LP doesn’t play by the rules. Not the industry’s, not genre’s, and certainly not the ones that dictate how many people should be allowed in a songwriting session. If you’ve heard a pop song in the last decade, odds are high LP either wrote it, could have written it, or was somewhere in the ether influencing it. But as far as her own music goes? Good luck boxing her in. “I feel like I’ve blurred the genres enough,” she says, talking from some undisclosed location where she’s likely conspiring with rock gods, pop ghosts, and the occasional outlaw mariachi.
Her latest single, The One That You Love, throws caution, classification, and a few vocal cords to the wind. “I don’t feel beholden to anybody,” she says. “I don’t feel like I have to worry about staying in my lane.” This is good, because LP has no interest in lanes. She speeds, veers off-road, and occasionally rips the wheel clean off. “I just let it rip and let the chips fall where they may.”
The song was birthed in Mexico with her longtime songwriting trio, the same team behind her massive 2015 hit Lost on You. “These guys allow me to be myself,” she explains. “It feels like we’re a band on our third record or something.” That’s the kind of chemistry you can’t manufacture—not even with seven-to-ten co-writers and a music industry exec taking a random writing credit because they were in the room. “I had a song where the manager of one of the writers was on the first printing of the record,” she says, before deadpanning, “I saw him there.”
Writing her own music, LP’s goal isn’t so much to fit into a genre as it is to set them all on fire at once. She’s always been a rock artist at heart, despite being tossed into the pop machine. “My first three major label deals were a bit of a wash because I couldn’t— they couldn’t even understand what I was doing,” she says. But she wasn’t alone in this. “People are kind of straying off the path of having to stick to something. A great song won’t be stopped just because it colors outside the lines of some industry-dedicated genre.”
Her latest release, Live in Moscow, is proof that LP’s music belongs wherever she takes it. The album captures her connection with a massive Russian audience, even in a world where everything feels like a political statement. “Music goes down all over the world,” she says. “When I first started doing well in Russia, people were like, ‘Really? You’re doing well there?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I think I am?’” The answer is a definitive yes—6,000 voices deep, screaming her words back at her. “People just want music,” she adds. “I choose to cultivate that, rather than delineate.”
Even with a career full of wild collaborations—including a posthumous duet with Chester Bennington and a turn with Morrissey—LP has only one real plan: to keep doing exactly what she’s doing. She’s currently working on a new album, expected in 2021, and promises that this time, it’s going bigger. “I am going to write a rock opera at some point,” she says. “But right now, I’m dealing with what’s in front of me.” If history has proven anything, what’s in front of LP is usually whatever she decides to bulldoze next.
Watch & listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
