being like, ‘What? Only nine songs? They picked nine against whatever? That’s insane!’ But now I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s because they wanted it to be the best, with no skips.’”

Carpenter must be doing something right, because just a few days before playing Licorice Pizza, he performed at the Grand Ole Opry and part of that legendary Nashville venue’s ongoing 100th anniversary celebrations. He confesses that, as a longtime self-confessed “people-pleaser” who recently covered Charli XCX’s insecurity anthem “Sympathy Is a Knife,” he did suffer from imposter syndrome when he was on the same Opry bill as the Oak Ridge Boys and John Conley. He hilariously likens the feeling to being a Goth teenager at Thanksgiving dinner, when he “got up there and sort of yelled in my denim, in my little Canadian tuxedo.” And he once again felt like he should pander and “offer what these people like,” so he played the two of King of Having Fun’s twangier tunes, “Cone Off” and “Home Depot.”

“I didn’t grow up listening to country music,” Carpenter freely admits. “I learned about country music really intensely in college, studying songwriting in Nashville, and then I slowly began to see there’s this really deep world, that I had to excavate personally and find out what’s real and what’s good. … I was kind of trying to completionist and put my ears on everything in high school — I wanted to know everything — and then once I got to college, that’s when the streaming stuff really came about, and I was like, ‘I can know about everything!’ I can know about L.A. punk like X, and I can know about Northern England sad gray weather boy shit. And then I’m doing my homework on old country at the same time, because I’m in Nashville, and I’m like, ‘Oh, I guess I should know about Randy Travis and all the way back to George Jones,’ all the way back to Roy Acuff and all this stuff.”

Even when discussing serious subjects, Carpenter, a clever and self-aware lyricist, has a delightfully inventive and snarky way with words, often inventing “micro niche genres” that sound like Spotify daylist titles; along with “white boy who’s aware of Frank Ocean” and “Northern England sad gray weather boy shit,” he describes mainstream country bros’ sound as “eat pray, fish” and slacker Midwest rock as “Tuesday trip to the ATM to buy weed from your uncle.” However, his own music has always been difficult to categorize.

“I actually really do fuck with country music now, so it’s not fake, but I don’t make mainstream country music. But my indie rock keeps kind of rolling towards some twangy-type stuff, and so I find myself in these spaces that I do respect,” he explains. “So, if these people in this light, at this angle, at this exact moment, are like, ‘He’s country enough to play the Opry,’ then hell yeah, bro! I’m playing the Opry!” And he does think his organically growing appeal is a sign that he’s “a part of something” bigger going on in country music.

“I don’t think this is a diss or whatever, but sometimes you have to widen the tentpoles. If you really want to reach the next generation, you need to offer some alternatives. If the only thing that’s feeding country music is white guy trucker hat radio songs, then those are going to phase out eventually and you’re not going to have a base,” he says.

Carpenter, who was raised in an evangelical household and came out as queer five years ago, semi-cynically imagines record label meetings with TikTok-obsessed music executives saying, “‘We should get some queers and some Black people. And we should get some rockers in here.’ It’s sad, but you know that’s happening!” he laughs. “But yeah, I had a friend this week post on their story — this is a producer in Nashville who I think kind of sees himself as a bit of a gatekeeper — and he was like, ‘The Opry’s really letting anyone [play] this year.’ And I’m just like, ‘Oh my God. OK, thanks, bro.’ I just went ‘LOLOL’ — I commented as I was posting about my Opry debut.”

Now Carpenter is on a creative tear ( “I don’t even think I have enough time in my entire life to make all the stuff I want to make,” he says enthusiastically), and that coincides with his newfound sobriety. “I spent years on and off the wagon trying to figure out how to control this beast, because I love how alcohol made me feel,” says the troubadour, who actually used to work as a bartender in Alaska, which didn’t exactly help him stay on the wagon. “I loved how it made me feel relaxed, and I loved how it would ease my mind and kind of push some of the dark, painful thoughts away. I started to see that I was doing some intense bargaining with my mental and physical health, and my shows were starting to take dives. My relationships were starting to take dives. I was starting to not be able to see what was important — or at least I could see it the next morning, but I couldn’t see it last night. It was on that Role Model tour that I was just like, ‘This is going to destroy me. I’m literally looking at the most beautiful sunset on the beach day and I have no joy. I gave it all to the night demons. I gave it all away and here I am feeling rock bottom.’”

That’s where those above-mentioned fears about being “washed-up” came from. As Carpenter, who acknowledges that the “lore” about his exploits and unreliability was starting to eclipse his reputation as a genuine talent, recalls, “The voice in me was like, ‘You’re shit, you’re trash, you have nothing left.’ It just felt obvious. It was like, if I don’t change, I’m going to die. Maybe not immediately, but I will. I mean, we’re all going to die, but I’m going to die faster than I should.”

After he had a panic attack onstage and called an emergency band meeting, Carpenter finally asked for and received help, and now he says brightly, “It’s been pretty good! I had a little fall-off last year, but I’m 11 months kind of dry, and I have a lot of friends that are sober now, and it feels like the only way forward for me. But now it’s exciting. It’s like every day feels kind of like a sandbox. What am I going to play in? What am I going to explore, instead of how am I going to push the feelings down? What am I going to discover?”

And so, the title King of Having Fun holds multiple meanings, some of them sincere and some ironic, but Carpenter truly is having the time of his life now. “It’s this sort of hero’s journey,” he explains. “I think what I was referencing [in that title] was I was a fun kid. I think there was a kid who was having fun before he found booze, but then I found booze and I became the ‘party guy’ king of having fun. So, there’s the performative king of having fun, and then… there’s the kid, the original, who didn’t need chemicals to do it, who could do it just with a bike and a Blockbuster subscription or whatever. And then there’s the kid who needs chemicals to do it. And now here’s this 35-year-old who’s like, ‘OK, shit, we’re back to square one.’”

On the day of their fifth album’s release — they made history as the first all-female band and first Mexican band to score a No. 1 hit on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart, with “Kerosene” — Daniela, Alejandra, and Paulina Villarreal Vélez of superstar rock band the Warning came by Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records for an autograph signing. The sister trio then sat down with Licorice Pizza’s LPTV to discuss how making that album, Everything’s Falling, helped them lean into their anger, face their fear of failure, and strengthen their family bond.

Watch the video of the Warning’s insightful conversation in the video above, and check out their “5 Questions” article from this interview over at FLOOD magazine.

They say every picture tells a story, and that a photo is worth a thousand words. But no one tells a story quite like legendary photographer Henry Diltz, who had fans hanging on his every priceless word when he recently sat down for two career-spanning “Vinyl & Vision: The Golden Era of Rock ‘N’ Roll” live Q&As at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records — just ahead of both the 60th anniversary of the Monkees (the TV band whose career he closely chronicled on-set and off) and his own 88th birthday.

“I didn’t go to photo school. I didn’t know how to use lights. I never developed a roll of film,” Diltz revealed with a good-natured shrug during the course of his nearly three combined hours of LPTV conversation. “All I knew was to look through the little hole, and when it looks good, push the button. And then you got it.”

Nothing about Diltz’s career was ever typical. The stepson of a U.S. State Department diplomat, he spent his childhood playing in post-WWII, bombed-out Tokyo and his teen years in Bangkok and Germany, and he’d planned to become a forest ranger before studying psychology and briefly attending West Point. But then the mail-order Pete Seeger albums he got from the Columbia Record Club inspired him to quit West Point after a year, buy a banjo, and move to Hawaii. Somehow this all led to Diltz becoming a member of the Modern Folk Quartet (a supergroup of sorts that also included future Monkees record producer Chip Douglas), and it was on tour with that band, while under the influence of “God’s herb,” that he impulsively purchased a secondhand camera for $20 in a small-town Michigan thrift shop.

And whether it was God’s plan or because of God’s herb, the rest was fateful rock ‘n’ roll history. “On that tour, we had about two weeks driving back to L.A., doing gigs along the way, and we took pictures of each other,” Diltz recalled. Upon the band’s return home, Diltz suggested they throw a slideshow party to watch the results. “When I saw the first slide glowing in the dark, eight feet wide, I said, ‘Oh my God, this is really something.’ That’s when I became a photographer: the first time I projected the pictures to all my stoned hippie friends.”

It was the keen eye for detail he’d developed while living and studying all over the world, along with his knowledge of psychology and ability to capture his fellow trusting musicians in unguarded moments, that helped Diltz launch a whole new unexpected career at the relatively advanced age of 27 (after he sold a Redondo Beach snap of his friends the Buffalo Springfield to Teen Set magazine for a cool $100).

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“Look, I was a musician; if you’re a musician, you belong to the club and you know how to hang out,” Diltz explained at Licorice Pizza. “That’s what it was. They were all friends of mine, because I lived in Laurel Canyon as a musician, and so did Stephen Stills and Mama Cass and Joni Mitchell and Mickey Dolenz and all those people. Long before I took pictures, they were friends of mine… so, I wasn’t perceived as a ‘photographer.’ Otherwise, I would’ve gotten kicked out. Photographers are pushy, like, ‘Look over here! Smile! Stand over there!’ I never did that. I would just sit and look at my friends, and when it looked good, I’d take a picture.”

Diltz went on to shoot more than 250 album covers for many of his friends, serve as the official photographer for The Monkees and the Woodstock festival, and even become one of very few photographers to receive a Lifetime Achievement Grammy. And he still did things the unorthodox way, his way, creating several “accidental album covers” (like James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James, which was initially intended to be a black-and-white publicity headshot) and shooting in forbidden buildings that were later torn down (like an abandoned Hollywood house for the Crosby, Stills & Nash rogue album cover shoot, or Downtown Los Angeles’s long-gone Morrison Hotel, where he snapped a quick roll of film of the Doors while the “slumlord” was away from his post for five minutes). A day-drinking session with Jim Morrison on the same afternoon as that stealth Morrison Hotel shoot actually inadvertently inspired the name of the Hard Rock Café restaurant chain — yet another amusing accidental tale that Diltz shared during his Licorice Pizza Q&A sessions.

Even Diltz’s arguably most famous portrait, of David Crosby aiming a prop American-flag pistol at his own head, was unplanned. Diltz was simply hanging with CSN&Y and Bob Dylan at a Minneapolis hotel room afterparty when Graham Nash handed Croz a toy gun — a random gift from a fan. And Diltz saw something that looked good, as he’d put it, and he instinctively reached for his camera. “I just took a couple of shots. Click, click, click, bang, and that was it. Just a total accident.”

During his two delightful conversations, Diltz also discussed how his jungle-themed, Grammy-nominated cover for Richard Pryor’s debut comedy album nearly got him sued by National Geographic; shooting what turned out to be the Mamas and the Papas’ final album cover; touring with troubled teen idol David Cassidy at the height of Partridge Family mania; getting high on a “basket of peyote buttons” in Joshua Tree with the Eagles, then engaging in a deep (if one-sided) chat with a few friendly cactus plants; literally riding through the desert on a horse (albeit a horse that did have a name: Frank) to photograph the band America; that time noted nudist Peter Tork showed up “totally naked” to a record-executives-packed Monkees tour afterparty at Chicago’s swanky Astor Tower; the one artist who was difficult on set (hint: his name rhymes with “Ron Gone Hovey”); the one living artist Diltz still wants to photograph (hint: her name rhymes with “Sailor Rift”); and one goosebumpy career highlight when, during an iconic Life magazine photo shoot at Paul and Linda McCartney’s Malibu home, Diltz heard the Beatle casually workshop an unreleased ukulele song by the pool.

Diltz exhibited the excitement and energy of a man one-fourth his age, whether he was talking about photographing Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Webb, or discussing his many lesser-known photos of bicycles, fire hydrants, and especially chairs (he became fascinated with four-legged furniture during an acid trip with the Lovin’ Spoonful in 1966). Watch both Diltz Q&A sessions in full here, and enjoy all of his vivid photographic memories.

On Aug. 30, East Hollywood pop/punk teen trio LED are playing the inaugural CAMP — The Next Gen Fest, a festival at Los Angeles’s Underground Museum featuring rock stars of tomorrow like Kim Theory and Japanese viral drumming prodigy Yoyoka. But LED’s wholesome origin story actually plays out a like a real-life version of Camp Rock.

“It was a film camp that we did two summers ago, in 2024,” singer/guitarist Edie Yvonne recalled, during an LPTV interview right before one of LED’s first public gigs at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records last year. At that camp, Yvonne and future LED drummer Lockett Pentz portrayed casino gamers, while singer/guitarist Layne Brisbois (aka Layne Olivia) was cast as an assassin, in an amateur action/mystery caper. And while that short film, The Chain Gang, didn’t even go straight to video — “I don’t even think the movie’s out!” Brisbois laughed — it was a “fun bonding experience.” But more importantly, the song they wrote for the end credits, “Lies All Lies,” became LED’s debut single. And then LED became a real band.

“I actually didn’t think that we would become a band out of it,” admitted Yvonne, who is also an actress (her non-Chain Gang credits include Kitty, Chloe Sevginy’s directorial debut) and had attended the Shanelle Gray Studios Movie Camp to study acting. “I thought it would just be a one-time song. But I was secretly hoping that they’d want to keep collaborating, so I was really happy when we all got together and kept writing.”

Technically, if The Chain Gang even got a brief theatrical release, “Lies All Lies” — named after an Austin Powers catchphrase that Pentz used to randomly shout around the house at age 5, and eventually became his impromptu background vocals on LED’s debut recording — would qualify to be nominated at the Academy Awards for Best Original Song. “Oh, but they had a little mini-Oscars thing [at the camp],” laughed Brisbois. “They would hand out little Oscars.”

“And everyone got Best Something,” Pentz chuckled. “I think I won Best Shoe Game.”

LED at Licorice Pizza Records, Oct. 11, 2025

It makes perfect sense that Pentz had style from a young age, since his father is fashionable superstar DJ/producer Diplo. Pentz and Brisbois have played together in various kiddy bands since they we were age 10, and their first show actually took place about five years ago at one of Diplo’s Halloween house parties. It was on that fateful night that Diplo’s wardrobe malfunction, which nearly sabotaged that living-room gig, ironically might have predicted Pentz’s future band’s name.

“My dad’s LED mask got caught in the speaker, and it was messing with the sound. Everything sounded super-terrible-loud,” Pentz recalled.

“And then everyone thought it was the fire alarm!” laughs Brisbois. “They’re like, ‘What is that? What is happening?’’”

“And we’re like, ‘Oh, it’s your mask. It keeps touching the wires,’” said Pentz.

Pentz acknowledged, “My dad has probably influenced me a lot. … . He’s taken me to some of his shows. I’ve seen him perform. It’s not really my style, but I feel like that really made me think, ‘Oh, I want to be like him and make music.” However, while Pentz has been “kind of learning how to DJ and do tech music” and likes to “dabble in everything,” as he figured out his own musical identity, he and his LED bandmates, who are now all around the ages of 16 and 17, gravitated towards alt-rock.

Pentz said he’s “more of a rock kind of guy” whose drumming style is influenced by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Green Day; Brisbois, who honed her guitar skills during the COVID-19 pandemic, cited Bring Me the Horizon as her favorite band; and Yvonne, who started writing songs during COVID lockdown, loves ‘90s-era indie-pop.

“I feel like a lot of teens our age are really into the ’90s and crave that era or that nostalgia, and maybe don’t resonate with some more modern music,” Yvonne told LPTV.

“In my personal opinion, today’s music doesn’t have that same feel. It’s kind of like, ‘I put this together quickly,’ in a way,” muses Pentz. “With older music, you can feel the work and time put into it.”

“I think the answer [to why teens love classic rock and alternative rock] is because rock is freakin’ amazing, but that’s just my opinion,” Brisbois stated bluntly.

An experience involving a famous ‘90s band, and Diplo, actually inspired “Goodbye Eric,” the second song LED ever wrote. [DJ Eric Hamilton] is one of my dad’s friends,” Pentz revealed. “The story is we went to a Limp Bizkit concert, and he went into the moshpit and we were like, ‘Ohhhh, he’s not coming back! That moshpit is crazy!… Goodbye, Eric. You made it this far. You’re gone.”

“He was gone for 30 minutes!” Brisbois chuckled. [Editor’s note: Hamilton made it out of the pit unscathed. He’s OK!]

Yvonne enjoyed an especially magical moment with two ‘90s rock icons, which set her on her own creative path. In 2018, at the third annual Girlschool festival — the same L.A. fest where another local teen band, the Linda Lindas, made their live debut, and where Garbage’s Shirley Manson was joined by surprise guest Fiona Apple for duet of “You Don’t Own Me” — Yvonne sang in front of a rock audience for the first time. Much like the Next Gen Festival, the Girlschool event was a perfect example of the importance of mentoring young talent.

“It was such an amazing experience,” Yvonne reminisced. “Anna [Bulbrook, founder of the Girlschool organization and a violinist who has played with Beyoncé, the Airborne Toxic Event, and Edward Sharpe] put a group of teens or kids together, including the Linda Lindas. I had never really performed on a stage like that; I came from more of a musical theater background at the time. I got to cover ‘Fade Into You’ by Mazzy Starr, and that was really when I knew I really wanted to do music.”

Along with their Licorice Pizza Records in-store showcase, LED have since played the Whisky a Go-Go, Aviator Nation, and the Hotel Café — “the more we get up there, the more comfortable we get, so we’re trying to play as much as possible,” Yvonne explained — but they confessed that their most daunting gigs, even more daunting than being on the same bill as Shirley Manson and Fiona Apple, have been on L.A.’s battle-of-the-bands circuit, which is “really huge” among local teens.

“I think we’ve done two so far,” Yvonne said. “I feel like those are actually our hardest performances, because there are some really heavy metal bands and it can be very intimidating! There’s a lot of moshing! It encourages me to play better, which always makes me nervous.”

LED did not win those two battles, but they’re clearly winning at life; maybe an Oscar (or Grammy) really is in their future. In the meantime, you can catch LED, plus a solo set by Edie Yvonne and many other future stars, at CAMP — The Next Gen Fest, on Sunday, Aug. 30. Tickets, full lineup, and other details can be found here.