Steve Lacy

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The last time Steve appeared in this magazine, he was still living at home in Compton with his mother, Valerie. It was 2018, only a year after the release of his demo, and yet, he was well into his career, receiving praise from artists like Nile Rodgers, who called Steve a musical pioneer – “innovation personified” – even inviting him to lecture on the intersection of technology and music at the 2017 TEDxTeen Conference held in New York. As the writer of the piece, Alex Frank, noted back then, Steve’s whole being (his U-turn driving, his philosophical tangents, his Winnie the Pooh fleece blanket) seemed to volley between goofy charisma and old-soul poise – personalities that could very well specify Steve’s evanescent sound. The confessional tone of his music is never self-serious; it’s remained emo-proof, marvellous in its evasion of genre or conspicuous reference.

Even with a new studio just steps away from his bedroom, Steve won’t begin working, free writing or sketching songs until evening. “Whenever I try to make music in the daytime, I’m, like, scratching my head, ‘What am I doing here? The sun is out.’” Maybe Steve will wait until five. That’s when he’s “on fire, just killing it, the music is flowing. I can sometimes go five to five.” On Thursday nights he checks out new music releases. On Fridays, he talks to someone who’s not a therapist but rather what he calls an “energy-therapy hybrid.” Every second Sunday, he hosts his family for dinner. “I’m really close to my family. My friends who have family far away, I always invite them to hang with my family. We take them in.” Does Steve cook? “I don’t, but I know I’d be good at it if I did.”

Steve’s Thursday ritual of discovering new music is one way he distils his place in the larger galaxy of genres and musicians. He seems both sceptical and hopeful, and like any artist who’s in the wild, deep-thinking, creative midst of crafting their next work, Steve appears elsewhere and dreamy. He looks away, focusing his attention on some middle distance. “There’s so much out there, like, D’Angelo exists already. He made something perfect. Why do I need to make music?”

He uses music, not life, to elaborate on this notion of difference. His craft, it seems, is dialectical, a metaphor or tool for explaining not just his work, but his life, his process, how he moves through the world. “There’s a difference between referencing and ripping off.

He’s joking of course. He’s often joking. “Ever since I was a child, I was always trolling. On my last tour I got a lot of press for how I was an asshole to my fans, but I was just trolling. That’s my swag.” That friction is his playground. He applies it to his music. It’s how he keeps things silly, a word he uses often. “I’ll make a soul track and approach it as if D’Angelo joined a rock band, but I’ll also make it rap and blues. It’s always a fluid mix.” He’s always trying to find the fun in it. “I like getting into little crevices where things don’t make that much sense.”

His criteria for finding musical kinship, someone to conspire with on a song or simply jam with, is typically Steve in its ambiguous selectivity. “It could be a weird note. I’m moved by what’s weird. It’s almost like I hear them, and I think, ‘I need to call this person.’” As he continues to work towards his next album, having already written something close to 300 sketches, he considers who he might want to feature: “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want a Kendrick verse.” Steve recently made a cameo in Lamar’s ‘Not Like Us’ video and shortly before that, at his Inglewood Pop Out, a one-off concert at the Kia Forum arena, which marked Lamar’s first major public performance since his gloriously lionised feud with Drake. Everyone from Dr. Dre to Roddy Ricch, YG, Dom Kennedy and Ty Dolla Sign were featured during the event. Steve admits he felt out of place at first. “I was the only fairy-type person in this room full of rap, hard rap music. I feel like a fairy. I don’t feel hard. I don’t feel tough. We were at the run-through, and I was, like, ‘How am I here?’ But I was so honoured. Compton has this rep of being hard. I thought I would never be in the conversation. It was cool.”

Despite his recent interest in interiors and objects, or his own personal style, Steve insists he isn’t a visual person. “I don’t have a visual language. I don’t have that part of my brain. Sometimes I get in my head about it because even if I make cool videos, they’re fine, I just don’t think I’ve made a video where I’m, like, ‘Damn, that’s me.’” Steve mentions Donald Glover aka Childish Gambino’s ‘This Is America’ (2018) video directed by Hiro Murai as the last example of an iconic visual. “[Glover has] developed his visual language very well. Maybe I can have him help me? But I also don’t know how much I want to be the subject. I do this dance between wanting to be the subject and wanting to be behind the scenes. I’m very discerning about my face in photoshoots. I like to have a character. It’s bad enough my name is Steve Lacy. If I can have anything for myself, like my face or my body… I just want you to focus on exactly what is it I’m trying to say to you, rather than it’s me saying this to you. I don’t aspire to be the biggest pop star. And I don’t mind if my work isn’t really good. I had a pop moment but I’m not chasing it.”

Steve, who features on Glover’s new album, ‘Bando Stone & The New World’, performed with him and Fousheé in July in New York at Glover’s listening party. Fans shared videos online and the three musicians’ rapport was unpolluted by spectacle, almost impromptu and sweet. It’s unsurprising, considering Steve’s genuine connection to performing. “In this modern age, it just feels like the most truthful way to communicate without all the blah blah blah in between. I think it’s good to be there in the flesh, to say ‘Hello, I see you. How are you?’ I’m always trying to make it fresh, for me, for them. It’s not plug and play. I like performing because it’s a way to own your shit. If you can perform and if you can establish that relationship with people, you can do it for however long, whether you want to put out albums or not. Even if your albums flop, if you have a fanbase, they will show up for you regardless. I’m one of the few artists playing and singing. You get to see musicianship. There are people I meet on the street who say that they picked up an instrument because of me. I think that it’s really important to carry on, because someone did that for me. It was Jimi, and D’Angelo, and Prince.” Steve’s pre-show rituals include praying with his band, vocal warm-ups, breathing and, sometimes, a ten-minute nap. “You don’t really fall asleep. It’s more like meditation. In the tenth minute you start to fall asleep and then you wake up, and then it’s show time.”

So. Where is the album? It doesn’t matter. Steve is in no rush. He’s writing, but he’s also, as he puts it, just living. Steve doesn’t make music in a vacuum, isolated from the world. His cosmic brew of styles, everlasting in its ease, constitutes more listening than making. More scrutiny, seeking, testing. Observation free of craze. He cites the late musical genius, Sophie, as a galvanising creative force in his life. He mentions the new alt-pop artist Cecile Believe, formerly known as Mozart’s Daughter. He talks about the music he loves while tapping his foot and air-playing a bass. His influences run through him and even though we are sitting outside in the Los Angeles heat, eating burritos and kale salad, Steve drifts elsewhere in moments, like he’s at someone else’s concert, happy to be alone in a mob. He doesn’t watch shows from backstage, even when offered. He loves to be in a crowd. He’s spent this in-between time – that beautiful period before the storm, before the promotion – understanding where his music can meet his audience and friends, ever-sensitive to their universe. “I’m talking to people. Seeing how we all feel. What’s the human emotion? What’s the shared emotions?”

Suddenly, Steve proposes a visual reference. “‘Being John Malkovich’, that’s the vibe. If I can give you any hints for how I want to write, it’s like that movie. I don’t want to make too much sense. I’m happy with the way things are coming, but it’s been hard. It’s been whooping my ass. It feels like a big secret.” With ‘Gemini Rights’, he began moving towards a persona, annexing the same instincts he has for performance during photo shoots, but this time, with his music. He describes using something as small as a pair of sunglasses as his muse. While the framework for his next album is still a work in progress, the pursuit of a persona will be a focal point. Steve makes clear his disinterest in art that reflects who he is and who he is becoming. The music will belong to the artist, not necessarily formerly known as Steve Lacy, but in that spirit.

As we talk about the future (children, yes; marriage, no), what’s obvious is the personal pressure Steve imposes on himself to produce an album that will live in the future, even predict the future. He’s digging deep. He’s in search of the fundamentals, something closer to zero, to no-sound, to no-image; the prospect of paring down. Steve describes a recent date with a guy. “We were talking about karaoke songs and he mentioned, ‘Sex and Candy’ by Marcy Playground. I’d never heard it. And I was, like, ‘Whoa, I love that song.’” It cracked something open in Steve, perhaps because the song – which was released in 1997, a year before Steve was born – shares the artist’s attraction to molten sounds and hypnotic lyrics that veer, two tenets of his next album, he says. “I’m trying to get out of the habit of writing a song. There are these moments or strides that you hit creatively, where you’re, like, ‘I’ve found it, I got it.’ Portals open and we’ve got to go in and get it all done. And then it stops, and I realise it wasn’t a direction, that it was purely a technique. We’re just collecting techniques, and I’m still waiting on a direction. I’m patient. I’m very confident that the songs I’m developing, no one else is going to make. It fills me with calm.”