You can take the girl out of Saudi Arabia, but you can’t take Saudi Arabia out of the girl.

Syrian-born singer-songwriter Azniv Korkejian — better known by her stage name, Bedouine, which loosely means “desert dweller” in Arabic — blissfully lived in a gated American compound in Saudi Arabia until she was age 10. Then her family won a green card lottery, and they abruptly uprooted and moved to the United States. Three decades later, as she discusses her fifth album, Neon Summer Skin, it’s clear that she’s still trying to find her way back home, if only metaphorically… and that maybe, this album got her a little bit closer.

“That was life-shattering for me,” Bedouine confesses to Licorice Pizza Records’ LPTV, semi-joking that her childhood relocation to America is “mostly what I’ve discussed in therapy! … My world was literally turned upside-down.”

Neon Summer Skin, Bedouine’s first album since 2021, was inspired by a recent bittersweet trip to see her family in Saudi Arabia, and it explores themes of displacement and belonging, or longing to belong; it is even described in a press release as “mourning the end of her childhood.” Bedouine recalls: “I was feeling a lot of things and I was really emotional about it, and I just thought that I better sit down with this and try to understand what it is and unpack it. And that’s when the songwriting started.”

photo: Janell Shirtcliff

At the heart of that creative process, and of the album itself, was a stunningly candid conversation Korkejian had with her mother — recorded audio of which Bedouine later incorporated into Neon Summer Skin’s centerpiece, “Canopies” — about her mom’s harrowing childhood in a Syrian orphanage. That track, which Bedouine made available for early purchase on her Bandcamp page in April for Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, is followed on the LP by only the second Armenian-language song Korkejian has ever recorded, “Deghma Cheega,” which is about “the resilience of immigrants and coming to terms with the fact that you might not find a place to call home in the same way, but you just accept it and keep moving,” she explains.  “There’s a little bit of cognitive dissonance… the placement in the record, it being right after my mom’s interview at the end of ‘Canopies,’ where it’s just like, ‘That’s life. We’re doing our best.’”

Korkejian tells LPTV that she now realizes that “belonging to a diaspora… having had an American education in an Arabic country, having an Arabic background or Western Asian background in an American country,” and her nomadic existence in general, ultimately “primed” her for a life as an artist and musician. “I think that my initial move from Saudi Arabia was so jarring that I was like, ‘Well, now it doesn’t matter where I go.’ So, it gave me a sense of freedom, like, ‘OK, nothing’s going to be worse than that, so I may as well just have fun with this.’ So, I just kind of went where life was taking me.”

However, after living in Los Angeles for 15 years (the longest she’s ever stayed in one city) and processing her family trauma on her most personal album yet, Korkejian does feel slightly more grounded. “I’m slightly less nostalgic than I used to be — but still nostalgic,” she smiles.

In the extended LPTV video above and the edited Q&A below, Bedouine sheds some light on Neon Summer Skin.

LPTV: Neon Summer Skin is your first album in five years. You don’t normally take such long breaks between albums.

BEDOUINE: Well, a lot of life has happened since my last record, and a lot of pandemic too. It’s just a lot of rebuilding and it took time, so it’s been a while.

Yes, a lot has happened since 2021! And that’s what this whole record’s about. So, you took this trip to Saudi Arabia to see your family. I know you’ve lived all over the world and you live in L.A. now, but you grew up in Saudi Arabia until you were 10. The whole theme of childhood, and revisiting your childhood and the pain that can come with that, is at the core of this record. Tell me about this trip, and how and why it inspired you.

Well, I didn’t expect to visit my parents so much in Saudi Arabia when they moved back from the States, but unexpectedly, I started to tour Europe every year or so. And every time I toured Europe, I tried to stay behind and tag on a visit to them, so it became kind of a regular thing. I would go see them and spend more time on my old stomping grounds than I ever expected to as an adult, and it rekindled this relationship with the place where I grew up, which I already had such a soft spot for because I’m such a nostalgic person to begin with. Every time I went back to visit my parents, I’d basically revert to my childhood. My parents are very old-school, doting, immigrant parents where they’re doing my laundry, they’re bringing me lunch — they’re offended if you do your own laundry. And I’m fine with that! I actually really like spending time with them.  So, I felt at a huge loss when I came back, and it slowly dawned on me that it might have been my last visit, because my dad was going to retire and they would no longer be living there.

Both of my parents were born in Syria, and my dad was just an immigrant worker. He took a job as an electrician in Saudi Arabia and stayed there and kind of worked his way up with this company, and he was essentially given room and board for his family at what was an American compound when we were living there. We all grew up in this really sheltered environment, and that’s where I got to go back to, because he was still working with that company. When it was coming time to retire, we were kind of folding it all up, our whole everything, the whole childhood, and I had really big feelings about that. It dawned on me that I might not ever go back, because even though I’m really sentimental about those places, it’s really the people, just as much as the places, that make them what they are. I was feeling a lot of things and really I was emotional about it, and I just thought that I better sit down with this and try to understand what it is and unpack it. And that’s when the songwriting started.

You’re of Syrian descent and were born in Syria, and your early childhood was in Saudi Arabia, but you were living on this American compound and even went to an American school. And then your family eventually moved to America. It seems you had your foot in two different worlds.

Yeah, absolutely. I feel like I was kind of primed for this experience because it dawned on me also the other day that was like belonging to a diaspora: You always kind of feel in between. It dawned on me that I was kind of primed for [this life], having had an American education in an Arabic country, having an Arabic background or Western Asian background in an American country. It’d always been a blend. This is all I know.

There’s a feeling throughout this album of displacement or not really having a home. I know that even though you were young when you left Saudi Arabia, you’re still nostalgic for it, and you were really sad about leaving. You’re maybe still a little sad about it.

I mean… [laughs]

Not in a bad way!

Absolutely. No, no, no, I don’t think it’s bad to be sad. I fully believe in leaning into your sadness and trying to understand it and not distracting yourself from those kinds of feelings. I’m just laughing because it’s like, you don’t have to give me a disclaimer. I’m fully on board. I’m OK with that. Yeah, that was life-shattering for me. Like, mostly what I’ve discussed in therapy is leaving Saudi Arabia when I was 10 years old, because my world was literally turned upside-down.

Your parents entered and won a green card lottery to come to the U.S., so obviously they wanted to come here..

Ish?

So, my dad actually was trying to get us Canadian citizenship.

That’s the green card lottery I’m trying to get in on!

Exactly! He was trying to get us there, and there were a few reasons for that. … We were in Saudi Arabia and the politics were starting to get a little funny; we lived there for the Gulf War, and I think he was just feeling like it’s time to get out. He couldn’t get us Canadian citizenship, and his friend just made an off-the cuff-suggestion, like, “Why don’t you try to get American citizenship?” And he was like, “Oh, I don’t want to go to America. That place is a business, not a country.”

That’s a good line. That’s a lyric, almost.

Exactly. I mean, I thought that was a really profound thing to hear as an adult. And so, his friend was like, “Just try, you won’t get in anyway.” And he did, and we did. And thank God we did. I’m very grateful for it. But we made our way to America after going through this really rigorous process and vetting and all this stuff, and ended up moving when I was 10.

Even in the U.S, you didn’t stay put — you live in Los Angeles now, but you’ve lived in Texas, Georgia, Boston, Kentucky, all very different parts of America. Are you still searching for a sense of home? Did making this record maybe make you get there, or closer to that?

I think that my initial move from Saudi Arabia was so jarring that I was like, “Well, now it doesn’t matter where I go.” So, it gave me a sense of freedom, like, “OK, nothing’s going to be worse than that, so I may as well just have fun with this.” So, I just kind of went where life was taking me and I kind of used school as a way to bounce around, follow where I could get scholarships or grants and things like that and have fun with it, while I discovered what I wanted to study. I was just kind of pulling threads and trying to figure out where to go. This is the longest I’ve stayed put since then; I think I’m going on 15 years now in L.A.

You’re an L.A. native now!

Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I don’t know. I definitely have slowed down. I’m not like I was in my twenties or early thirties, when I was kind of restless and wanted to stay light on my feet. A sense of home is really important to me, and it’s not maybe as heavy as it was before, but a place to be comfortable or hang your hat for a while. But I don’t think I would be as attached to any place like I was to Saudi. So, it’s in a sense liberating.

I found it really interesting and surprising to find out that you didn’t really start playing music or writing music until you were about college-aged. And it was relatively late in your life that you actually started releasing solo music. You were doing stuff behind the scenes in film and video games, but in terms of being “Bedouine,” you were in your thirties.

Yeah, I was 32 for the first record. … I never once expected for this to be realistic, like a realistic ambition, so I wasn’t actively pursuing it. But I feel in the back of my head, I always thought if the opportunity ever presents itself, I want to be prepared. You know how they say “luck is opportunity meets preparation,” or something like that? I always kind of wrote and played and just did this thing for myself, and I thought if I ever met someone that wanted to put my record out, I would have something to share. And in the meantime, this is just how I express myself, which I think is very important. I think everyone should figure out how to express themselves, so they don’t bottle up their feelings. But no, I moved here to be in post-production. I studied sound design, like sound-editing essentially for film and TV, and I moved here for an internship actually just down the street [from Licorice Pizza]. I’d come to Studio City every day, got my hours to get into the union, and then I pivoted to music-editing for film. And I was just getting my footing there when I met someone that wanted to put my record out. It was a very, very gradual development.

I wonder if that gradual development had anything to do with the fact that your first introduction to playing music was strict, militant piano lesson as a kid, which kind of soured you on playing music.

Well, when your mom forces you to do something, it’s a very easy thing to rebel against, right? She made it too obvious that that’s what she wanted me to do; if she had played it cool a little bit, I probably would not have quit. And I wish I didn’t, but she had me practicing piano so strictly that when we did make the move to Saudi Arabia, I was so just emotionally wounded that I was like, “This is how I get them back. I’m going to quit the piano! I’m not going to continue my piano education!” Boy, did I show them [laughs].

Well, that brings me to the final track on Neon Summer Skin. There are two versions of “Canopies” on the album, but the last song is an instrumental piano version [played by Drew Erickson, who’s worked with Lana Del Rey and Father John Misty]. Was there some kind of full-circle meaningfulness to doing that, especially since it ends the album?

That’s a really good observation. … Some of that was just a sonic curiosity, and then otherwise, there was an emotional meaning to it too, returning back to my first instrument, the relationship that alludes to with my mom and just the coming-of-age of it all. It felt like a really nice nod, like a ribbon to tie the whole record with.

But the other version of “Canopies” is the real centerpiece of the record, because of the story behind it. You a recorded conversation with your mom when she was living in Texas at that time, and used that audio on this song.

Yeah, we were just running an errand, going to get some food or something, and I caught myself asking her the same kind of questions I did about her past or upbringing. And I just thought, “I better record this, because I want to remember the details.” I’m not so good at that to begin with. And you get to an age where you’re also more aware of your parents’ mortality, so it felt like something important I should have.

Your mom went through some pretty traumatic stuff in her own childhood. Sometimes you’ll talk to a parent or a grandparent and they’ll start telling you something about their childhood and you’re like, “I never knew all this. How am I just finding this out now that you went through this?” So, how much did you know about her story about being in an orphanage?

I vaguely knew that she was put in an orphanage. In Lebanon, your custody defaults to your mother until you’re age 7, and after that the father has some rights to basically just kind of pluck them out of their household. And my mom’s dad was abusive and her mom was trying to protect her from him, so she decided the safest place to put her was in this orphanage in Lebanon. They fled Syria and she put her there and she stayed close by, and it was like the ultimate sacrifice she made for her [daughter’s] own safety. [My grandmother] stayed close by at a relative’s house and would visit [my mom] during visiting hours. I vaguely knew because when we visited Syria as a kid every year, we’d sometimes take this overnight bus to Lebanon, and my mom would go visit the orphanage and sometimes donate it to it when she could. So, I had been there, but I think I was too young to really appreciate the gravity of it. This felt like the first time that I was really, really hearing it. And she opened up in ways she hadn’t before and shared details with me that she hadn’t before; those really struck me, and that’s what inspired the song.

What specific details surprised you?

Namely, it was really that phrase that her mom would say. Her mom would sit at this balcony nearby and say something that translated to “the waves of Beirut flutter and blow my daughter’s scent to me, her essence to me.” She would sit there and just take in the air and just think of her daughter. [My mother] says it in Armenian on that recording, and it sounds so beautiful and so poetic that I knew at some point that I would have to build a song around that. And it eventually became basically the heart of that song.

What does your mom think of “Canopies,” and how did she feel about the fact that you wanted to put her actual voice on it?

My parents, they’re so subtle. I imagine a lot of musicians’ parents are like this — they’re just not ever sure what we’re up to.

They don’t really get it. You could win a Grammy and they’re like, “Oh, good for you.”

“Oh, that’s sweet.” [laughs] I think that I was fortunate enough to have a TV performance with my first record on Seth Meyers’s show, and that was maybe the first time they were like, “Oh, OK.” But I think it’s still relatively unclear to them, which I don’t blame them; I hardly know what I’m doing half the time! I think she’s delighted, but it’s like pulling teeth getting them to talk about themselves. It’s like this immigrant survivalist thing, where you have to really take some pulling to get at some heavier stuff.

I think a lot of Boomers and members of the Silent Generation have that suck-it-up mentality. Like, “Oh, it wasn’t so bad. Yeah, I was in a soup kitchen with no shoes, but it was fine. No big whoop.” Anyway, it’s cool that they’ve supported your career, even if they don’t quite grasp what you’re doing. When you initially wanted to go into music, whether it was behind or in front of the scenes, were they cool about it? Because a lot of parents, of any background, would be like, “That’s not a stable career. You’re not going to make money doing that. You should go to law school, or marry a rich man, or become a doctor” — literally anything besides becoming an artist.

There was a little bit of that. They were like, “What are you doing? Does it pay?” I think there was a certain amount of trust involved, because they did see me get my degree and maybe that was just enough for them. … They definitely want the best for me and want stability for me, but I think that they were also dealing with so much of a culture shock moving to America that they were still learning English. So, maybe part of them was just trusting that [their kids] would find our way.

Is the song “Always on Time” about that cultural or generational gap?

I think it’s more about personal milestones or starting a family, feeling like you’re behind in general or feeling like you should be further along and the tendency to compare yourself to other people. It’s just a reminder that there’s no right or wrong way. It was a reminder to myself, at least, that there’s no right or wrong way to go about anything, and that you can only really compare yourself to yourself. It was just a cathartic thing to write.

How many siblings do you have?

Two. And they’re both brothers. I’m the youngest.

What are the dynamics of being the baby of the family and the only girl?

I mean, I don’t know any other way, so it is what it is, but I probably was toughened up a bit as a kid. I saw how they operated, and maybe it calloused me a little. … I think maybe I was a little bit boyish growing up because of them.

I assume your family has heard this record…

Actually, no! I don’t think they’ve heard this whole record! They’ve heard the singles. Actually, my mom’s heard the song in Armenian because she asked me, “Have you been writing in Armenian again?” She was kind of tickled by that, because I only have one other song in Armenian.

Has she actually heard “Canopies,” though?

Yes. And actually, it occurred to me that for “Always on “Time,” I made a music video that kind of alludes to “Canopies” by having a locket — like, the focal point of this video is this locket where I lose the photos that are supposed to go inside of it, and the photos are my mom and her mom. So, it kind of alludes to “Canopies.” I watched it [with my mom] the morning the video came out. I was video-chatting with her, just catching up, and she said, “I saw you have a new video out. I’m going to watch it as soon as we get off the phone.” I said, “You know what? Can you watch it while I’m on the phone with you?” … It occurred to me that it actually might have some weight to it for her. I even recorded a screenshot video of her watching it, and I saw it affect her. And that’s a pretty rare moment. It doesn’t always occur to me to share things with them.

I feel you and your mom need to perform “Canopies” together on a late-night talk show, like Seth Meyers again.

I would love to involve her. I would love to do something like having a little cooking segment where she teaches us her Armenian dishes or whatever. Actually, she’s making some merch for me because she loves to crochet, so she’s crocheting these coasters and these scrunchies and stuff.

That’s really wholesome. Tell me about the song in Armenian that is on the album.

It’s called “Deghma Cheega.” It’s a track about, I guess you could say, the resilience of immigrants and coming to terms with the fact that you might not find a place to call home in the same way, but you just accept it and keep moving. There’s a little bit of cognitive dissonance between the tone of the track and the lyrics, and I think that rub is very intentional. And also, the placement in the record, it being right after my mom’s interview at the end of “Canopies” where it’s just like, “That’s life. What do you do? That’s life. We’re doing our best.”

Was doing a song with that kind of theme, or this album in general, in any way inspired by what’s going on in our country right now with immigrants and ICE?

It’s really difficult to separate the two. I feel like there’s some awkward shapeshifting that happens when you don’t have any reflection on what’s happening in the world. But I will say that this album was so deeply personal; I think it’s easy to apply it to things that are happening right now, but it’s really, deeply personal. I wasn’t quite thinking about things like that. And also, it was written years ago, maybe like three years ago. I’ve been sitting on it for a while. So, it’s not super-topical, but I still think it applies, absolutely.

Well, what’s happening with ICE is terrible, so I think it’s good timing that a song with that kind of perspective is coming out now, even if it’s coincidental.

For sure. And I think those things, they don’t expire, sadly. They seem to be cyclical or something.

So, you have only ever done one other Armenian-language song in the past?

Just the one other called “Louise,” which has a similar subject matter as well. I didn’t expect to do another one… It kind of feels like the cousin to this song.

It seems a lot of Armenian or Armenian-American artists who usually primarily sing in English — System of a Down probably being the most high-profile one — tend to cover Armenian songs in concert, but they don’t do many studio recordings in Armenian. Do you ever cover classic Armenian songs?

I don’t, but I would love to, actually. That’s something I thought about doing, like having an album’s worth of older Armenian songs. I hope that’s something I actually get to do, but I haven’t done it. The singing is quite different, so it would be a very different challenge.

How is it different? How is it challenging?

Just the kind of vamping that goes on in the vocal lines and stuff. It’s just very different muscularly and it would take some practice, but I’m down. I’m down to try. The songs are beautiful.

I understand that you speak in the Western Armenian dialect, but even though L.A. has the world’s biggest Armenian population outside of Armenia itself, that dialect has been an obstacle for you here.

Yeah, for sure. It’s very different, and sometimes there’s a language barrier when you come across someone that assumes that you’re Armenian, because my name is very Armenian. So, when they try to open up a conversation, there’s like a little bit of hanging on for dear life and then you’re kind of like, “Oh, I don’t really understand. I’m from this place.” And there’s a little bit of, like, shaming that’ll happen sometimes.

Is there a stigma if you’re speaking the Western Armenian dialect?

I have experienced it, yeah, which is frustrating because we’ve had very different trajectories, Western Armenians and Eastern Armenians, but we can both celebrate Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day — like, that’s the reason our dialects are so different! It’s a tricky one, because there is the biggest population here, but I don’t necessarily always feel connected to it. It’s a very different culture.

I guess that sort of ties into a lot of the themes we’re talking about with this album, of never fitting into one place or one community.

What kind of music did you grow up with? Obviously you had an Americanized/Westernized upbringing, but what types of music from around the world were you listening to?

Really, it was very Americanized, my exposure to music, because of the time difference. Like, we would come home and watch The Simpsons and The David Letterman Show and wake up to MTV music videos. I would wake up early and have my little handheld tape recorder and tape the music videos’ sound. It was a lot of Nirvana around then. And then I would go to school with my little tape recorder and play it back during recess and walk around the soccer field like an angsty teen, when I was just like 8 or 9. I remember also my first records were Boyz II Men and Mariah Carey’s Music Box, and I had some Michael Jackson and whatever was on MTV at the time.

That’s interesting, because a lot of music critics reviewing your records namecheck all these ’60s and ’70s folk artists, like Joni Mitchell or Nick Drake. Were you into that music too?

I wasn’t at all! I don’t think I even knew Nick Drake until after my first record was out and people were saying I sounded like Nick Drake. Now he’s one of my favorite songwriters and I consider it an honor to be compared to that.

 How do you think that classic folk sound got in there, then, if you were raised on Nirvana and Boyz II Men? And how did you react when those comparisons started happening?

My reaction was just, I don’t know, I felt kind of detached from it, because there was a lot of really great, positive feedback and I just didn’t really want to feel too reactive to it or affected by it. … It’s super-flattering, but I don’t know if I always heard the references myself. I think probably my producer had a lot to do with it, Gus Seyffert and his method of recording, which was on tape and keeping things pretty minimal and stoic. But also, I think the format — just the way that I gravitated to guitar was finger-picking, for some reason, and so everything kind of had inherently this very simple, throwback folk thing to it.

How did you and Gus meet?

When I started working from home doing sound editing, I all of a sudden had more time on my hands, and I started picking up the guitar more often. I started writing a lot. … I was doing more and more voice memos on my phone, and around this time I was listening to Sybil Byers’s records, and it was a ’60s record of basically her on, I believe, a nylon string [guitar], on like a reel-to-reel tape machine. And I really liked that idea. I knew of Gus, I didn’t know him very well, but he was “the analog guy” in Echo Park. And so, I just hounded him and asked if I could maybe borrow his TASCAM machine. I finally got over there and asked him a bunch of questions, and he was running this small house in Echo Park which he’d essentially turned into a studio where there’s pedals in the kitchen drawers — there’s no food anywhere, but there’s guitar pedals in the cabinets and there’s an amp in the bathroom, one of those kind of places. … All of his stuff was set up and we did a song called “Solitary Daughter”; we did two takes of it, and that ended up on [my debut album in 2017]. And so, the first song we did together ended up on the record, and we kind of had an understanding that we would continue to work together.

The last song on Neon Summer Skin that I want to ask about is “One Thing Right.” We’ve talked a lot about family in this interview, but that song is about chosen family. And that’s a big thing, particularly in Los Angeles. There are so many people who live here who were not born here, weren’t raised here, have no family here. I was wondering if there was any L.A. inspiration behind that song.

Yeah, totally. When I do feel at a loss with my family or they just feel so far away, I try to remember that I have a few friends really close by that do feel like family, and that we do have that in our control. Because as close as I am to my family, not everyone has that sort of relationship, and chosen family is just as important, if not more important, to a lot of people. [That track] is a bit of an outlier [on the album], but I think it still works.

Your Neon Summer Skin press release says this album mourns the end of your childhood. That statement jumped out at me. So, what kind of closure or understanding or processing, that you maybe you didn’t have before, did you come to have while making this record, or when you listen back now?

I think just working through it long enough to write all these songs was really cathartic. I think any time you write something, you get to put away the feeling. It’s like seasonal clothing, like putting your sweaters away. Not that it’s gone completely, but I think that there’s something to compartmentalizing things like that, and also facing them long enough in order to do that, like sifting through it. I’m a big believer in sitting down with your feelings. So, I think just sitting down with it was a huge help. I’m slightly less nostalgic than I used to be — but still nostalgic.

I think nostalgia is a good thing, as long as you don’t fall prey to the mindset that everything was better in the past.

Yeah. I don’t think everything was necessarily better then. I just feel like a kid and honestly, it connects me more to my parents. … It’s that realization that everyone has at one point or another: that their parents were just people, and maybe they felt like kids once, and maybe they still do. Because I always feel like a kid, and maybe in a way that just connects me to everyone.

Deb Never is living the dream — even if it’s a dream that she never imagined when she was growing up all over the world, from America’s Pacific Northwest to East Asia, as Deborah Jung, the shy but rebellious youngest child of a pastor and a nurse. The indie-rock/alt-R&B singer-songwriter is at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records celebrating the release of her much-anticipated stellar debut album, Arcade, and like many things in her career, the day hasn’t gone as planned… but in the best possible way.

Deb had intended to perform at the store acoustically, but then someone unexpectedly handed her one of Prince’s guitars, so she of course had no choice but to go electric. Sitting with LPTV after her Prince-ly performance and fan autograph signing, Deb is still in awe, as she gazes down at the (no pun intended) symbolic instrument.

“All I know is, nobody has played this [guitar] except for Prince, Billy Corgan… and now me, which is crazy,” she marvels. “I felt a little the star power from it. But yeah, honestly, I was holding it and like, I felt not worthy of playing it.”

photo courtesy of Giant Music

Deb is in good company and is indeed worthy. And she doesn’t need any superstar’s borrowed guitar to radiate star power on her own — even if she once suffered from such extreme stage fright that at her first gig at a Spokane coffee shop, at age 19, she froze mid-song and “just literally walked off and then walked home.” (She only very recently returned to doing intimate stripped-back or acoustic shows, like the rare one she just played at Licorice Pizza.)

Incredibly, there was a time when Deb “didn’t really see a career in music.” In fact, she only moved to Los Angeles as “kind of an accident” and as a “very last minute, on-the-win decision” when, during a summer vacation before returning to college, she made some new friends who hooked her up with work as a session guitarist. (This eventually led to her collaborating with the likes of Brockhampton, Dominic Fike, Tommy Genesis, and Omar Apollo.) And even when she began to realize that a career in music actually “could be a thing” for her, she still expected to remain mostly behind the scenes, writing songs for other artists, before a music manager that knew her then-girlfriend discovered Deb’s home recordings via SoundCloud.

“I didn’t have it in my mind to put out music as an artist at first, and then I worked with him and he kind of uploaded a song for the first time on Spotify. And it just kind of snowballed from there,” Deb shrugs.

But there’s one endearing, amusing story that Deb shares, about her religious upbringing, that proves that even from an early age, despite any shyness or social anxiety, she knew who she was, she had a specific point of view, and she was always in control of her own destiny — and that the Arcade singer was always going to play the game of life her way.

“I remember when I was 13, I made a whole presentation [for my parents] for some reason. I was like, ‘I don’t want to go to church anymore, and here’s why,’” she laughs.

So, was this a PowerPoint? A diorama?

“Basically,” she chuckles. (Sadly, Deb doesn’t have this audiovisual display anymore, otherwise it could be an awesome stage prop during her more elaborate concerts.) “I got really into Greek mythology, and I would just be online just researching a bunch of other stories. Everyone has their own beliefs, but I came to my own conclusion of why I didn’t believe in the same thing as my parents, and I feel I had to present that to them, to have a valid argument and be like: ‘This is why.’”

Deb says her family — even her pastor father, with whom she had traveled throughout China, Malaysia, and South Korea when he was doing missionary work — were quite understanding and accepting. But perhaps they weren’t surprised, since Deb had already “gotten in trouble a lot in church as a kid” for always questioning what she was taught in youth group.

“I told my mom one day, ‘I don’t want to go to church anymore. I don’t believe in the same thing that you believe,’” she recalls. “And then there’s just a conversation, like: ‘Why?’ And I was like, ‘From what I’ve researched, there’s all these different stories or mythology or whatever that all feel similar, so I don’t believe in one thing. I feel like there is maybe something, but I don’t believe in the one specific thing that you do.’ And it was valid enough that they were like, ‘OK.’”

It was actually two years earlier, while an 11-year-old Deb was living with her father in Korea for a full year, that these rebellious seeds were planted — when, after watching videos online by “one of the biggest inspirations,” her Seattle hero Kurt Cobain — she taught herself how to play a guitar that she’d stolen from the local church. “It had a missing high E-string,” she laughs, only realizing literally in the middle of her LPTV interview that that five-string setup might have influenced her unique playing style, “because I do have a habit of playing a lot on the top four, and I think it maybe comes from that! … I initially wanted to play drums, but then I saw the guitar. It was kind of janky. There were multiple guitars, and I took the one that was broken because I was like, ‘No one’s going to miss this.’ And I took it home with me and taught myself how to play.”

That broken guitar was Deb’s salvation, so to speak, during a difficult year of isolation abroad. “I didn’t know how to speak the language; I am Korean, but I grew up mostly in Seattle and Spokane, so I didn’t know the language. I got thrown into a Korean school in not even a main city,” she explains. “So, [playing music] was kind of my way to feel some type of ‘home’ or comfort. I kind of used the guitar to be able to express, I guess, a lot of the feelings that I had, because I couldn’t speak and I didn’t know what was going on.”

Deb Never poses next to Prince’s guitar

Deb admits that she still deals with imposter syndrome, saying, “I just feel inadequate. … One of my biggest insecurities is playing guitar because I don’t think I’m a good guitar player, since I was a kid.” And she still describes her playing style as “self-taught,” after all this time, because, as she chucklingly explains, “I don’t know chords. I technically don’t know keys. I don’t know notes. I don’t know shit! I’m just playing by ear. So, when someone’s like, ‘Oh, can you play the C-sharp’ or whatever, I’m like, ‘I don’t know what that is. But play it for me, and I’ll figure it out.’”

When Deb decided to stay in L.A. to pursue studio work — it should be pointed out that if other artists were so willing to hire her for their sessions, then she’s absolutely not an “inadequate” guitarist — her parents harbored even more doubts than she once had about music becoming her full-time career. But just like that time at age 13, when she convinced them that organized religion wasn’t for her, they let her find her own way, and she feels “very, very lucky for that. … It was mostly my mom a lot of my life, but she was very understanding of me and what I wanted to do or what I believed in. She was just kind of like, ‘Whatever, OK. You’re going to do what you’re going to do.’ … My parents for some reason have been very lenient. I think in the beginning they didn’t understand — same as me. ‘What are you doing with music? How are you going to survive?’ But I was just like, ‘I’m going to figure it out.’”

That whole “figuring it out” attitude obviously figures heavily in Deb’s story. Looking back on working for two years — a much longer creative process than usual for her — on Arcade, and the whirlwind of four EP releases and nomad living that led up to the album, including spending five months in her “second home” of London during the COVID-19 pandemic, she muses: “I feel like it’s one of those things where you just have to jump into it. You know when you learn how to swim and your parents just push you, and you sink or swim and survive? That’s kind of how it felt when I got pushed into [music]. And then I just had to survive. I think I was on this snowball of constantly having to release music and not having really any time to think about what I wanted to make, so for the album I kind of disappeared for a couple years. I needed that time to catch up with myself, because it had been nonstop.”

Deb approached making Arcade with “intentionally less production,” going back in some full-circle ways to her stage fright-stricken coffee shop roots as she placed her vocals more front-and-center than ever. “It was really vulnerable and exposing for me. But I wanted that,” she asserts. “I wanted it to feel like you’re in the room with me when you listen to these songs.”

One Arcade track, “Deign,” was so vulnerable, however, that Deb actually considered taking it off the album. While she’s reluctant to get too in-depth regarding the song’s backstory, she notes, “I think you could probably pick up from lyrics what I’m talking about.” Some of the most telling lines include: “Remove the pressure from the room/One hit could knock the wind out/Too young to notice that my lips are turning blue/Laying with my face down/Think I finally found some peace that afternoon/Didn’t want it to end/If I ever come down, will I feel this good again?”

“It was purely just like, oof. You could hear everything that I’m saying about a certain thing, and I’m like, ‘Eh, I don’t know…’” Deb says, when asked why she considered leaving “Deign” off Arcade. “I think that was the most exposing for me, because I don’t think I’ve ever talked about my past, whether it was drugs or life experience. That was the first song where I didn’t talk about love or relationships. It was just a very specific moment of something that happened in my life.”

Deb also tapped into her long-held agnosticism on “Deign,” contemplating at one point, “If there’s a God, why does He only talk to me when I’m high?” But she says it’s Arcade’s slightly “Purple Rain”-esque heartbreak ballad “Heavensake” that has garnered the most fan feedback. “It’s a yearning song about somebody. And, oh — actually the chorus has to do with maybe the God thing!” she points out. “The chorus is literally: ‘Heaven’s so far away/I don’t believe in a god/But tonight I think I’ll pray.’”

Deb says she’s “more like spiritual” these days, but whether it was kismet, divine intervention, luck, talent, hard work, or a combination of any of the above, it seems Deb’s prayers (or dreams) have been answered when it comes to her blossoming career. Besides releasing a critically acclaimed album (which will later come out as a deluxe edition, featuring all-star collaborations to be announced), she has mostly conquered her shyness through music, she has her own Arcade-themed video game, and now she can even add “played Prince’s guitar” to her ever-lengthening list of accomplishments. So, now there’s only one (game-related) prayer that needs to be answered.

“My favorite video game right now is Fortnite,” Deb says. “I would always make a joke. It’s not a joke, though! I’m so serious about this: Once I get a Fortnite skin is when I’ll know I’ve made it, literally. That’s when I’ll stop.”

The Eldest Daughter, the debut album by Florida-born indie-folk artist Gatlin that sees its deluxe reissue this week, might have been ever-so-slightly overshadowed by Taylor Swift’s The Life of Showgirl, which coincidentally featured a song called “Eldest Daughter” and was released on the same day last year. But rest assured, this fearless (no pun intended) singer-songwriter very much has her own unique voice.

Inspired by her conservative Christian upbringing in Florida (as, you guessed it, the oldest of three children), and how she has processed and made peace with her childhood trauma since coming out eight years ago (she even re-read her teenage diaries during the recording process), Gatlin Thornton’s album is heavy at times. “I think that Christianity and my relationship with God was so tied into my identity, and growing up, I was very much taught that I was born bad. I was born evil, and God is the only thing that is good. That’s a really damaging way to grow up,” she explains, sitting with Licorice Pizza Records’ LPTV in Studio City right before her in-store performance. “I had to learn how to trust myself and believe that I was good.”

But The Eldest Daughter is also laced with wry humor, whether it’s the clever play on words in “Florida Man” (the comma is silent); the diaristic, nostalgic memories of Gatlin’s first girl-crush in “If She Was a Boy”; the rebellious declaration in “Jesus Christ & Country Clubs” when she sings, “I’m going to hell because girls are fun”; or that moment in “Man of the House” when she proclaims, “My cats can be gay if they want to!”

And that humor definitely comes through in Gatlin’s charming and candid LPTV interview (as seen in the video above and Q&A below), in which she opens up about undergoing ketamine therapy; dissociating during interviews (thankfully she didn’t during this one!); the whole “Florida Man” viral phenomenon; going (temporarily) no-contact with her family; donning empowering male drag in her music video; her ever-shifting relationship with spirituality; and, yes, gay cats.

LPTV: I’d love to start by asking about the significance of the title The Eldest Daughter, because I know you grew up in a conservative, religious family.

GATLIN: I think I was in this process of really doing a lot of healing with my family dynamic, and really a lot of things were coming to light. And so, naturally, I’m going to write about it.. And everything I was writing about was pointing towards being an eldest daughter and all of the pressures that come along with that.

What was your family’s dynamic, in terms the pressures you felt as the oldest of three kids?

I felt like in a lot of ways the truth-teller, the protector, another parent.

Did you feel you had more expectations placed on you, because you were the leader of the pack? When you’re the eldest, you’re the kid that does everything first.

Or you’re the guinea pig!

Yes! And also, parents are usually much harder and stricter with the oldest child. By the time the later kids come around, they’re much more chill.

It is crazy, the difference. I think also because when [the oldest is] female and the baby [of the family] is male, the gender of it all… yeah, there was a big difference. I wasn’t allowed to have sleepovers, or what I was consuming in media was just very strict, versus with the baby it was free reign.

I do want to get into specific songs on the record that address your childhood, but in general, what were you revisiting or maybe even reinterpreting when you were making this album?

I think it really started with my queerness and figuring that out. And then it was not only an issue with my family, my queerness, but then to talk about it publicly. It was almost more of a big deal when I decided I wanted to start talking about it and letting other people know! Because I think that’s a Southern culture thing: having this presentation of being perfect and everything is all put together, and not wanting the judgment from other people. So, it felt like I had to just full send it and go all the way there, of being honest and being open publicly in my art and my songs.

When did you come out?

When I was 19. Now I’m 27.

(photo: Dualtone Music Group)

So, it was relatively later in life for you.

Yeah. And it was bisexual. I came out as, “Oh, I have a crush on this girl.” But even at the time, I was like, “But I’m not going to do anything about it,” because I was still in the church. And so, it was very interesting, the way that I even presented it to my family and my community. It was like, “Everyone start praying for me! I have feelings for a girl!” It took me a really long time to process it and be OK with it myself. And then I was still dating men, so I think maybe my family would view it as I only came out two years ago, because that was when I was really [started] dating women.

Did they think it was a phase?

Yes. And obviously it wasn’t a phase!

Where do they stand with all this now?

It’s a process. I think they’ve come a long way from when it started. The song on my album “Love Me” is a song to my mom, kind of about right when I came out and she was saying extremely hurtful things. It has come a long way since then, but I still am struggling with it, because I do think that there is a difference between tolerating something and celebrating something about someone. I want this part of me to be celebrated.

How did your mother react to “Love Me”? I assume she’s heard it and knows it’s about her?

Yeah, I did show [my family] all of the music before it came out. It’s a hard thing that we’ve been having to navigate, because for me, this is my story and I’m just trying to be honest and it’s my way to process. I was like, “I’m not trying to hurt you through this!” But I think she did take it as hard to hear.

You mentioned this crush that you had on a girl, which was sort of your sexual awakening. The song “If She Was a Boy” is about that. Tell me about that real-life experience.

I wrote that [two years] ago, but from the perspective of 19-year-old me, when I was in that place of “I have feelings for a girl, everyone start praying.”

Did you really want to “pray the gay way”?

Oh, man. Yeah. I truly believed that if I acted on that [crush], I would go to hell. And so, it was a product of the environment I grew up in, and was in. I was living in Nashville [at that point]. I was at a Christian school and surrounded by other Christian kids and deep in the church. I grew up Baptist, and then we went to an evangelical Presbyterian church. It was very much: “Go spread the word of God, go convert everyone.” It was fear-based. I didn’t want anyone to go to hell.

This seems like it was traumatic, and yet you seem very untraumatized. You’re sort of laughing and joking as you talk about it.

I think maybe that’s just my way of coping with it. I’ve done a lot of work about all of this. I’m currently doing ketamine therapy. It’s really rocking my world.

I don’t know if you ever acted upon that crush at age 19, or if that woman knows about it. But I do believe I’ve read that you wrote about her in your diaries, and it was finding and re-reading those diaries — and in the process rediscovering your 19-year-old self — that spurred much of this album.

Yeah, because that was kind of the first moment when I began to really question. Maybe it was because I wasn’t living in Florida anymore; I was in Nashville. I felt in the space to start questioning. Before I was like, “Well, I’m as religious as it comes,” but I finally had the space to start questioning these feelings, and then that just stirred up kind of an entire deconstruction of faith, of politics, of what my family dynamic was, of gender. That was the catalyst.

Is it weird when you visit home? Is it one of those cliché situations of awkwardly being at the dinner table with people who don’t share the same beliefs you have now?

Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people are having a hard time because of the political climate right now. [I didn’t go] home for the holidays [last] year. It’s my first time not going home for the holidays, but the beautiful thing about it is I have this chosen family and a beautiful community of friends and the queer community. I had a wonderful Friendsgiving and there was just so much love and acceptance.

I do think the whole notion of chosen family is very important. I assume you’re not religious anymore, at least not the religion you were raised in, but are you still spiritual, or do you still have some kind of faith in your own way? How do you define your faith, or are you just completely agnostic or atheist now?

Thank you for asking that! I love talking about it! I’m definitely very spiritual. I’m kind of like, re-finding God. For a while I had to separate from it, because there was a lot of pain attached to God. But it wasn’t God — it was people and humans that would corrupt it. I’m kind of in my journey of finding out what [faith] looks like. I’ve been in a lot of discovery, looking into different religions, reading the Bible again and seeing what I feel about this, now that things have kind of calmed. I think I’m just searching right now.

Is ketamine helping with that? I don’t know much about ketamine therapy.

I’ve been seeing this therapist for like eight months. I went to this place, got prescribed the medicine. We refer to it as “medicine.” It’s been very helpful for me. I don’t think it’s for everyone, but she had suggested it. I think it’s just been a way for me to reprocess things or create new neural pathways, because I can logically know something so well, but my body would still react. Even this process of doing interviews for the record and talking about the way that I grew up and family things… I was doing a podcast [recently] and I fully dissociated mid-podcast. And so, it’s just like, “Oh, there’s still work to do.”

I hope you don’t dissociate during this interview! Actually, you’re welcome to dissociate if that’s what you want to do, but hopefully you’re OK with how this interview is going so far. Do you mind me asking what the podcast question was that triggered that response?

I think it was just something about my parents and what they thought about me. And I just was like, “Annnnnd… I’m now no longer in my body.” It’s a body-keeps-score thing. The body remembers.

Well, if anything I ask bothers you to the point that it would make you disassociate, please let me know.

It would have a few months ago, but I have done a lot of work and I’m much better.

I’m glad to hear that, because as I get into asking about specific track, we’re obviously going to get deeper into this. I did want to ask about “Jesus Christ & Country Clubs,” because I love the line :“I’m going to hell because girls are fun.” That’s a great line.

I think that song is more me being a little bit angry. Growing up, I wasn’t really allowed to feel anger, or I didn’t feel like I was allowed to be angry. It felt good to get some of that out. It’s about hypocritical Christianity, like MAGA Christianity, and how the Jesus I knew wouldn’t be acting like this. It was really therapeutic for me to write that and to feel angry about it.

Which song on the record is the most therapeutic for you to perform live?

That one’s really fun. I feel like at shows, that’s the one that people really respond to and get excited about. “Love Me” is one that I have not been able to sing live without crying. I’m very deeply uncomfortable, but I think that is a good thing. It also has allowed for people who are there at the show to make me feel safe and make me feel seen. And I think it makes the space feel very safe.

Another track, “The Hill,” is about religion as well. There’s a line in it about how walking away from Christianity was the greatest loss of your life and the hardest thing you ever had to do. I imagine that’s another cathartic and/or difficult song to perform live.

Yeah. I think that Christianity and my relationship with God was so tied into my identity, and growing up, I was very much taught that I was born bad. I was born evil, and God is the only thing that is good. That’s a really damaging way to grow up. And so, leaving that, I had to relearn… not relearn, but I had to learn how to trust myself and believe that I was good. All of these things that were very difficult to do. It felt like I was completely losing myself. And I think for a lot of people who grew up in Christianity, that’s why it’s so hard to question it or to walk away from it, because you have grown up thinking that’s how life is. And then, also, my whole family is in it. And church is also such a wonderful place for community; I had so many friends and I felt so loved. So, it was a really hard thing to walk away from. And yeah, that was a painful song to write, but I think a good one. It phrases it almost in a Stockholm Syndrome kind of way.

https://youtu.be/O_Mpp3qR6hw?si=yqep6nBamGo2ST8M

When you talk about the community, did you lose a lot of friends or family members when you came out and changed the way you were living? Did you lose a lot of support? Did you have to make new friends?

It was a process, like a year’s process. I was living in Nashville at the time and a lot of my friends were all kind of coming out of it at the same time, which was really nice and felt less isolating. Family relationships changed, definitely. And that’s sad and heartbreaking, but also OK.

You do approach all this with a bit of humor, like I said before. You have a song called “Florida Man,” which I love because if you ever read The Onion or even the real news, there’s always a headline along the lines of, “Florida Man Does Some Crazy Shit.”

Have you done the thing where you put your birthday and then “Florida Man”? Google your birthday and “Florida Man,” and there’s always going to be something!

Ha! So yes, Florida has a bit of a reputation that’s probably somewhat deserved. But there’s a comma, at least an implied comma, in your song title, because you basically say, “I’m never going back to Florida, man!” It’s a fun play on words. So, tell me about this song, because there’s a lot of humor, but also a lot of anger in this too. It’s kind of like an F-U Florida, or at least that’s how I’m interpreting it.

I think now, retrospectively, I view “Florida Man” as this metaphor of almost who I was when I was living there, playing my role in my family dynamic and not being who I was and not questioning and being in the closet and all of these things, I kind of view it as, “OK, I’m never going back to that.” Through honestly writing this album, I kind of got to reclaim Florida as mine.

I hope anyone reading or watching this interview who’s unfamiliar with your music doesn’t think The Eldest Daughter is an entirely a sad, mopey, angry record! So, I’ll cite another example of your lyrical humor, in “Man of the House.” My favorite line in the album is from that song: “My cats can be gay if they want to.” I’m all for gay cats. I’m all for cats living their truth.

Let the cats be gay!

Yes! But what is “Man of the House” really about? Because that’s a loaded term — patriarchy, gender roles, all that.

Yeah, I was kind of claiming that for myself. In the visualizer I did, I was in male drag. I had a beard and the camo and I felt awesome; I feel like it unlocked something in me. When I wrote it, I was living in an apartment by my own, by myself, and paying the bills from my music, which was wild. And at the time I wasn’t talking to my parents, because you go through breaks, or at least I do with them.

Are you talking to them now?

No, not right now.

Oh, I’m sorry.

It’s OK. So yeah, I think it was the first time that I was like, “OK, I’m a little bit on my own. Let me figure this out.” I just felt powerful. It was a time of my life when I was like, “I’m a strong person!” So, I wrote “Man of the House” and I was like, “I get to live by my rules. My cats, if they want to be gay, can be gay!”

Are your cats gay?

One of them definitely is gay. For sure, gay. My partner says that I project a little bit. Like, I’m almost forcing them to be gay, when they might not be.

You’ve just got to let your kids, even your furry kids, be who they want to be, whether they’re gay or not. That’s one thing we’ve learned one thing from this interview! I also want to ask about “Soho House Valet,” because your press release called it the “north star” of The Eldest Daughter. It’s about a very specific conversation you had with a family member, I assume at Soho House…

I wrote that a week after I had this f fight with my dad walking into Soho House Warehouse in Downtown L.A., and I wrote it to process that. I was very honest in a way that I hadn’t in my writing before. I viewed the song as, “Well, this is for me. No one else is going to hear it. So, who cares? I’ll just say everything.” And then I sat with it for a while and I was like, “You know what? I think I do want to put this out. And I want to make an entire album that is this honest and is for myself.” I guess why it’s the north star. It was like the catalyst of, “OK, I want to start making music in this way.”

Do you mind me asking why you’re not speaking with your parents right now?

I think it’s a rollercoaster. Relationships change. And right now for me, as this album’s coming out and I’m talking about it, and there’s been fights, and the political climate… it’s just a lot. And I’m kind of like, one thing at a time. Sometimes space is good for healing as well. When things are really emotionally charged, sometimes it’s OK to say, “Everyone needs to take a break. Take a break and breathe for a second.”

But even though you have differences of opinion, different political beliefs, different religious beliefs, I understand that your parents always been very supportive of you of being an artist from very young age. And that’s interesting. Maybe some people would assume they’d be like, “Be a housewife! Don’t pursue a career!”  But they always encouraged you to be musician.

Yes, and I feel like that’s such a gift, because I’ve had so many friends who parents were like, “OK, be practical.” And doing music is not practical. It’s a hard thing to go out and pursue. And especially my parents are not creatives and not in this world, so they didn’t really understand it, but they were willing to learn with me and figure it out. So, I’m like, “OK, see? If you can do that with music, then you can do that with me being gay, too!”

Did you always want to play music?

Yeah, when I was young, it was always, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And I’d say: “A singer! I want to be a singer. I want to write my songs.” Maybe in middle school I thought I would do something practical, but then in high school I got diagnosed with an anxiety and depressive disorder and I was like, “Music is the only thing that makes me happy.” And I was really supported in that.

So, your parents supported you in your mental health journey and got you help, et cetera?

Yes, they did. So, you see, they’re not… there’s so many redeeming qualities. I had a lot of great things in my childhood.

I’m glad to hear that. So, let’s end things on that positive note. You were obviously unpacking a lot of stuff from your adolescence when making this record that was painful or dark, but there’s nostalgia on The Eldest Daughter too. What did you revisit that was nice to remember?

I think the last track, “Kissimmee,” which is where I was born. I had gone back to Florida and was able to go out with some queer people and discover so many beautiful people in Florida and be with family in a really positive way. And I was like, “Oh, I have this nostalgia for childhood again!” Coming back and being able to be who I am and really love who I am in Florida, I think was really good for me — because I’d kind of had this view of loving a place so much, but not really being loved by it. Maybe that’s a generalization, but you can find pockets and find people anywhere.

My last question is, what advice do you have for people who are going through something similar — whether it’s coming out, or just in some way breaking away from their upbringing — about they can be as grounded as you seem to be now?

Oh, wow, thank you! … I think being honest with yourself and learning how to love yourself is such an important thing. And I think I was able to do that by spending a lot of time by myself and doing a lot of work, but also finding community and finding people who celebrate you for exactly who you are. And it doesn’t need to be a lot. I think that has made all the difference with me — just having my few friends who are like, “I see you. I love you. And I’m here for you no matter what.”

“On a couple of songs on this album, I tried to write from the same place that I wrote when I was a kid, which was very anti-intellectual,” singer-songwriter and actor Nat Wolff tells LPTV, as he sits with his bandmate and brother, fellow musician/thespian Alex, at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records. “I tried to do a lot of closing my eyes and just feeling the shapes of the piano and the sounds of the piano, not even writing down the chords, not knowing even exactly what I was playing, and letting the songs come to me. That’s how I did it as a kid. … Sometimes it ends up being so embarrassingly bad when you listen back, but then sometimes you discover something really unique that you wouldn’t be able to find otherwise.”

Nat and Alex are at Licorice Pizza — a much more intimate space than the arenas they’ll be playing in May and June with tourmate Alex Warren, or the big stages they graced in 2024 opening for their friend and collaborator Billie Eilish — to play a stripped-down show celebrating their new album. Fittingly and simply Nat & Alex Wolff, the record is one of the best releases of 2026 so far, and certainly the best of their long career — a stunning dreampop opus that evokes everything from ‘70s Laurel Canyon folk, to ‘90s slowcore and shoegaze, to even ‘80’s/’90s Cher. And it’s probably not at all what unfamiliar listeners would expect from child stars of the aughts’ cult Nickelodeon show The Naked Brothers Band.

“I remember someone recently said, ‘Oh, I just saw that you released music. When did you stop being the Naked Brothers Band?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I was about 11,’” the now 28-year-old Alex chuckles.

But starring on three Naked Brothers Band seasons, for which they performed and composed all the music, actually served as a sort of songwriting/production “bootcamp” for the Wolffs — the sons of Thirtysomething actress Polly Draper, who created and directed the Naked Brothers series, and veteran jazz musician Michael Wolff. And it led them to this full-circle moment with their fourth studio album, as they explore and unpack their complicated and conflicted experiences with, among other things, childhood (and adulthood) fame.

“I read a book, and then I was in therapy dealing with some traumatic moments from my adolescence and late childhood, kind of trying to deal with the question of how these little incidents in my childhood are affecting me in my romantic relationships and in my friendships,” says Nat, 31, as he reflects on “Horse,” one of his most raw and confessional contributions to Nat & Alex Wolff. “But it wasn’t really something that I was sharing with anybody. …  I thought, like, ‘Whoa, this is too scary to even show Alex.’ … But now it ends up being the one that I’m the most excited to play and feels the most healing.”

Alex feels the same way about his own (no pun intended) naked “Backup Plan,” a song “that felt different and dangerous and strange.” He wrote it in a hotel room in Athens, Greece, while shooting a movie on location and spending an unprecedented amount of time away from Nat, when “there was nothing else that I could do in that moment except to write about it,” he explains. “Sometimes you want to be more of a journalist of your feelings and kind of be a little bit removed… and that was not the case with that song at all.”

“We definitely missed each other, and also just worried about each other. I remember Alex sending me ‘Backup Plan’ and thinking, like, ‘Oh, I really love this song, and I can’t wait to record it’ — but also, ‘I gotta check in on him.’ Sometimes it’s easier to communicate through the music than it is in any other way,” Nat muses, remembering the time apart before they reconvened to record Nat & Alex Wolff. “I felt the same way playing ‘Horse’ for Alex for the first time. … My hands were shaking, and he’s like, ‘We’ve got to record that tomorrow.’”

The brothers have had their struggles, both during their Nickelodeon run (when they experienced the double-life whiplash of being bullied at school, yet being worshipped by both teenybopper and “creepy older” fans off-campus) and after the series ended in 2009. “We were famous and then not famous and famous and not famous,” Alex quips. And yet, they’ve managed to avoid the rock-bottom scandals of many former child stars, which they attribute to both their tight sibling bond and to the periods of quiet in their professional lives that allowed them to process and regroup.

“I think we were really lucky that we had each other. We watched a lot of people that were kids on shows or in bands just completely self-destruct, and I think having each other, it became ‘us against the world,’” Nat says. “I think especially as musicians and as actors and as artists, having those times where things weren’t ‘happening’ or ‘hot,’ when I look back, those are the times where I made the most growth as an artist by far. It also kind of made us realize that we just need to keep our heads down and keep making the work.”

In the extended LPTV video above and the edited Q&A below — what the brothers sweetly and generously call their “favorite interview ever,” at their “favorite record store” — Nat and Alex open up about the cathartic and rewarding process of crafting their “most collaborative album on every level”; respectively portraying Pavement’s Scott Kannberg and Leonard Cohen onscreen; their “Mount Rushmore” of all-time favorite songwriters; the encouragement they received from family friend Warren Zevon; getting pelted with monkey feces while performing at a rained-out Bronx Zoo; love-bombing; and the very special four-legged guest star on their album, Shark O’Connell.

LPTV: It’s an exciting day. There are already a couple-hundred people lined up outside the store to see you perform. Congratulations! I know this album was made in a different circumstances from previous ones — particularly the one before, Table for Two, when you were literally locked down together during quarantine times. Before this new one, you had spent some time apart. You weren’t estranged, you hadn’t had a feud or anything, but you’d been living in different places. After being in a band together for practically as long as you’d been brothers, I assume it was unprecedented for you to be separated, and that this affected the record.

ALEX: For sure. That was the longest we’d been apart. I was traveling around Europe for a year filming — I was in Norway, I was in Greece, I was in Montreal, I was in Argentina, I was in London. I was really all over the place. And I think that there’s something about writing songs while you’re away and then bringing them back to Nat. It’s like the most amazing, rewarding feeling, because you felt so far away and you’ve sort of been writing to yell out and get back home. And then when you bring it, it feels almost like it was very, very private. But we also did some songs completely together on this album. We did “Tough,” where Nat sings the first verse and I sing the pre-chorus, then we sing the chorus together. I’m really proud of that. I felt like this was the most collaborative album that we made on every level.

NAT: Yeah, there’s something interesting about Alex being far away and me being far away and sending each other songs, almost as a way to check in with each other.

Did you miss each other? Did it feel weird to be apart?

NAT: Oh, yeah! We definitely missed each other, and also just worried about each other. I remember Alex sending me “Backup Plan” and thinking, like, “Oh, I really love this song, and I can’t wait to record it” — but also, “I gotta check in on him.” Sometimes it’s easier to communicate through the music than it is in any other way. I felt the same way playing “Horse” for Alex for the first time. … My hands were shaking, and he’s like, “We’ve got to record that tomorrow.”

Am I correct that “Backup Plan” was the song that sort of kicked things off for this album? And it’s one of the ones that Alex wrote in a hotel?

ALEX: Yeah, in Athens. Definitely for me, that’s the inciting incident that’s it was time to make a new record. We’d been writing songs, but there was something about that song that felt different and dangerous and strange. It demanded to at least follow something through with it and see how it would come out in the studio. I was very nervous to record it, because it felt like I didn’t know what direction really we wanted to go in, because it was very raw. And I think that we felt the same way about “Horse,” where it was so raw that it was almost like, “OK, what do we do with this song? … I don’t know what the fuck we’re going to do with this.”

What were your respective mindsets during “Backup Plan” and “Horse”? What were you each going through when writing two of the most vulnerable songs of your career?

NAT: I read a book and then I was in therapy dealing with some traumatic moments from my adolescence and late childhood, kind of trying to deal with the question of how these little incidents in my childhood are affecting me in my romantic relationships and in my friendships. It was just something that I was thinking about a lot. [“Horse”] was just a byproduct of that, but it wasn’t really something that I was sharing with anybody. So then, showing the song, I thought, like, “Whoa, this is too scary to even show Alex.” But then at a certain point of showing people, now it ends up being the one that I’m the most excited to play and feels the most healing. And it’s been the one that I’ve gotten the most kind of vulnerable take from people who’ve heard it, sharing stories with me.

ALEX: I feel the same way. I feel like [“Backup Plan”] was written in a state of there was nothing else that I could do in that moment except to write about it. Sometimes you want to be more of a journalist of your feelings and kind of be a little bit removed… and that was not the case with that song at all. I was playing Leonard Cohen [in the 2024 drama series So Long, Marianne] and I was really entrenched in the work that [Cohen] was inspired by and Herman Hesse and all those people, so I felt, “OK, I have a lot of information that I’ve inhaled. Hopefully when this explosion comes out, there will be pieces of that stuff.” I think that’s how we sort of approached it, like if it’s a raw song, let’s keep it raw. Use the scratch vocal. The vocal doesn’t sound perfect, but it sounds true.

I hear a lot of Leonard Cohen’s influence on this album. How daunting was it to play one of the greatest artists of all time, in my opinion?

NAT: My opinion too!

ALEX: Yeah, definitely. Probably for me, the favorite songwriter.

NAT: What about Paul [McCartney] and John [Lennon]?

ALEX: It’s like it’s [Cohen] and Paul and John are on the Mount Rushmore of best songwriters, but definitely lyrically [Cohen] is the king for me. And I still feel that he’s underrated, even though he’s huge and important. You can’t talk about him enough. I think in approaching [the role], I just thought, “Well, there’s going to be a huge chunk of people who really don’t like it no matter what I do,” because it’s almost a betrayal that someone else is not actually Leonard Cohen. So, I just felt like I’m just going to accept that, and [tap into] what he meant to me and what I took from him.

And then Nat played Scott Kannberg, aka Spiral Stairs of Pavement, in the recent Pavements movie. I don’t even know how to describe that film. It’s not a documentary, but it’s not a biopic, either.

NAT: Yeah, we didn’t really even know what we were doing when we did it, but they said, “It’s going to be half-biopic, half-you as actors pretending to be like an actor that can’t get out of character.” Like Austin Butler playing Elvis or something. And then it’s a bit of an actual documentary. And then there’s also a musical that they put on Broadway for three days, and they filmed the behind-the-scenes of the musical. It’s laugh-out-loud funny. I saw it in a theater. But then it’s weirdly really moving too. I actually got to sit next to the lead singer of Pavement [Stephen Malkmus] at a fake premiere that we did to make it look like a premiere — they were going to shoot it and then put it in the movie — and he was shaking and crying and stuff, because it’s his life and his legacy. That made me think of how people that have that bratty kind of persona usually are the most sensitive. It’s like a way to block it. I’ve always felt really moved by the Pavement songs and I didn’t know why, and then I was like, “Oh. That’s why.” He’s a really deep-feeling person; he just subverts it in kind of goofiness and wackiness.

I can hear the ‘90s alternative influence in your music too. I hear Elliott Smith, Sebadoh, Beck — but like sad Beck, like Sea Change-era Beck.

ALEX: Oh, we love that! That’s our favorite Beck.

NAT: Nigel Godrich Beck.

There’s also obviously a lot of ‘70 influences on this album.

NAT: Our parents really introduced us to a lot of the late-‘60s and ‘70s music, and then at 12 or 13 I think we rebelled and dove really hard into all the ‘90s grunge — My Bloody Valentine, dreampop, Slowdive. All those kind of bands have meant so much to us, especially production-wise. And lyrically, we love Blur.

ALEX: [Lyndsey] said our clothes look like Oasis!

But unlike the Oasis brothers, you get along.

NAT: Well, we had a couple of fights about the album…

ALEX: I feel with an album, you can hear the compromise if you don’t battle it out a little bit. I feel like when you really love an album between two people, you can tell they both had a point of view.

NAT: The problem was is that one day Alex got the talk-back mic in the studio and I was playing a piano part, and he was giving me notes on the piano part. And as soon as I heard Alex’s voice of God in my ears, in the headphones, I thought, “This is not going to work for me.”

Are there songs that were particularly points of contention?

ALEX: I can’t say that there was one song on the album that while we were in the studio we weren’t getting along making it. I felt like that was the magic. It’s more about after and mixing. I feel like if there was any song that we weren’t both totally 100 percent sold on, it’s just not on the fucking album. That was our rule.

NAT: It was more like, what were the songs that we were going to cut? What were the songs that are going to be on? It’s hard, because there’s a lot of songs that didn’t make it, but it wasn’t even because these songs are better than other songs. It was more like, “This is the most cohesive album.” The album has lots of ups and downs and different colors and isn’t one thing; I’m bothered by a lot of modern music when an album just has a uniform sound. All my favorite albums take lots of journeys, and we wanted to make sure that it has our imprint on it, but that it takes on lots of different shapes.

You mentioned that you rebelled against your parents. But your father is an amazing jazz musician, Michael Wolff, and he was the bandleader and musical director for The Arsenio Hall Show! So, I imagine you met some very cool people as kids. I understand that you sort of grew up with Warren Zevon.

NAT: Oh, yeah, Warren Zevon was my huge influence ,and he was my dad’s best friend. He died when I was probably like 8, but actually for my fifth birthday he gave me a little leather jacket and he said, “You’re going to be a rock star.”

And he was right! Warren was right about a lot of things, actually. What did you think of his Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction that finally happened last year?

ALEX: So awesome. So great. So moving.

NAT: His last album that he did right before he died [The Wind], where he brought in Bruce Springsteen and all these people and he did “Keep Me In Your Heart” — oh my God, that’s the most beautiful song you ever. My dad used to always say, and he still always says when he’s sick or feeling bad or something, “Oh, my shit’s fucked-up.” And then Warren wrote a song based on my dad saying that. It’s a great one, one of my favorite songs. … He was such an amazing lyricist, it’s crazy.

ALEX: Yeah, he’s on the Mount Rushmore of lyricists, for sure.

So, your Mount Rushmore is Warren Zevon, Leonard Cohen, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney? How many are allowed?

ALEX: Neil Young? Can John and Paul be one [spot]? OK, thenalsoBob Dylan…

NAT: And Joni [Mitchell], oh my God!

That’s a pretty solid top five. So yes, you came from a musical family, a showbiz family, growing up with this music, and you weren’t brothers very long before you became a band. And it’s interesting, because we were talking about the Pavements mockumentary, but if people look back at your mockumentary-style Naked Brothers Band show, it was pretty smart for a children’s program. It was pretty meta. I don’t even know how much younger viewers understood how sophisticated it was, especially for the time.

NAT: We didn’t even understand!

ALEX: I don’t think I knew that it was really making fun of us until much later.

NAT: But I did feel when we did an episode where we went to the VMAs, we’re supposed to win the VMA, and we hadn’t even been on TV yet and the music hadn’t even come out yet. We started to leave the VMAs and we got into a car to go home, and [cast member] Qaasim [Middleton] goes, “But what about our award?” And then I was like, “Dude, this is just a show.” That’s when it kind of hit.

ALEX: We met Fergie [at the VMAs] and she said, “I’m a big fan,” but she was just being really nice and polite.

There are other TV shows that began this prefab-band tradition, especially The Monkees. The Monkees were a TV band before they were a “real band,” and some people still don’t take them seriously as a real band, because they still have never been nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. You’ve probably dealt with that skepticism yourself, but maybe it’s less of an issue for you guys because you are no longer called “The Naked Brothers Band,” which gives you a clean slate.

NAT: We wanted to break out and just be “Nat & Alex Wolff,” because it wasn’t the Naked Brothers Band. It wasn’t that group. It was us. … And it’s been interesting that ever since we’ve been making music as Nat & Alex, it’s never been an issue for people to wrap their minds around it. We’ve always been really, really lucky with musicians, producers, and people like that who understand where the music’s coming from. But I do remember with press and journalists, having to steer the ship. They were trying to pigeonhole us into a certain thing that we weren’t.

ALEX: I remember someone recently said, “Oh, I just saw that you released music. When did you stop being the Naked Brothers Band?” And I was like, “Oh, I was about 11.”

It’s crazy that the show ended more than 20 years ago! I know you had to write several songs for each episode, so it seems like it was a good songwriting bootcamp to help you with the career you have now.

NAT: It was a bootcamp for songwriting, and then it’s how we learned the studio. We started off where we would sing and play our songs, and then we had musicians come in and we’d play with them. But by the end of the show, Alex and I were doing everything in the studio. … We were kind of already writing all the songs, and now recording them basically a duo.

ALEX: I was just a drummer, initially, and then we started to become more of a duo.

When we were talking about the song “Horse,” Nat, you alluded to traumatic experiences in your adolescence. Do you mean the whole child-stardom thing? Unlike some other kid stars or TV stars or Disney stars or Nickelodeon stars of your era, I don’t recall hearing about you two going through any big scandals or struggles.

NAT: I think we were really lucky that we had each other. We watched a lot of people that were kids on shows or in bands just completely self-destruct, and I think having each other, it became “us against the world.” There were times when it was really overwhelming, having a lot of people know who you are and kind of getting bullied at school, but then having crowds of people outside of the school screaming. It was just a really strange time. And then it kind of going away and then touring, and going from playing the Bronx Zoo for 10 people to then playing Madison Square Garden and Irving Plaza…

The Bronx Zoo concert sounds kind of lit, though.

ALEX: Nope! No, bro. We were right by the monkeys — the real monkeys, not the [Monkees] — and they were throwing fecal matter at our guitars.

NAT: We’d learned all these songs because this choir was going to come, and then only two people from the choir showed up.

ALEX: And they didn’t know any of the songs that they told us to learn.

This is like an episode of a TV show, almost.

ALEX: A tragedy. A horror movie.

NAT: I remember turning Alex and being like, “I don’t think it could get worse” than that show. And honestly, and it never did.

That’s like Spinal Tap. It’s maybe even worse than “Puppet Show with Spinal Tap.” Instead, it’s “Monkeys with Nat & Alex Wolff.”

ALEX: I just feel bad for the eight or nine fans who did come to that show and were like, “What the hell?”

Well, I don’t think you should feel bad for them now. Now they’re probably like, “Remember that show at the Bronx Zoo? We were there!”

NAT: Oh — and it was raining so hard that they put up a half a tent just over the stage. But everybody who came was just getting rained on really hard.

I bet the monkeys enjoyed the show, though.

ALEX: Nope, clearly not!

I mean, maybe monkeys throwing feces is like Greeks throwing plates. It’s a sign of affection and applause.

ALEX: Opa!

But at least you don’t have to play zoos anymore.

NAT: Well, maybe we should, A zoo tour could actually be fun.

Anyway, more seriously, your childhood is a recurring theme on this album. I know “Whole Other Life” unpacks some of that. But I don’t know if it is only about being famous at a young age, or if it’s about other stuff.

ALEX: I think that we were famous and then not famous and famous and not famous, and that can come and go. But it’s more about the after-effect. I feel like when it’s happening, all that stuff was great. It was just really complicated after — your feelings of trying to fit in and your relationship with family members. Nat told the story of how we were in school and we would be getting bullied, but then we’d walk outside and there’d be fans there. And there’d be creepy older people. It was just a lot of strange shit for young people to endure. A lot of amazing stuff, and a lot of shitty stuff, especially when you’re a child star and then you move on. I mean, if you can call us child stars; some people like Miley Cyrus or whatever, that was just so insane. But being famous, I think that you want to almost pretend that you get embarrassed by it. You don’t want to even look at it. And then when you get a little bit older, not only are you OK to look at it, you can kind of feel it again and understand what it was that you were going through at the time.

NAT: On a couple of songs on this album, I tried to write from the same place that I wrote when I was a kid, which was very anti-intellectual. … I tried to do a lot of closing my eyes and just feeling the shapes of the piano and the sounds of the piano, not even writing down the chords, not knowing even exactly what I was playing, and letting the songs come to me. That’s how I did it as a kid. And somehow it does unlock a certain self-consciousness that goes [away], and you have the ability to be free. Maybe it’s because you’re not trying to be good, so you can be free. Then you end up stumbling upon stuff. Sometimes it ends up being so embarrassingly bad when you listen back, but then sometimes you discover something really unique that you wouldn’t be able to find otherwise.

Do you think it was a blessing in disguise that there were ebbs and flows to your career? I’ve heard this theory that the age at which someone becomes famous is when their maturity level freezes…

ALEX: People say my maturity level is about 8!

NAT: Something froze there.

Well, I beg to differ. You both seem very mature and grounded to me. But do you think the fact that you had periods of relative normalcy after your TV show ended was a good thing in the long run?

NAT: Totally. Because I think especially as musicians and as actors and as artists, having those times where things weren’t “happening” or “hot,” when I look back, those are the times where I made the most growth as an artist by far. It also kind of made us realize that we just need to keep our heads down and keep making the work.

I have a couple of other songs I’d love to discuss. My favorite track on the album is “Candy Speak.” It’s about love-bombing, which has happened to us all. “Forever for about a week” is best line ever. I don’t know if this song is based on a real-life experience or amalgam of experiences, but I can relate.

NAT: It was an amalgamation of a few. It’s definitely that feeling of not just being love-bombed, but buying into the fantasy because it’s nice for that moment. You know somewhere in the back of your head that this isn’t real. If it feels too good to be true, it’s usually too good to be true.

But yes, it feels good to be love-bombed, so you think, “I’m just going to go with it, and worry about that later.”

NAT: It’s like doing a drug or drinking too much. You’re like, “This feels so good! It’s going to last forever!” But the hangover’s comin’, man. It’s comin’.

It’s relatable content, for sure. The other song I wanted to ask more about was “Tough,” which opens the record, because that’s a particularly emotional one.

ALEX: I had listened to Alex G’s new album Headlights and I’d really loved it, and then I’d gone down a really a deep rabbit hole with Cher. I love Cher a lot. … Cher is the greatest chorus-writer ever. So, I just wanted to kind of capture that feeling I had when I listened to Headlights, and then capture the feeling I have when I listen to a Cher chorus. I went in the yard and I wrote that chorus and then kind of wrote a pre-chorus, but I didn’t really know what it was. And then Nat and I went to the studio for the very first time, having sections of the song not written, like writing it on the day. And it was the most thrilling thing in the world.

NAT: All the things we’ve been talking about in this interview — about growing up and that sort of face that you have to put on in order to have that weird childhood that we had — that, I think, came through in those lyrics. “Empty compliments/That’s what I do best/The days just do that/I got no candy left.”

The last song I want to ask about is “Soft Kissing Hour,” because it obviously has a very special guest on it: Billie Eilish’s dog.

NAT: Hey, I was going to make that joke! … Yeah, Shark is on a lot of tracks on that song. … His snoring is kind of comforting. It’s just way in the back, but I remember the mixer being like, “Should I take out all this noise?” I was like, “Nope!” And he said that’s what happened with Carrie & Lowell, the Sufjan Stevens album. He’d spent two weeks taking out all the air-conditioning noise, and Suf said, “What happened to the air-conditioning?”

I guess you kept what some people would call “mistakes” on this record, and you kept it organic and DIY and kind of went back to your roots. And it all worked out. There were no mistakes. So, congratulations again on a fantastic album.

Twenty-five years ago, hip-hop/electroclash baddie Princess Superstar, aka Concetta Kirschner, was the queen of the scene with Princess Superstar Is, the album that AllMusic Guide’s rave review said “should mark her arrival” and spawned the global hit “Bad Babysitter.” But as recently as 2023, after years-long gaps between album releases, lapsed record deals, and diminishing returns — “I put music out, but it would fail. It would literally get a thousand streams,” she recalls — Kirschner assumed her career was pretty much over.

But then “Perfect (Exceeder)” — a 2007 mashup of Dutch dance artist Mason’s instrumental with “Perfect,” a track from Kirschner’s ambitious and prescient but commercially disastrous Princess Superstar Is follow-up, My Machine — appeared on the Saltburn soundtrack. And everything turned around. The song went viral, and Princess finally earned her first gold record in the U.S., 30 years after she started in the business. “I got my career back. It’s kind of like a miracle,” she tells LPTV, during an autograph signing at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records for the 25th-anniversary pink vinyl reissue of Princess Superstar Is.

“I was so grateful to have a second chance at doing music again,” Kirschner says. “When you’re an artist, that’s what you love, and it’s so painful when you don’t get to do it. Or maybe you get to do it, but on a smaller level and you’re just not reaching people really the way you want to. I was so excited to get it back. It was just flabbergasting.”

Princess Superstar has lived several lives, which is why she is currently writing what is sure to be her juicy, compulsively page-turning autobiography. Obviously, she needs save some of her stories for the book, but during her hilarious LPTV interview, she dishes about being labeled “Feminem” by the U.K. music press and winning over the white bros at late-‘90s/early-2000s hip-hop shows; the glory days of electroclash and the current “indie sleaze” revival; the aughts-era NYC rivalry between electroclash fans and followers of more “serious” bands like the Strokes; how her Grimes-approved sci-fi concept album My Machine, on which she worked with Todd Terry, Stuart Price, Armand Van Helden, Felix the Housecat, and Arthur Baker, was supposed to be her Tommy, and her dream to revive My Machine as a theatrical piece; dealing with industry ageism; discovering, mentoring, and producing a young Lizzy Grant, aka Lana Del Rey; opening for Morrissey in Serbia; hanging out in Grandmaster Flash’s supplements-stocked kitchen; wearing full daytime glam at Chipotle; and the plans for her new album, which will be her first since 2013.

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LPTV: It’s crazy that it’s been 25 years since Princess Superstar Is came out.

PRINCESS SUPERSTAR: I know! I can’t even fathom it. I can’t believe it.

But what’s cool is your career is possibly bigger now than it was when that record came out.

It’s kind of true. It’s like one of those wild life stories, right? My career was kicking off back then with “Bad Babysitter.” It was No. 11 on the charts in the U.K., and I was touring in a big tour bus, and I did so much for that whole decade, the 2000s. And then my career sort of died. But then totally it got revived two years ago with the Saltburn soundtrack. “Perfect” was on it and went viral, and I got my career back. It’s kind of like a miracle.

You’ve used that quote before — that you “got your career back.” But I don’t think you ever really stopped grinding or working. There were big gaps between records, but it’s not like you were on hiatus. Or were you?

It was couple things. I mean, I was taking breaks because I was knocking on so many doors and they were just shut. It was really depressing. So, I gave up music for a little while. And then I was like, “OK, I’ll just be a mom,” which is amazing; that’s an incredible job. But inside, I was like, “I just want to do music again. Why is nobody letting me?” And then I was like, “I’m not going to wait for anyone to let me.” I was a scrappy kid in the ‘90s that started their own record label with zero money. So, I was like, “Let me just keep making music and I’ll put it out on Spotify. How do I use this thing now called Spotify?” I was so confused. And then I put music out, but it would fail. It would literally get a thousand streams. But I kept going. And I think that that’s the message I really love to give to artists — and to people. Just keep going. You just never know. Because when opportunity came, I was prepared.

I definitely want to get into that. But it’s interesting that you said you went to No. 11 in the U.K., you sound quintessentially American in the best possible way, like very New York. What do you think it was about British audiences that made them early Princess Superstar adopters?

I think they’re just forward. They’re just cooler. You know what I mean?

Yeah, they are. Obviously you’re not a novelty act, but do you think they were attracted to the novelty of your persona, of you being this street-tough New York broad?

Oh yeah, they loved that. They have such an amazing sense of humor. And yeah, I was this white-girl rapper. They called me “Feminem” or whatever.

There weren’t many female rappers back then, and even fewer white female rappers. Iggy Azalea had some success, but that was later. But you worked with Grandmaster Flash, Kool Keith, and Prince Paul, so obviously you did get taken seriously. What was it like blazing that trail back in 2001?

It was really hard, actually. You don’t, especially in this day and age, want to be like, “Oh, it’s so hard! I was white!” But it was hard being a woman doing this art form. I remember back then I would do these shows opening up for Dilated Peoples and Beanie Sigel and huge hip-hop [acts], because I was squarely in the hip-hop milieu. [The hip-hop audience] was all dudes. There were no women in these audiences, OK? I don’t know why, but it was dudes. … And it was, like primarily white dudes in the audience, too. In the early 2000s, the people going to the hip-hop shows were white dudes. And no girls. It was really weird. … If they liked you and you got a head nod and a shoulder, that was good. That’s why I started rapping over dance music, because electroclash was happening at the same time in Europe, and I was going all the time to Europe because that’s where I was famous. And I was like, “Oh, wait a minute. This is gay and sparkly and fun! Oh, fuck these [hip-hop] audiences.” So, I really just went straight into the electro thing because I was like, “I can still rap, but I need a better environment for me.” … And also, if [the white-dude hip-hop crowds] didn’t like you, they’d throw things at you — like dangerous things. This white guy in a Wu-Tang shirt threw a bottle at me.

Did you ever get injured?

No, because I could jump out of the way. I was like, “Nope, I’m not getting fucking hit by a bottle.” It was hard, hard, hard blazing that trail, for sure. But I just knew one thing: I wanted to rap. That was it. I didn’t know the politics. I didn’t know anything about that. I just was like, “This is the art form I want to do.” Because I love that with rap, you can do different things than you can with singing.” So, I was like, “That’s what I want to do.”

What was the first rap music you heard that inspired you?

I remember first hearing Kurtis Blow on the radio. It was like pirate radio. I was really young and I was like, “Why is this guy talking on the record? He’s not singing. He’s talking!” And I was like, “Dad” — because I was brought up on classic rock — “Dad, he’s talking. Why is he talking?” He’s like, “That’s rap,” and I was like, “Oh, that’s so cool!” And my dad was like, “Eh, I don’t really get it.” And I said, “But it’s cool, right?”

You spent a lot of your youth in New York, which was the perfect place to be raised on rap.

Yeah, late ’80s — it was so amazing. A Tribe Called Quest and all that. There was cyphers in Union Square and stuff like that. And then there was this record store called Fat Beats, which was the quintessential hip-hop store. … And yeah, so that’s how I got into it.

You mentioned electroclash. It was a short-lived movement in the aughts, but I think it’s coming back. Now people call it “indie sleaze.” You hear it in what Charli XCX is doing…

Or the Dare.

Yeah, I love the Dare. “I like the girls who do drugs”… the minute I heard that, I was like, OK, fun is back. And even though electroclash was short-lived and maybe not taken seriously by music critics at the time, I think it was very important. It was actually dominated by a lot of women, like Chicks on Speed, Peaches, and yourself, and it was very sex-positive and queer-positive. I’d love to hear your memories of that era. I think it was a lightning bolt in time.

It really was. It was so amazing. What I really loved the most about it was that you had all the music genres blending, and that’s something that I was always super-into anyway. You had punk with techno, hip-hop, classic rock. That was really when mashups started happening, like here in the U.S. with Z-Trip, and over [in Europe and the U.K.] with Too Many DJs. I remember hearing Missy Elliott rapping over AC/DC and I was like, “What the fuck is that? What is that?” Because that was really my childhood: I had the AC/DC, but I was also into hip-hop. And that’s part of why I wanted to become a DJ, which I did too, because I was so influenced by that. I loved that you could mash up everything. It was wild and free and fun, and it was a real kind of nod also to ’80s new wave, which I grew up on as well. It was just really queer and sparkles and fun, and not taking it too seriously.

Do you think there’s this “indie sleaze” revival because young people weren’t around for that era, and since they came of age during COVID and glued to their phones, they long for that sort of mindless, debauched fun they never got to enjoy?

Yeah, I think so. It was a really super-fun, amazing era. We didn’t have phones!

Well, we had Razrs.

Yeah, we had Razrs, but we were just more present, and they feel that. And I think nostalgia is always a thing. In the 2000s, we were nostalgic for the ’80s. But yeah, I think the [electroclash] fashion was sick, though.

And it was also not expensive. The fashion looked cheap, but in a good way.

We made things. We cut things up. We were wearing American Apparel.

I almost felt like the electroclash backlash was similar to the “disco sucks” backlash of 1979. Disco also was powered by a lot of women, queer artists, and people of color, and it got dismissed as cheesy and vapid. But now everybody loves disco. Maybe that is also why electroclash is getting its due now.

It’s funny you say that, that because there was like a kind of seriousness coming out of New York, which was like LCD Soundsystem and the Strokes — that kind of crowd looked down on us, like electroclash was embarrassing, that it wasn’t music of substance. They were like the cool kids, and we weren’t as cool. It’s funny, I forgot about that.

Everything was more compartmentalized then. Now no one cares about genre loyalty and tribalism. Kids today will like Doja Cat and Geese, or whatever.

Exactly. I wasn’t really in the New York scene too much. I was in Europe a lot. I’m writing this song with Digitalism called “I Was in Berlin” and it’s about what we’re talking about now. I wasn’t even in New York. If you read that book Meet Me in the Bathroom, I’m not even in it.

I guess you never really fit neatly into any genre.

I know. I do sit in a funny place, because I come from hip-hop and then I went over into dance, and I became a DJ. People don’t really know where to put me.

Well, now is a good time for you to be back, because everything’s a little more genre-fluid now. Let’s talk about your career timeline. Princess Superstar Is got a lot of attention, but then four years passed before you released another album. And then it was like another five years until the next one. Why did your momentum slow?

That’s a great fucking question. Basically, after the success of “Bad Babysitter,” we’re like, “OK, we need the next single.” Everybody thought it was going to be “Keith ‘n Me.” We made a really funny video, and it was with Kool Keith, who’s like a legend. I was so excited to work with him, especially because us kids loved “Blue Flowers” and Dr. Octagonecologyst. I was like, “This is going to be huge!” But then it didn’t pop off. We’re like, “Oh shit, what are we going to do?” And I was like, “Well, the next thing I really want to make is like a science-fiction concept record.” And everyone was like, “Oh no, don’t do that.”

What could possibly go wrong?

Right? And I was like, “I’m going to make my Tommy.” And everyone’s like, “Oh, God…”

I still want you to make an electroclash musical, with the electroclash kids and the Strokes kids having a fight, like the Jets versus the Sharks.

Well, that would be sick. [Singing West Side Story-style] “When you’re a Stroke, you’re a Stroke all the way…” But anyway. I decided I’m going to make this crazy-ass record. I was just then transitioning from hip-hop into electroclash, so I was like, “Let me work with all the best producers.” And I could, because everyone loved “Bad Babysitter.” I got Todd Terry, Stuart Price, Armand Van Helden, Felix the Housecat. And I got Arthur Baker to be the executive producer — who did “Blue Monday,” for crying out loud! And I’m like, “OK, it’ll be a concept record, but it’s going to be the shit.” I made My Machine and it was so many tracks [25], and it took me so long because it was a story. I did that in London with Arthur and everybody, and by the time that it came out, nobody really cared about me anymore.

But then we put out “Perfect” as the single, right? Basically, we put the a capella of “Perfect” on the vinyl, because that’s what you did as a hip-hop person — you put your a capella on your single vinyl. And thank God I did, because that album totally flopped. It flopped so bad that I was on tour and I had this really cool live show that I actually did at the Echo here in L.A. in 2005; it was one of the last few places I did it. It was a theatrical thing that I totally envisioned, and the label pulled out their tour support in the middle of tour. They’re like, “This record’s not selling, so that’s it, we’re canceling all the dates.” That was devastating. But two years later, they called me up and said, “Somebody put the a capella of ‘Perfect’ over [Mason’s] ‘Exceeder’ and it’s blowing the fuck up in England. It’s now No. 3 on the U.K. charts.” This was 2007, two years after the album, and that catapulted me back into the spotlight again. But it was a really weird thing because the label, Ministry of Sound, didn’t put me in the video. People were like, “Wait, the ‘Bad Babysitter’ girl is the ‘Perfect’ girl?” I don’t know, my branding got all fucked-up.

Wasn’t your last album released in 2013?

Yeah, I was always really kind of slow on the making of records, which in retrospect I wish I wasn’t, but it is what it is. What’s really cool is now I’m working on my next record, my first full-length in 13 years. … I’m working with amazing producers like Oscar Scheller, who produced Pink Pantheress; he’s got a No. 1 right now with Pink Pantheress and Zara Larsson. I also have a song with Hervé who made Princess Superstar’s song] “Licky” and [worked with] Rye Rye. Laidback Luke is one of the producers, and also Konstantin who produced [Tones and I’s] “Dance Monkey,” which was a global No. 1 in 40 countries. I’m trying to mix up the old-school and the new. Let’s see what it does. It’s a really fucking amazing record. I’m so grateful for it. I don’t know what it’s called yet, but I’m toying with Her Magnum Opuss, spelled O-P-U-S-S.

I feel now that you said it on camera, now that it’s out there, that has to happen! That’s a pretty great title. But I know you’re playing May 30 at the Echoplex with Lords of Acid and Mz Neon/a>, but can you do please another sci-fi one-off show at the Echo, so I can see it? I missed that Echo show in 2005.

@therealprincesssuperstar I am absolutely loving that this pigeon filter is trending to the song i wrote in 2005. As an artist, you hope to create deep and meaningful music that will last for generations. I see that i have achieved that -now with this pigeon meme I can die knowing i did everything i needed to do on this earthly plane #pigeonfilteristrending #pigeonfilter #perfectexceeder #perfectexceederpigeon #2000sthrowbacks #2000sdance #2000skids #hitrecord #onehitwonders #pigeonlovers ♬ Perfect (Exceeder) – Vocal Club Mix – Mason & Princess Superstar

That sounds like some feelgood, wholesome content.

It was! I’m proud of my pigeon filter. But no, it was Saltburn. Everyone was obsessed with Saltburn. and then it just snowballed. And then the label reached out — the label that never talks to me. I was like, “Why are they emailing me?” And then I got a booking agent, I got a manager, I got signed to Universal Publishing. It was crazy.

And I loved how on social media you were not shy when expressing your joy about this, and how you were really milking and embracing moment. You were so excited.

That was because I was so grateful to have a second chance at doing music again. When you’re an artist, that’s what you love, and it’s so painful when you don’t get to do it. Or maybe you get to do it, but on a smaller level and you’re just not reaching people really the way you want to. I was so excited to get it back. It was just flabbergasting.

Your social media in general is so entertaining. I recall around the time when Saltburn was blowing up, some tabloid like the Daily Mail ran a clickbait article saying you were “unrecognizable” — when, by the way, you were completely recognizable, you pretty much looked the same — and you called out their stupid ageism in the funniest way.

Yeah, with the [fake] rotted teeth and stuff. That was fun. I actually love all that; I think it’s so hilarious. I forget what famous person said this, like Mae West maybe, but the saying is: It’s bad when they’re not talking about you.

But that sort of ageism is so lame…

Right? What am I supposed to look like? I’m older!

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Have you had to deal with ageism a lot in your career?

A little bit. I mean, I think no matter how you slice it, music is hard. So, if you add aging onto it, yeah, for sure. But what am I going to do? I’m not going to complain, because again, that’s like complaining about being a white person in hip-hop or whatever. You can’t really complain. This is the way the world is. I’m going to fucking keep doing my thing and either bust through or not. I have a new single, the one with Konstantin, called “Tough Titties.” That’s the name of it. So, it’s like, tough titties, dude. You gotta just show up. Who cares what the world is doing? You’ve got to follow your passion.

I love that you released a song called “Gettin’ Older (Pussy Still Pop)” for your 50th birthday. That’s the best way to celebrate.

And that was one of the ones I put out that got zero response!

Well, maybe now it will finally get a big response. I feel like anyone who’s unhappy about turning older needs to make that their anthem. It needs to be the new birthday song that people do at karaoke or whatever. Celebrate that your pussy still pops even though you’re 50!

There is no expiration date! There’s no pussy-pop cutoff date!

You are the queen, or the princess, of reinvention. You have always been a visionary. Weren’t you also instrumental in Lana Del Rey’s career when she was Lizzy Grant?

Yeah. My husband actually found her. I was producing artists at the time. It was like 2007 and he’s like, “You should produce her.” And I was like, “Oh yeah, she’s amazing.” And I was like, “You should do a vintage thing, like a James Bond girl thing,” and I slid her in that direction. And then I introduced her to her manager, who’s still her manager to this day, Ben [Mawson]

Do you still produce other artists, or would you like to?

Well, I’m a lyricist. I like to write melodies and words, and that’s what I really love to do more than produce. I actually did just take on this artist to produce him [Moses Thee Artist], but in general, no, I don’t really feel like it.

Speaking of writing, is it true you’re working on your autobiography?

Yeah! I just got a little, tiny book deal with this U.K. publishing house. … I’m actually nervous about it.

It’s going to be great. I think during this interview we’ve only scratched the surface of the stories you could tell. What’s the biggest pinch-me moment of your career? What’s like the biggest “Holy shit, I can’t believe that was my life” moment?

I think it was when I got to open up for Morrissey. I was like, “Dude, I’m going to die. I’m going to die.” Because I was like a little like 16-year-old emo kid listening to Meat Is Murder and crying. That was crazy. It was in Serbia. And I’m opening for Morrissey. I’m like, “What is even happening?” I really don’t remember much from that day except for the fact that I was DJing and I forgot to paint my nails, and the jumbotron kept showing my hand. And I was like, “Morrissey, Morrissey.” I couldn’t even be present because I was just so in love with Morrissey. So, that was something special. And then working with Grandmaster Flash was also a pinch-me moment, because this is the godfather of hip-hop. I was so nervous. And his studio was below his kitchen, so you have to walk through the kitchen, and it was just supplements everywhere. He doesn’t age. He’s very healthy. I saw all of his supplements, and I was like, “I can’t believe I’m in Grandmaster Flash’s kitchen. What am I doing here?”

So, you have the memoir, the science-fiction musical revival, the electroclash Sharks/Jets musical, the Her Magnum Opuss album, and also your tour with Lords of Acid and Mz Neon. That’s a lot, but do you have anything else going on?

Just trying to take care of myself, and take care of my daughter.

How does your daughter now feel everything going on with your career right now?

She loves it, but also she’s 14, so it’s also somewhat cringe. Even coming over here [to Licorice Pizza Records], there’s a Chipotle right near here and she was like, “Mom, that’s an embarrassing outfit for Chipotle.” And I’m like, “OK, that’s going to be the name of my new record!” Embarrassing for Chipotle.

Well, you’re not regular a mom, you’re a cool mom. And I’m sure she realizes that.

“I’ve seen arenas my whole life, which is a blessing and a curse,” Griffin McIntyre tells LPTV. “Because I have high standards — and I want to get there.”

Griffin is sitting at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records, where he’s about to play his first official live show in the intimate space to celebrate the release of his debut single and video, “Risk It All.” He may be a new kid on the pop block, at age 18, but he has actually grown up around music and on arena stages his entire life — because his father is an actual New Kid on the Block, Joey McIntyre.

New Kids on the Block sensationally got back together just one year after Griffin was born, so Griffin grew up accompanying Joey on various NKOTB reunion tours. But he “never really thought about” his father being a former teen idol (“I just always kind of knew he’s a singer, but he’s a very normal guy; he’s just my dad,” he shrugs), and it took him a while grasp the concept of fame in general (or realize that a breakout pop diva named Lady Gaga was opening for his dad’s band on tour).

However, it was always clear that Griffin was destined to become a performer himself. As an infant, he was literally humming before he could talk, and he caught the dancing/musical theater bug not long after that.

“Gene Kelly was a big thing for me,” Griffin recalls. “I asked a balloon guy once [at a children’s party]… everyone asked the balloon guys, ‘Hey, can you make Spider-Man?’ But I asked him to make Gene Kelly. And he made a [balloon] dude in a suit, and I carried it around.” Griffin later studied various dance disciplines — “ballet, tap, African, hip-hop, modern, all of that stuff” — with none other than Fame icon Debbie, who, much like her tough onscreen character, taught him that if he had big dreams and wanted fame, he’d have to start paying in sweat.

“I owe a lot of my performance vibe to [Allen]. She’s just a role model to me, and definitely a teacher and a mentor,” Griffin says. “It started at Dance Debbie Allen Academy, and that mindset, I feel, is still in me.”

His work ethic paid off. Griffin was just 12 when he got first big showbiz break, on only his second-ever audition, landing a role in the Netflix musical sitcom Country Comfort (which also starred American Idol‘s Katharine McPhee). But he waited until now to properly launch his pop career — because before, no music opportunities came his way that ever felt quite right.

“In these past couple years, you might know, there’s a boy band frenzy right now,” Griffin chuckles. “Companies and record labels are putting together boy bands, and it’s very bright and shiny. And I tried to go down that route. But no, I’m not doing it. … I saw the industry on that side, and I am so grateful for that journey. It taught me a lot — and it taught me what I don’t want. I’m a solo artist. No boy band.”

Griffin says he “had to say no to a lot of cool things,” admitting, “That’s what keeps you up at night. But I knew. It’s like, ‘Hey, does this feel right?’ And if you can’t go to bed many nights in a row, maybe you should just do the thing that you want to do.”

The solo route was by default the best option for Griffin, because while some skeptics might assume that he’s some “nepo baby” taking advantage of his family’s industry connections, he actually had to hustle — just like any other unknown up-and-comer living in competitive Los Angeles and recording self-produced music in his bedroom. “I used to be like, ‘Hey, can we do a session?’ But people [in the music business] are very bougie, and they don’t want you. They’re like, ‘How many followers do you have?’ So, I had to do it on my own,” says the singer-songwriter/guitarist/pianist. “But I like proving myself to people.”

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Griffin did have a little help from another famous mentor, super-producer Linda Perry, who he’s known his “whole life” and with whom he has “a special relationship.” He and Perry co-wrote one track, “Shadows,” that will come out eventually, possibly as the follow-up to “Risk It All.” But the biggest lesson Griffin learned from Perry was how to stay true to his own vision, because most of their collaborations ended up being shelved — which was Griffin’s surprising decision.

“I learned that if you want something to sound a certain way, you are the person who knows what it should sound like,” Griffin says. “I went in with [Perry] and we wrote a bunch of songs — songs that I didn’t really like, to be honest. And she knows that. She respected that. She was like, ‘You need to do this on your own. You need to produce your stuff on your own.’ So, I went home and did my stuff. … I had to really step up in the writing process. I wasn’t as good of a writer as I am now. I definitely was not the best; now, I’m all right. But I think [the Perry sessions were] just a different vibe, and I had to step up to get what I want.”

However, Griffin has learned the most from his proud and supportive dad, who was only 13 when he began his only career with NKOTB, but at age 53 remains humble and grounded.

“He’s always a practice guy — just ‘practice, practice, practice,’” Griffin says of Joey’s own work ethic. “One thing I respect about my parents is they kind of let me figure a lot of stuff out on my own. … They’re always telling me, ‘Go to dance class. Try to make a song.’ If I was playing soccer, it’d be the same thing: ‘You’ve got to go to practice. You’ve got to shoot your shots, kick the ball.’ … And I like being a student. I think people take me seriously because they see that I really care.”

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While there will always be a number of curious New Kids fans who’ll follow whatever Griffin does simply because of his lineage, he’s already building his own devoted fanbase. That’s very evident from the audience at his Licorice Pizza in-store, which is almost entirely composed of excited Gen Z and Gen Alpha girls. And while Griffin is “very grateful” for any attention he gets as a young new artist — “This is where I started. My dad is a singer, and I grew up with his fans. He did too,” he explains — he’s happy that he “risked it all” professionally, and that he didn’t join a boy band or do anything else that his gut told him not to do. And he hopes to one day grace arena stages on his own.

“I’ve made the right decision,” he smiles. “I’m in the right place.”

Back when Australian garage-rockers Jet were dominating aughts FM radio with their attitudinal, riffage-heavy bangers “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” and “Cold Hard Bitch,” drummer Chris Cester was sort of the Tommy Lee of the alt-rock scene — in the sense that his huge rock-star personality (which has not diminished even slightly over the past two decades, judging from his boldly hilarious new interview for Licorice Pizza’s LPTV) often outshone his big brother Nic Cester, Jet’s lead singer.

“Honestly, a lot of people in the past have said, ‘He leads from the back,’ that kind of thing. And the truth is, I’m pretty vain. I always enjoyed the show part of the show, really selling the show and going for it.” So states Chris as he sits with his new-ish band, the ferocious and swaggering Mystic Knights, at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records, where they’re celebrating the 7-inch vinyl release of their second single, “Count.”

“I’ve never really said this before, but it often bothered me, because I’m a songwriter, that I would write these [Jet] songs and I’d play them in front of thousands of people, and it would be my brother singing them, not me,” admits Chris (whose many Jet co-writes include “Cold Hard Bitch,” “Rollover DJ,” “Get What You Need,” “Move On,” and “Take It or Leave It”). “When I was in my mid-twenties, I probably selfishly thought, ‘Nobody even knows it’s me,’ all the time. … It was a little bit frustrating to have done the work and not get the rewards, the recognition. … I have no qualms with that now; it was what it was, is what it is. But now I get to perform all the songs that I write myself. It’s been a long time coming, and yeah, I enjoy it!”

Mystic Knights is a supergroup featuring the Soft White Sixties’ Aaron Eisenberg and film composer/self-described “road dog” Manny Castro, and originally known as Mystic Knights of Amnesia. (There’s no connection to the Danny Elfman-fronted new wave band once fully called the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo; the name was actually a “smart-ass” suggestion from Chris’s pal Noel Gallagher.) “I met Chris out one night and I gave him a ride home from somewhere and we were talking, and he’s like, ‘Dude, your girl’s older than you. You must have a big dick,’” Castro laughingly recalls. “And I was like, ‘This guy’s my new best friend.’”

That was obviously an auspicious (and for Cester, on-brand) start, and Mystic Knights’ early L.A. show were packed. Cester opted not to do the Phil Collins/Don Henley/Andy Sturmer-from-Jellyfish schtick (meaning, he didn’t sing while playing drums, although he and his bandmates joke that they might “still get him a headset” in the future). But despite having all the bravado and bluster that would make him a natural frontman, he surprisingly confesses, “To be honest, the first show Mystic Knights ever played, I was really nervous. I know I’m not very shy, but I remember going to, um, extreme lengths to overcome my shyness that night — let’s just put it that way.”

Manny Castro, Chris Cester, Aaron Eisenberg

However, this actually wasn’t the first time Chris had been up in front. His centerstage debut technically took place in 2017, when another supergroup he was involved with, the Jaded Hearts Club (a rotating-member, all-star Beatles cover band also featuring Muse’s Matt Bellamy, the Last Shadow Puppets’ Miles Kane, the Zutons’ Sean Payne, and occasionally Nic Cester, Blur’s Graham Coxon, and Ilan Rubin of Nine Nails/Foo Fighters) played a party for their musician friend Jamie Davis.

Chris confesses again, “I was so nervous. I’d never felt nervous like that before. I’d been so lucky in my career up until that point, to be able to be in the back. It actually gave me a lot of respect for what my brother does for a living, being the frontman. I always just sort of took it for granted when you go onstage every night, and we had a pretty lucky quick road to success with Jet. It gave me a lot of respect for him because I went onstage, I was like, ‘Oh damn, this is a whole different ballgame.’ But something happened after that. It was just fun. We’d gotten together because it was a friend’s birthday, like, ‘Let’s just do some Beatles covers,’ and we just had such a good time. … So, I got to go onstage and really learn how to perform.”

The next year, Jaded Hearts Club performed at Rachael Ray’s outdoor Feedback party at South by Southwest. (“We had a bet of who could keep their leather jacket on for the longest. And I won. Of course I won. I always win,” Chris quips). And  even more intimidatingly, they played a Stella McCartney event where her father, an actual Beatle, showed up and surprise-jammed with them. By this point, Chris was feeling more confident behind the mic, but as he recalls, “It was intense, because there’s fame, and then there’s the Beatles! It was amazing, because I know a few famous people, but it’s a different kind of level when it’s someone like him. … We were just halfway through and I was singing, ‘She was just 17…’ It was a foot-high stage and then [Sir Paul McCartney] just stepped on there. I looked over to my right and I was like [jaw drops]. … I got offstage and there was like 48 missed text messages. Everyone knew about it within 20 minutes. My mom had called me three times!”

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All of this set up Chris for sure success as a cocksure frontman, but only a few weeks after Mystic Knights’ above-mentioned first Los Angeles shows, the COVID-19 lockdown put their live plans on hold. So, the band shifted their focus to writing and recording, and it was a prolific time: While Mystic Knights have only released two singles so far (the other one being “This High Up”), they estimate that they have at least 250 songs in their arsenal.

“Chris has an old G3 tower computer full of unreleased songs,” Eisenberg laughs.

“And there’s like a hundred songs labeled ‘Tuesday,’ and then a hundred more labeled ‘Wednesday,’ and a hundred more labeled ‘Thursday,’ or something like that. So, it’s hard to find them,” adds Castro.

Jet have enjoyed a resurgence as of late — they were inducted into the Hall of Fame at the 2023 ARIA Music Awards (Australia’s equivalent to the Grammys), where Chris and his Jet bandmates performed a medley of hits, and then officially “reunited” in 2024, although Chris has not been part of that reunion, with Peter Marin playing drums instead. When asked about the possibility of him returning to Jet to appear on their long-rumored comeback album (which would be Jet’s first since 2009), he bristles a bit and answers with his usual sauciness, “Well, if you were Jet, and the drummer in Jet had 250 songs on the boil, what would you do?”

Fair enough. Chris is instead excitedly prepping Mystic Knights’ debut full-length album, whittling down those 250 songs. “Oh yeah, we’re making a record. It’s going to be out this year,” reveals Castro. “We went to EastWest [Studios] the other day. We finished recording the whole thing, and now we’re just in the final mixing and getting all the final vocals and overdubs done.”

Watch Mystic Knights’ full LPTV interview in the video at the top of this article, where they discuss tricking Chris’s friend, Caleb Followill of Kings of Leon, into saying the C-word on live radio; their surprising desert-island-disc picks; their unexpected (and awesome) live Kasabian cover; the story behind Jet’s bloody and murderous seldom-aired “K.I.A.” music video; and Chris’s love for under-appreciated (on this side of the equator) Australian power-trio You Am I.

This week brings us a new album from Ringo Starr, who’ll also appear on his former bandmate Paul McCartney’s The Boys of Dungeon Lane album coming out May 29. But real Fab Four fanatics will be excited to learn they may soon hear a new collaborative album featuring another Beatles drummer, Pete Best.

“So, we recorded this album together for the [91X] radio station… we did about six songs together, but we haven’t done anything with it,” reveals Christopher Leyva, leader of the intercontinental glam-rock collective Falling Doves.

Leyva exclusively tells LPTV this news while sitting with his rotating bandmates at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records, during a celebration for Falling Doves’ 10th anniversary. Leyva, a “100 percent Mexican” San Diego/Los Angeles native, has been living in Liverpool more much of those 10 years — after Falling Doves were on a Liverpool layover during their European tour, headed to Sweden, and the airline lost their luggage.

“We were stuck in Liverpool for a week, and we just fell in love with the people there. … The thing is the culture over there is so great, very much just into music,” Levya gushes.

Eventually, Leyva became pals with Liverpool’s Best, who was famously the Beatles’ drummer from 1960 to 1962, playing with them during their developing Hamburg era, before he was sacked by Beatles manager Brian Epstein and replaced by Starr.

“We were working in this documentary where they grabbed a band and they took us on the same route to Hamburg, the way the Beatles went, and for part of it we got to spend time with Pete to learn about everything that we needed to do in Hamburg — which I’m not going to go into detail about, because I don’t know who’s watching this [interview]!” Leyva chuckles. “But I will say became good friends, and he said he’d come play for me on my birthday, as my drummer. He kept his word, flew down San Diego, and we did a mini-tour.”

Leyva, a rock ‘n’ roll lifer himself, got to spend a lot of quality time on the road with Best, who had sadly become a punchline or cautionary tale because of his unluck Beatles firing. And Leyva got to learn about how Best recovered from the setback.

“To be honest with you, you can learn a lot about a man by drinking with him for a week straight,” Leyva says. “You can’t just go and ask, but the more time you’re with them, they just themselves start telling you stories. And so, [Best] did go through a really rough period. But I think he had everything that he wanted to begin with. And as the years progressed, he saw how some of [the Beatles’] lives kind of went, and he became a civil servant, but he lived a good, moderate life. And he got his due in the ‘90s [when he received substantial royalties from the Anthology project]. But he’s such an optimistic dude. And he’s such a powerful drummer, actually.”

Leyva and Best got so close, so quickly, in fact, that during that whirlwind Falling Doves/Pete Best tour he even tried to facilitate some sort of comical Ringo Starr/Pete Best collaboration.

“That same weekend that he came to my birthday, Ringo was playing at Humphreys [in San Diego]. So, I went over to say hi to Ringo, and I felt horrible, because it’s like cheating on your girlfriend! That’s kind of how it felt,” Leyva chuckles. “So, the whole weekend I was going back and forth between Pete and Ringo, hanging out, then I was drinking a little bit too much and I was smoking weed with Ringo and some of his … I’m not supposed to say that! I was smoking some weed with some of his friends. So, I just threw out this wild idea and I said to Ringo, ‘I’m shooting this music video. Let’s pretend that you’re playing the drums, and then Pete Best kicks you off the drum kit.’ And he laughed and he said, ‘That’d be funny!’ But then I said the same story to Pete… and that wasn’t that funny. No, [Best] didn’t like that at all! So, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m fucking with you, man! I’m messing with you.’”

Faling Doves ended up hiring a Ringo impersonator for the video instead, but there didn’t seem to be hard feelings on either side. And while Starr is of course widely and historically considered to be the better drummer of the two, Leyva continues to be impressed by Best’s under-appreicated skills.

“I’ll tell you a funny story. First day he walks into our studio, because we’d never jammed with him, I tell the guys, ‘Hey, let’s go a little easier on this old guy.’ And he gets in the drums and wow, he plays like Marky Ramone — hard, like boom! It’s a different ball game. Ringo’s a great drummer, but [Pete] really is a punk drummer,” Leyva marvels.

Leyva “didn’t want to do a bunch of Beatle covers,” so they let Best pick the songs, including one of Falling Doves’ originals, “Glass of Wine.” The resulting Falling Doves/Pete Best 91X mini-album, recorded live at San Diego’s Iacon Sound, remains unreleased — Leyva says Best is negotiating with NAMM to put it out — and while Best officially retired in early 2025, Leyva doesn’t rule out him eventually making some live appearances to promote the record.

“Yeah, we’ll bring him out. As long as you bring him with his wife, he might come out,” Leyva quips. “He’s never going to stop drumming. He drums. He loves it.”

King Tuff, aka neo-psychedelic singer-songwriter Kyle Thomas, is a modern-day renaissance man. When he’s not fronting the stoner-rock band Witch, occasionally playing with Ty Segall, or focused on his solo career — recently releasing his sixth album MOO, a full-circle return to the lo-fi aesthetic of his early home recordings, on his own record label, MUP — he’s usually at his bunker in Vermont, drawing, painting, and pickling.

This master of the arts also an incredible webmaster, overseeing his animated-GIF-adorned online hub, kingtuffworld.net, which could easily be mistaken for the Space Jam website or a Wayback Machine redirect to a discarded GeoCities page. World Wide Web-surfers probably feel like they’ve stumbled onto the site via some Ask Jeeves portal, and they can practically hear the screech of a 28.8k modem or see toasters flying in the distance as they journey down Tuff’s information superhighway. But along the way, those lookie-loos will clean a lot more information than most artist’s modern websites offer —  not just Tuff’s photography, artwork, and mostly self-directed music videos, but his likes and, more comically, dislikes, listed in the Papa Smurf-themed section called “Grandpa’s Complaint Corner.”

Grandpa Tuff may have plenty to complain about — “This world could be a lot nicer,” he tells LPTV, sitting at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records while signing copies of MOO — but he’s actually an exceedingly cheerful dude, living his best life. “You only live once, as they say. So, you’ve got to experience all you can,” he shrugs. In the delightful video above and edited text Q&A below, he discusses his return to both his rock roots and his home turf of Vermont, mixtapes, ice cream, tacos, pickles, cheese, and something that has nothing to do with food, “avocado baby voice.”

Come hang Tuff in Kyle’s corner.

LPTV: Your new, sixth album, MOO, seems like a full-circle affair. You were perhaps not totally comfortable with your last couple of records, and you wanted to return to your roots. You even recorded it on your old equipment from back in the day.

KING TUFF: Yes. I do like the last previous albums I’ve made, but I was kind of experimenting with my sound a little bit. And when it came time to playing those records live, it was hard to pull off because they had strings and pianos and stuff on them. When I’d be playing live, I just kind of wanted to play the rock songs, my earlier songs. So, I was like, “I’m just going to make an album that’s fun to play live.” And it’s also just the music that comes most natural to me — just fun, rock ‘n’ roll kind of music. So, I just decided to lean into that. And yeah, I went back to my Tascam 388, which is the tape machine I recorded on a lot of my early stuff on.

Your debut album from 2008 was recorded on that! Did it still work?

It didn’t work for about a decade. That’s why I hadn’t been using it. But I finally got it fixed, and instantly I just felt like myself again when I started working on it.

Is there something about that old equipment that the newer stuff just can’t replicate?

Yeah. I mean, it’s a pain in the ass to keep it working, but it just has a sound to it. Whereas recording on the computer, you have to work a little harder to make it sound cool, because it’s so clean and high-def that you have to put effects and plugins on it to make it sound cooler. With the tape machine, you put something in and it comes back sounding cooler.

What made you want to experiment sonically on your two previous albums, The Other and Smalltown Stardust?

Just boredom, really. I mean, you do something for a while and then you want to try something else. I have a lot of different musical influences, and I think a lot of artists want to see how far they can take their sound. I just write songs, and they come out the way they want to come out. And certain songs ask for certain things.

Were those albums well-received by your fans, or were fans like, “Hey, Tuffy, get back to your Tascam”?

Some people definitely were like that! But a lot of people are like, “Those are my favorite albums.” You can’t please everyone, so you just have to make something that is exciting to you. I just try and make the songs that I want to hear.

Are there any other ways in which MOO is a full-circle moment, in terms of the lyrics, what you’re writing about?

Definitely. It’s full-circle in also moving back to Vermont. Just the spirit of it, like falling back in love with a lot of the stuff I listened to as a teenager and in my early twenties, like ‘70s punk stuff. My early influences were like a lot of Modern Lovers and Television and Ramones, the classic stuff, and I hadn’t really listened to that stuff for a while. And then I got back into it and I started dating someone and we were making each other mixtapes, and it’s so fun. I was like, “I forgot how fun this is.”

What was on the mixtapes, if it’s not too personal to ask?

That’s a good question. I don’t remember. I’ve made her quite a few at this point!

That’s very sweet.

But yeah, I think I go into making albums like that, too — I want it to be like a mixtape where every song is good and is its own thing, and you can listen to it over and over again. That’s what I like about cassettes, too. It’s like a record, where it has sides. I think that’s the one thing that streaming doesn’t have. I’m into sides.

When you’re doing the sequencing for an album — or even before that, when you’re in the middle of recording it, even if it’s not on vinyl or cassette yet — do you mentally have in your head a Side A and a Side B? Do you think about when one side will end, and at what point the listener would flip over the tape or LP?

I mean, usually I like to treat each side as an A-side! So, you could either put on either side and it would sound like the beginning of a record, or sound exciting. The first song on Side B should sound sort of like a beginning again.

I like that K-Tel compilation vibe. Because, did you ever have experiences growing up where you bought an album because you liked one or two singles, but then you got the album and were like, “Oh my God, those were the only two good songs”?

Yeah, it’s weird when a band just has one song that’s so good. And then you’re like, “What happened to the rest? What happened here?” I want every song to be like candy that I want to eat over and over again.

Did you write a lot of songs for this record, or was it more like the songs you wrote are the ones that ended up on MOO?

Pretty much [the latter]. There’s maybe a couple extra ones, but yeah, it all came pretty quickly.

More quickly than usual?

Way quicker! I think that was partially due to working on the tape machine. I work a lot faster on that, because you just have to make decisions and you can’t labor over them. And yeah, I had a clear vision.

What was the vision?

Fun rock ‘n’ roll. Good songs. Keep it simple.

I dig it! You mentioned returning to Vermont [last year], where you grew up. I know you used to live in L.A., for over a decade. What made you go back?

I’d been thinking about going back ever since the pandemic, really. I really started to miss nature and the seasons, the extreme seasons. And also, the person I’m dating is also from Vermont. So, the fires last year kind of put us over the edge, and it just felt like a good time to go back.

How did Vermont inform this album?

Definitely a lot of the lyrical content is … I was kind of manifesting the move back, I think. There’s quite a few songs like “East of Ordinary,” “Backroads,” “Landline.” … I actually do need [a landline phone] now.

You live somewhere remote?

Yeah. And my [cell] phone doesn’t actually work most of the time.

It must be nice though, after being in a big city for so long.

Yeah. I basically traded a social life for trees. And I’m fine with that. I had gotten to the point in L.A. where I wasn’t leaving my house too much anyway, so I was like, “I might as well be surrounded by trees, if I’m in my house all the time.”

We’re talking a lot about going back to the past — your old equipment, your old sound, your old home state, et cetera. So, I have to ask you about your website! I love the whole ‘90s aesthetic, and I assume that was a choice. Because it’s a new website, after all.

I love that aesthetic too. I think you can treat a website like an art project, kind of. So, I have a bunch of random stuff on there, like…

“Grandpa’s Complaint Corner”! I want to ask about that, but go on.

And yeah, some of my photos and just artwork. I was really inspired by Wendy Carlos’s website, where she has a bunch of just random stuff.

Your site is so fun, especially “Grandpa’s Complaint Corner.” You are Grandpa, and you rant about very specific pet peeves.. One is “cursive voice,” which you also call “avocado baby voice,” which is basically people sort of singing like they’re from Iceland or just like doing weird mush-mouthed vowel stuff. Why does this bother you?

It’s a style of singing that has seemingly just infiltrated every corner of music, and I don’t know… it’s disgusting to me. I cannot listen to it. Maybe I’m just old and I don’t get it, but it makes me want to die. … I just hope it ends soon.

OK, another one of your music-specific complaints is the idea of being perfect in the studio, which ties into what we were discussing about the making of MOO. Why was that on your list of gripes?

I think especially with rock music, it should not be perfect. And I think this also goes hand-in-hand with recording on computers: You can make things “perfect,” and that just makes them boring. It’s similar with using AutoTune or something; it kind of makes everyone sound the same. And for me, it’s all about personality. I want to hear the personality in someone’s voice, even if they’re singing off-key. That is what I am drawn to, just somebody’s true personality. It’s just boring when it sounds like a robot.

“Grandpa” is also not a fan of bright LED lights.

Is anybody?? I don’t like overhead lighting. I like lamps. A lot of lamps. … I’m trying to push this idea of a lamp-lit supermarket. Can you imagine how relaxing that would be? You would actually go to the grocery store to relax.

I think when a store or office has bright lighting like that, they don’t want you to relax. They want you to just get your groceries and get out.

Yeah, maybe, I don’t know. This world could be a lot nicer and we need more lamps.

Well, speaking of groceries,, I felt your pain when browsing Grandpa’s Complaints, because mentioned your favorite discontinued desserts. I feel that way about Zima and several beauty products, like my favorite lipstick shades that got discontinued. But the things you’re upset about are Good Humor Toasted Almond Bars and Friendly’s Wattamelon Roll. These are a really specific complaints. You’re not just like, “Oh, I hate chewing loudly.” Well, you did say that, actually…

I do hate chewing loudly.

That is true. But I was fascinated by some of the specific complaints, because other artists’ websites just say, “Here’s my bio, here are my tour dates.” But I was deep-diving into these random sections of your dark web, and I was really into it.

Well, again, it’s like I want to show people who I am. I want to share what I’m thinking about. That’s what’s interesting to me to learn about other artists and stuff. But yeah, the desserts… Friendly’s, that’s like an East Coast chain. The Wattamelon Roll, it was incredible. It was like watermelon sherbet — not “sher-burt” —  with chocolate chips in it. And then the rind was lemon-lime sherbet.

I’m trying to imagine chocolate chips with watermelon and lemon…

It sounds weird, but it was incredible. They changed it into a different form and it sucks now, and I’m just mad about it.

This happened with your favorite brand of cheese as well! You had a favorite brand of cheese that I’ve never heard of, called Seriously Sharp Cheddar Cheese, that apparently is no longer seriously sharp. False advertising.

Cabot Cheddar is actually close to where I live and I am a lifelong devotee. I still love Cabot. Shout-out Cabot. But they have this cheese called Seriously Sharp and I don’t know what’s going on, but it is not sharp anymore. And I wrote to them! I said, “What’s going on here?” And I got back a pretty bland response.

Much like the cheese itself.

They’re just like, “Every batch is different.” And I’m like, “No, no, it’s not. For decades it was the same and it was sharp and it was good.” And it’s still good, but it’s not sharp anymore.

Who do we have to escalate this to? We need to speak to the manager.

I might just have to go down there.

This is good marketing here. We’ll get these products happening again. But I don’t want to make this interview all about your complaints. If people want to see your other complaints, they should visit your website and check out Grandpa’s Complaints Corner. You like a lot of things as well.

Oh yeah, a lot!

I wrote down the things you like. It was also very random. Some of them, besides of course playing music, drawing, painting, and other design work, are driving the snowplow (I guess that’s why you moved back to Vermont), dogs, bowling, the forest, maple syrup, turtles (much like that “I like turtles” YouTube kid), and making ice cream. So, you could make your own Wattamelon Roll! You also like eating ice cream, root beer, and pickling your own homegrown cucumbers. You are a renaissance man of Vermont, aren’t you?

Yeah, I’m getting into some pickling. The first song I ever wrote was called “Pickle Boys,” so I gotta live up to that song.

How old were you when you wrote that?

Think I was in fifth grade, maybe.

Was it a very literal song about how you liked pickles, or was there some other metaphorical meaning to that?

No, it was just my love of pickles.

Are there any county-fair, blue-ribbon pickle contests in Vermont you’d like to enter?

I’m still working on my recipe, but I might get into some of that.

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We’re talking a lot about food, but a lot of artists do go into that. Hanson have their own beer called Mmmhops. Alice Cooper has a line of hot sauces. Do you think about going into the food space?

Yeah, sure. I’m sure not making money from music, so I’ve got to start a pickle company.

Or an ice cream company.

Probably both.

Is that one of the reasons you also left L.A.? Because it’s so expensive to live here?

It definitely is cheaper in Vermont. My car insurance went less than half. And the gas is half. It’s much more manageable.

Is it a better space to create because of all of those things?

Definitely. And there’s no distractions. When I lived here, I would wake up and be like, “I guess I’d better get out there and meet some people or do something.” And now I’m just like, “There’s nothing going on!”

But is that ever a concern, that you need to be where the action is, networking or whatever?

Heavens, no! I can come to the city when I need to, get my fix, and then retreat back to the woods.

Well, since you’re back here for a day or two, when you come to Los Angeles, what are the things you miss?

Pretty much just tacos. Vermont has a lot going for it, but it doesn’t have great Mexican food.

I imagine that would be on Grandpa’s Complaint Corner too — you venting about the lack of good Mexican food in many parts of the world. What’s your favorite taco joint in L.A.?

I mean, got to shout out Villa’s.

Which was in the Super Bowl halftime!

Yes, I got very excited when I saw tha.t That was close to where I used to live. My OG that I first loved when I first came to L.A. was Taco Zone. The Asada Mulita at Taco Zone.

Well, I hope you get to have some Asada Mulita while you are here. What else do you have going on? Besides your website, your complaints, all your diverse interests, and of course getting ready to put out and tour MOO, what else are you focusing on these days?

I’ve just been doing a lot of artwork and making all the music videos.

You shoot them and direct them?

Yeah, for this record I’ve started doing that, and it’s been fun.

I know you do the cover artwork for your albums as well. So, the chicken-or-egg question I have about that is: Which comes first? The artwork or the music? Do you think about the artwork while you’re making the music?

I’d say it’s always different, but a lot of times one will kind of inform the other. I switch back and forth a lot. So, if I’m in a songwriting mode, sometimes I’ll get ideas for a painting, and then I’ll start painting and I’ll think of songs. It kind of goes back and forth that way.

You’re a renaissance man. King Tuff of Vermont.

I do what I can. You gotta live. You only live once, as they say. So, you’ve got to experience all you can.

When Los Angeles indie-pop trio Cannons returned from their grueling Heartbeat Highway tour in late 2024, just as their career was really exploding, frontwoman Michelle Joy knew something wasn’t quite right.

“We were in survival mode. We didn’t want to say no to anything — and that’s the quickest way to burn out,” she recalls, sitting with LPTV and her longtime bandmates, guitarist Ryan Clapham and bassist/keyboardist Paul Davis, at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records after an autograph-signing event for Cannons’ eagerly anticipated fifth album, Everything Glows.

The burnout and subsequent impostor syndrome actually inspired one of the new LP’s singles, “These Nights,” in which Joy wonders if she’ll be able to maintain this pace and still perform at the high level expected from the group. “I came back from tour and I was just in this low state,” she confesses. “Like, ‘Can I even perform again? Can I even write a good song? Can I show up the way that I want to show up?’”

Thankfully, Joy eventually got her joy back, as indicated by the new album’s optimistic title, shimmering and euphoric tracks like “Light As a Feather,” and overall summer-soundtrack disco vibes. But it frustratingly took three months for her to be diagnosed with severe anemia, because many doctors refused to take her seriously — instead blaming her persistent, crippling fatigue on her rock n’ roll lifestyle or even on clinical depression.

“It took me so long to figure out what was wrong with me… because of dismissive treatment, telling me that it was something smaller than it was and not doing thorough checkups on everything,” Joy sighs. “Later, I found out low iron causes very depressive [behavior] … It shows itself as severe depression.”

Joy is in a much better place now, physically and emotionally, after receiving proper treatment and undergoing stomach surgery. But her health crisis obviously posed a huge challenge as Cannons commenced work on Everything Glows, and they had to radically alter their collaborative process.

“I had six weeks [while recovering from surgery] where I couldn’t meet up, and I told the guys, ‘Don’t let me stop you! Keep going to the studio and keep writing!’” Joy says.

“We were in the studio for a little bit and we were trying to think of, like, ‘Well, what would Michelle write about?’… Or, ‘What’s Michelle feeling?’” Davis explains.

Joy stresses, “The reason I even wanted to make songs or join a band is because I love writing.” So, any lyrics she sang on Everything Glows had to ring true, as if she had penned them herself. “[Clapham and Davis] did an amazing job at that, because once I had the brain space to listen and pay attention to what was going on, like deeply listen… I was just like, ‘How did you guys know? Exactly, this is how I feel!’ These are words and things and images that I would’ve wanted to put in a song.”

There clearly was a sense of camaraderie and trust, almost even osmosis, between the three band members by this point; they likely wouldn’t have been able to make an album this way if this setback had happened 13 years ago when they were first starting out.

“I feel like there’s not that weird, ego-based thing in the room that might’ve been the first year, where I’m like, ‘But I need to contribute this!’” Joy chuckles. “We’re all in the same space where we’re just like, ‘What’s going to be the best thing we can do to bring out the best in each other’s talents?’”

“Also, at the end of the day, the three of us collectively form our sound. So, there’s no egos in it,” says Clapham.

“There’s so little ego, we have to force Ryan to write solos!” Davis jokes.

While Davis and Clapham’s friendship goes back to childhood, their bond with Joy formed when they answered the then-recent Florida transplant’s “vocalist seeks band” ad on, of all things, Craigslist.

“I liked writing poetry… and I would like to try writing songs, but I’d never been in a band,” Joy explains. “I didn’t want to go into this solo-artist type of world because that scared me, and I wanted to grow with people, because if you’re a female that’s trying to make some songs, it seems scary to just hop from producer to producer. So, I was like, ‘I want to meet people I feel safe with, and I can learn from them.’”

Campbell was intrigued by the ad’s mentions of darkwave influences like TR/ST, but since Craigslist can often a skeevy forum, Joy ended up barely checking her messages. “Honestly, after the first couple of replies, I was like, ‘I’m just not even going to open these emails,’” she shrugs. So, Campbell tracked her down on social media instead (which sounds skeevy, but it wasn’t in this case), and after they finally connected, they began trading audio files.

“I vividly remember hearing Michelle — her voice on a demo,” Campbell says. My wife was with me at the time; it was like Thanksgiving or something. We were driving home and I’m like, ‘Listen to her voice. This is absolutely amazing. I think we have something here…’”

“And then we met up at a coffee shop in Studio City, and it felt like you were already my friend,” Joy says, grinning at Campbell. “It felt like I already knew you. And then when we all worked on music together, it felt like this was what we were supposed to be doing. Nothing felt out of place. It just felt like one of those things in life where you’re just like, ‘This is what I’m supposed to be doing.’ And we just kept doing it.”

(courtesy of Columbia Records)

When Cannons eventually played their first gig — which was, incredibly, Joy’s first time singing live in public anywhere — at a dive bar called the Rendezvous in Clapham and Davis’s L.A.-adjacent hometown of Santa Clarita, they somehow managed to fill the venue. And that’s when they really knew they were onto something.

“We did expected a couple people, maybe just three people,” Joy laughs.

“Friends and family,” says Davis.

“I’m not even sure how it was so packed! How did they even find our music?” says Clapham.

“That was a really cool thing in the beginning, though. We always had fans coming to our shows just by finding us on SoundCloud and through blogs,” Davis recalls.

“It definitely felt like we had something,” says Clapham. “And if just people would just listen to it, it would catch on eventually.”

Cannons have long since graduated to major stages, and as they return to the road for their Everything Glows tour, they’re making sure to pace themselves this time around.

“We really want to be a band that has longevity, so there’s a specific way I feel like you have to work so you don’t burn out,” Joy asserts. “We’ve reached a point where we make good music, we’re proud of what we do, we have more confidence, and taking care of ourselves, mentally and physically, is No. 1 — showing up fully to each thing we do, instead of having 15 percent [strength that day] because we’re exhausted.”

The band enlisted a supportive new management team to make sure their limits aren’t overextended (“‘Boundaries’ wasn’t even in my vocabulary when we first started, but I can’t tell you how important it is to say no to things and really take care of yourself. Boundaries!” says Clapham), and Joy even recently took her first-ever vocal lessons to increase her stamina.

“I had horrible breath support for half of this album because I had a stomach surgery and it was hard to breathe, so it took me some time to get my breath support back. But now I’m in great shape and ready to tour,” Joy says. “[I’ve learned to] just pay attention and trust my body, and take care of myself a little bit better. And that’s going to make a huge difference with the longevity thing.”

Listening back to Everything Glows now, after the band has survived so much and emerged all the more stronger, closer, and more inspired for it, Joy muses, “It’s kind of cool to see the progression of my confidence throughout the album, because the beginning was a very unconfident kind of fearful place, where it started out. But the music is so beautiful and juxtaposes the feelings that I had, and it makes it feel safe to be in that space.

“My dad is no longer here, but he came to me in a dream and told me that this album is something that people really need right now,” she continues, getting a bit choked-up. “I definitely feel the message on the album is the idea that we all come here with a spark and a light inside of us, and many things happen throughout your life that maybe by a certain point dampens it. And you can’t really see it sometimes, when life gets really heady… but there’s a lesson in it that can bring you back to this knowing of inner joy. I feel like I’ve done that personally through being in this band. It has brought me so much joy, so much purpose, and all of the trials and stuff that we’ve been through over the past four years have taught me so many lessons. … There is so much light that comes from making it through a tough situation and finding out how to move forward in a new way.”

Michelle Joy hugs a supportive Cannons fan at Licorice Pizza Records on Everything Glow‘s release day, March 27, 2026. (photo: Max Scott)