Sermons From the Church of LP: Our July 2021 Cover Story SPIN
How the ‘Lost on You’ singer saved herself and survived music industry hell
Written By Sarah Grant July 29 2021, 12:00 PM
LP has been promised all the right things by all the right people.
“My life has been an exercise in waiting,” LP says with a deflated sort of laugh. “You wouldn’t believe the things people have whispered in my ear. And then nothing happens.”
But in the summer of 2016, LP had a wild change of fate. An older song of hers went inexplicably viral in Greece — and then it kept spreading around the world. Now, five years and a pandemic later, LP is a global superstar with streaming figures into the billions.
Her largest U.S. headlining tour to date, is booked through 2022, and her sixth studio album, Churches, arrives October 8 via SOTA Records.
With Churches, LP releases all the systems, relationships, and institutions — real and imagined — that have failed her. It is the sound of a divine exhale. Many of the songs are emotionally raw and the lyrics don’t cower from thoughts of sexual desire, self-sabotage, and addiction.
It was made with LP’s now-steady creative partners, producer Mike Del Rio (Kylie Minogue, X Ambassadors) and songwriter Nate Campany (Tove Lo, Christina Aguilera), both of whom refer to LP as a sister. And a survivor.
“The one thing some fucking douche behind a desk does not care enough to do is come to your house and rip the guitar out of your hands, say you’re a fucking hack, and tell you to stop,” LP says, “So you just keep going.”
CREDIT: Ashley Osborn
At her home in Los Angeles, LP is sitting with Orson, her Brussels Griffon, on her lap. Morning light is pouring in through the window. Her thick brown curls hang down her narrow face, partially obscuring the intensity of her eyes. When she smiles, you forget she’s looking at you at all.
LP says she’s six months into a breakup. Sometimes, especially when talking about her songs, it can feel like all of her past heartaches are folding in on each other like a long, depressing accordion. “Does that mean I have something to work on?” she jokes.
“I’m clearly a dangerous person to date. Even women I’ve dated have been like, ‘do you just do this to have shit to write about?’ And it’s like, no … But if I want to seduce you, I’m gonna fuckin’ seduce you.”
The song “How Low Can You Go,” is about temptation. “Last time I saw you we did coke in the closet at the Chateau Marmont,” the song begins, intoxicating in its restraint and based on various interactions LP has had with women, wondering where, if provoked, things could have led.
“It’s like, how deep into the fucking sludge can I go with love with, with substances, with everything,” LP said. “If I go down this path, how far fucking down could I go?
As a songwriter, LP has been trained to look for patterns. “Duality is the crux of what I’m after,” she says. The same could be said for her personhood. She’s gentle and charming. But she’s also tough — with the Lou Reed shades, the sailor tattoos — she even cocks her chin up like the Fonz when she’s telling a joke (“ayyy”). Maybe the real LP exists somewhere in between these dimensions, drifting in the space between genders and even, genres.
These mysterious dimensions of LP’s identity lend themselves to being a rock star. But for LP, living a kind of double life was also a defense mechanism that stems, in part, from her Catholic upbringing.
“I can hide from anybody,” she says, pausing. “And I did for a long time.”
CREDIT: Ashley Osborn
Born in Brooklyn, New York, LP grew up with her parents and older brother in Long Island. She describes her late father as a “classic Brooklyn tough guy,” the son of Italian immigrants who became an attorney. When LP was growing up, she remembers he drank coffee out of a mug that said “Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down.” Years later, she snuck the saying into a Rihanna song.
When LP was older, her father’s alcoholism became destructive. “I knew what kind of night it was when he’d walk in the door — is it the fun, two-to-three-drinks night, or the other kind. The run-for-your-life kind.”
“We had to constantly deal with where he was going to take the evening or what it was going to end in – him throwing my mother against the fucking wall, or him saying he was going to kill himself,” she says, trailing off. “The last thing I was gonna fuckin’ tell him was that I’m having these feelings that I’m gay.”
Those feelings of being exposed and abandoned came up for LP when she was writing one of her new songs, “Rainbow.” It’s a delicate song about the pain of deciding to leave her ex-fiancee. More broadly, it’s about the battles we choose to fight and how long we’re willing to fight them. For LP, it conjured memories of living with her father and coming out. “I would wonder — when I was younger — whether it was worth coming out at all?” she said.
“Somehow, the melody Mike played was like, all my childhood fears — which I hesitate to say because it just sounds so lofty — but it was emotional, I cried,” she said. “And I don’t get like that very often. I’m usually able to stay austere.”
CREDIT: Ashley Osborn
LP moved to New York City when the Strokes were just taking over. It was at a time when the music industry was making way for the pop-punk explosion that would dominate the early aughts. So when LP secured her first record deal with Koch Records, it was to put out a rock record. In 2004, she moved to Lightswitch. The whole time, working in bars and playing gigs.
By 2005, Marvin Howell, a manager in the dance music scene who knew LP walked into her bar imploring, “When are you going to let me help you?” She was skeptical, but, she was desperate to get out of slinging drinks. Howell gave her a publishing deal and suddenly it felt like her career began taking shape. He would bring her to meet his friends, who were all major songwriters like Billy Steinberg, who worked with Madonna and Cyndi Lauper, Desmond Child, who worked with big rock bands like KISS and Bon Jovi, and Andreas Carlsson, one of the hit mavens behind NSYNC.
“I was the kid in the room in these sessions, sitting at the feet of the biggest songwriters in the world,” LP said. During this time in her life, she went from writing around 20 songs a year to 100, maybe more. She learned how to approach a pop song like a Rubik’s Cube. And that expectations were the enemy. “It was a great day when I realized it was about volume. Because that means there’s no end. Even if you write a hit song, you just have to move on and write more songs.”
But her new teachers saw something more in LP.
“Her voice is God’s trumpet,” Desmond Child says. “The first time I heard her sing, I was blown away. There’s no one like her. Her voice is this unique instrument that just goes higher and higher.”
“I remember she played a song for me on the guitar of one of her early recordings called ‘Cadillac Life,’” Billy Steinberg says. “It had an exquisite, melancholy melody, and I was just floored by her insane vocal range.”
Island Def Jam chief executive L.A. Reid also heard the power of her voice and it led to a bidding war with Jive. LP signed her first major label deal, which coincided with the first song she cut: with a plaintive ballad called “Love Will Keep You Up All Night” that went to the Backstreet Boys.
It was an exciting time, but LP’s schedule was relentless, with her ping-ponging between New York City, to be with her girlfriend, and Los Angeles, where she was booking as many songwriting sessions as possible: two a day, six days a week. Meanwhile, the Island deal fell apart after a year and a half. A SoBe Entertainment deal came next, followed by another with RedOne that lasted about a year. Something had to give. And in 2010, it did.
CREDIT: Ashley Osborn
LP left New York and, for the most part, her dream of being an artist. “I’d already had two indie deals and two major label deals that didn’t work,” she says. “I don’t know anyone that gets that many more bites at the apple.”
She decided to focus solely on songwriting. She had a big, new publishing deal with Primary Wave, and rekindled her love of the craft by bringing a ukulele into her sessions. In this period, while being managed by Gerardo Mejia — the singer best known for his run of hits in 1991, including “Rico Suave” — LP cut songs for Rihanna, Christina Aguilera, Cher, Rita Ora, Leona Lewis, and Cher. “I felt free,” LP says. “I was finally having fun.”
But for all the talk of “settling down” as a working songwriter, LP found herself slipping away a few times a week to sing covers at places like Bardot and The Sayers Club. Her newer L.A. friends had no idea she could perform.
“Are you in front of a computer right now?” Steinberg says, directing me to a YouTube page. “Play it now so we’re on the same page.” Steinberg and his neighbor, record producer Tony Berg, put together a special session for LP to cover the chilling Roy Orbison ballad “It’s Over.”
“Of course, Tony’s thinking this is nearly impossible for most human beings to sing because [Roy] had a voice like no other,” said Steinberg. They gathered some of L.A.’s finest session musicians in the studio — when LP arrived, no one knew who she was. She just got in the vocal booth and started singing.
It was a staggering performance. Her voice sounded as though it was suspended in the air, as she sang the melancholic verses:
All the rainbows in the sky
Start to weep, then say goodbye
You won’t be seeing rainbows anymore
Setting suns before they fall
Echo to you that’s all that’s all
But you’ll see lonely sunsets after all
“Tony just looks at me and goes ‘fuck!’” Steinberg says. “The way her voice rose to the occasion of that song, I really felt like it was a turning point in terms of what music she wanted to write and who she wanted to be as an artist.”
CREDIT: Ashley Osborn
Later that year, Warner Bros. signed LP to a massive deal. It would produce her first major label live EP, Into The Wild, and later, her major-label studio debut, 2014’s Forever For Now. The recording process for the album was needlessly extravagant and, worse, butchered the songs. But through it, LP began seriously working with Mike Del Rio, whom she met two years earlier and who also happens to be an Italian from Long Island. (“We joke that he’s the Tony Visconti to my Bowie,” LP says.)
Del Rio agreed with LP that Forever For Now was over-produced and thought that, together, they could do something better and way cheaper. In the summer of 2014, Del Rio brought LP and Campany to his first L.A. studio (“a windowless bunker in the shittiest part of Hollywood,” Del Rio quips) that he found on Craigslist. It was crawling with cockroaches, the bathroom was up two flights of stairs, and there was always a fresh coat of graffiti on the door.
“I’d been listening to this song called ‘Sugar Me,’ by Lynsey De Paul,” Del Rio said. “ It’s an old French pop song that had this bop to it, so I put a few drums down.” LP already had the title, “Lost On You,” which was inspired by a recent heartbreak that left her feeling adrift. “She was at this place of surrender in her life,” Del Rio said. “I think the truth just permeated out of her.”
As they were leaving their windowless prison cell, the three of them knew they’d just done something special. “I remember calling my manager after we recorded that song and said, ‘I think this is the best song I’ve ever written,” Campany remembers.
LP brought it to Steinberg for his opinion. “I think I had her [LP] play it three times — it’s the strongest melody she ever wrote,” he said. “There was something so melancholy and beautiful about its melody. I told her, ‘This song is going to break you.’”
Charged up, LP took “Lost On You” to Warner Brothers to play for the newly-instated president and head of A&R, Dan McCarroll. Within three weeks of the meeting, the label dropped her.
In the new year, LP signed with the indie Vagrant.
The plan was to release “Lost on You” as a track on an iTunes-only EP. Campany felt that was like putting the songs out to pasture. “It’s like, ‘put your song out with no money, no support behind it and see how it does,’” he said. “Everyone knows what’s going to happen. The song is just going to disappear.”
CREDIT: Ashley Osborn
Panagiotis Loulourgas grew up in a fishing village, on the Greek island of Demonia, where he mostly listened to traditional Greek music, he said over the phone. Until his family moved to Athens. There, he discovered his calling — through Haddaway. It was the summer of 1993 and “What Is Love” was dominating Europe. “I started tracking it on the charts, watching go to Number 1 in France, Germany, all the different countries,” said Loulourgas.
Loulourgas became the head of international at Sony Music in Athens for 13 years, until the financial crisis caused the office to shutter. He pivoted to work at a small indie label, Panik, an intense change of pace from working at a major. But Loulourgas came to learn a lot about Greece’s radio stations and the kinds of songs that do well in the country. One day, a former Sony colleague Manos Xanthogeorgis, sent Loulourgas a catchy mid-tempo song by an American singer he’d never heard of. Did he think it would work on Greek radio? “I had huge goosebumps,” Loulourgas said.
On the other side of the planet, LP clicked open a DM on her Instagram. It was from Loulourgas, asking her if he could license her song “Lost On You” in, of all places, Greece. Vagrant locked in the foreign license.
But Loulourgas had another problem. Greek radio stations were only playing dance-pop. So he made personal calls to DJs he already knew and introduced LP by leaning on her songwriting credits for artists like Rihanna and Cher. Any airtime “Lost on You” got was amplified by European vacationers pouring into the country, hearing LP’s voice, Shazaming it in Greece, and then bringing it back to their own countries.
The more the song got Shazamed, the easier time Loulourgas had pitching it to DJs. Once he saw the fan-generated “Lost on You” dance club remixes though, he knew his work was done. The regional remixes drove the “Lost On You” craze in Greece where it went to No. 1 on Greece’s radio and Shazam charts for 12 and 22 weeks, respectively. As the song spread even further, “Lost on You” was the fourth most Shazamed in the world.
In October 2016, LP landed in Greece for the first time to accept a platinum sales plaque celebrating the runaway success of “Lost On You,” then she played it in the center of Athens, with the Acropolis in the distance, her ragtag band swarmed by thousands of fans. “It was an Elvis moment, it was nuts,” Del Rio remembers.
Three years later, in 2019, LP was awarded another plaque. “Lost On You” had woven around Europe and Russia and onto Mexico and South America. It officially crossed 1 billion streams.
“I just want people to know it can happen,” says LP, “I’m not saying you can hawk around the same fucking song for the rest of your fucking life because you think it’s a hit. But don’t get too down on yourself if someone didn’t see it.”
CREDIT: Ashley Osborn
LP had been here before. Standing outside a church in St. Petersburg, being told to cover her head — apologize for being a woman — before she could enter the hallowed chambers.
So she waited. Just like she’s waited for her entire career. She didn’t need to enter any more structures to be blessed.
“I’m not going to be told how to believe in God, by anybody,” LP says.
Waiting around in some cold courtyard in Russia, LP started thinking about what, in her life, she does cherish. That thought grew into the title track, “Churches,” a gorgeous, hymn-like song that feels earnest and freeing. “I wanted it to be devoid of artifice because I’m asking what you hold sacred? What is dear to you on a higher spiritual level?”
One thing that is dear to LP, after everything she’s been through, is the value of the hours she put in along the way.
“The rewarding thing, really, was to have to work through it,” says LP. “You’ve got to cultivate yourself. Your work. You’ve got to garden, motherfucker!”