LP swears she didn’t see hit coming
Foul-mouthed songwriter recalls story of ‘Lost on You’ en route to Toronto show
It’s hard to get a proper read on someone over the phone, admittedly, but LP comes across as a good hang.
The Long Island-raised singer/songwriter born Laura Pergolizzi was entirely chill, grounded and candid, anyway, when after a tragi-comic series of failed attempts to connect — first the writer’s kid got sick, then the writer got sick, then LP herself got sick and subsequently stranded when her tour bus broke down “at 4 o’clock in the morning in the middle of f--kin’ nowhere and we couldn’t get it fixed” en route to a Feb. 2 tour date in Missoula, Mont. — we finally overcame whatever curse the universe had visited upon us and spoke while she cooled her heels before a gig in Salt Lake City earlier this week.
For one thing, she had no problem reliving the well-travelled from-the-shadows-to-the-spotlight narrative that’s dogged her since the freak 2016 hit “Lost on You” catapulted her from the music-industry background as a professional songwriter to a budding pop star in her own right, one with a sold-out show at Toronto’s Danforth Music Hall tonight. She was funny about it, too, and heroically foul-mouthed. As someone who curses a blue streak himself and has interviewed Noel Gallagher a few times, I admit to being quite impressed at LP’s constant, casual deployment of profanity. The many dashes deployed below speak for themselves.
In any case, there was no prickliness
returned at the suggestion that — seven recording contracts deep and five albums along from her 2001 debut, Heart-Shaped Scar — it must be nice to have some semblance of the masses paying attention to the most recent LP album, last December’s Heart to Mouth, in the aftermath of continental Europe’s unexpected embrace of “Lost on You,” just a realistic assessment of the situation.
“‘Paying attention’ is relative,” Pergolizzi says. “In my own world, people have been paying attention for awhile. You, now that you’re giving me attention, good on you. That’s why I’m doing this. On the previous tour to this one, I was still playing 800- to 1,000-seat rooms so it’s not, like, fresh. But if the outside world sees it as that? OK.
“That comes with the f--kin’ job. That comes with the whole show. I thought when I f--kin’ walked out onto the stage on Bleecker St. however many years ago that I was gonna, like, fart and get signed. That doesn’t happen. I don’t know what massive stars you’ve talked to but it takes some sh-- and, as of now, I wouldn’t really change my perspective at all. But, yes, it’s nice to have people paying attention, to get back to your original ‘nice’ thing.”
Pergolizzi, at 37, is no pop ingenue reeling from the sudden smack of overnight success.
She’d been dumped by major labels Island Def Jam and Warner Brothers, in fact, and had more-or-less resigned herself to supporting an obscure solo career by occasionally selling songs to such big-ticket stars as Rihanna, Cher, Christina Aguilera and the Backstreet Boys. Then, in late 2015, a small Greek label asked to license “Lost on You” — a post-breakup arena-folk anthem originally found on the EP Death Valley before becoming the title track to LP’s fourth album. It went on to top the singles chart in 16 countries and currently sits at 156 million streams on Spotify.
“When I was just a songwriter, we used to say all the time, ‘You’re only a song away,’ ” Pergolizzi says. “And I think that’s true of many artists. You just keep writing songs and if that’s what you do, that’s what you do. If you’re hawkin’ the same f--kin’ song around thinking, ‘This is my ticket,’ and that’s the style of artist you are, it comes with its own heartache.
“You have to put it out there with your balls f--kin’ swingin’ in the wind. I mean, when ‘Lost On You’ became a huge hit in Europe, I was already f--kin’ 30 to 40 songs away in my writing. I get these interviews that are very kind and in awe of the whole thing and they’ll be, like, ‘You must have known it was a huge hit when you wrote it.’ And I didn’t know sh--. I was on Warner Brothers, they got new people in who didn’t like me, who didn’t sign me, who didn’t care, and they basically said, ‘Hey, come in and play us your new sh-- so we can decide if we want to keep you on the label.’
“So I went in there and I played them ‘Lost on You,’ I played them ‘Muddy Waters’ and I played them a song called ‘Strange.’ ‘Muddy Waters’ has been synced, like, over 25 million times for me … And I got dropped three weeks later. Whoops. There was no ‘Oh yeah, I’ve got this great song.’ ” Had Pergolizzi not been picked up by BMG subsidiary Vagrant Records shortly after the Warner deal went sour and been given the right to license her songs to other record companies worldwide, she would likely never have tasted the success she has. As she puts it bluntly: “‘Lost on You’ would have sat on my f--kin’ computer while I f--kin’ toiled away writing songs and/or working in a f--kin’ restaurant and that has happened to thousands and thousands of people.”
Hence her motto of “just keep writing.” Which is exactly what Pergolizzi did for Heart to Mouth, a confident and varied collection of big-lunged power ballads that should appeal to fans of Stevie Nicks, latter-years Sia, Lady Gaga in “rock” mode and Adele alike. LP has her idiosyncrasies, but she’s also adept at penning a chorus that goes straight for the throat. One doesn’t get to write for Rihanna, after all, without knowing a few tricks.
“I wanted to really dive into, like, the possible pressure of having another hit,” she says. “In my own little story or whatever, (2014 single) ‘Into the Wild’ was the first thing that was kind of a bigger ‘blip’ for me back in the day. After that, I remember thinking — because it was a foothold, of sorts, for me — ‘Do I write another one of these? Do I try to, at least?’ I didn’t know how to, but I was like ‘Do I try to?’ And I was, like, ‘Nah.’
“And then a song like ‘Lost on You’ came around and one of the things that I like about this record is that, to me, when I set myself apart from it, I don’t feel like it sounds like I was chasing anything, y’know? It’s very ‘me.’ ”