Aiming for the heart
Songwriter for LANY gets more personal on debut album
Paul Klein wants to challenge himself when he writes music.
The musician and member of alternative rock band LANY also looks up to the writing style of John Mayer and Frank Ocean.
“I’m obsessed with John Mayer,” he says during a recent phone interview. “There are lines that he wrote in 2001 and I’m still blown away at how he wrote something so inspiring. He’s the best songwriter of his generation. Then there’s Frank Ocean, who just pushes the boundaries. A lot of his songs make me feel things. This is what I try and do with the music we put out.”
Klein is joined in LANY by Les Priest and Jake Goss.
The band formed in 2014 and has released a trio of EPs.
Though Klein is hard at work gearing up for a tour and the June 30 release of the band’s self-titled debut, the songwriter says the material for the record was written and recorded over the course of 15 months.
The process occurred in the middle of the trio’s playing 117 shows last year.
“The second we’d get off tour, it was back to recording and writing,” he says. And the one rule the trio had was to create an album of original music.
“We were adamant about not using any songs from the EPs,” he says. “If I knew I had two weeks off, I wouldn’t come up for air during that time. It was all business.”
The buzz behind the band has been building for nearly a year.
The band has more than 100 million combined streams on Spotify for its songs.
And with appearances on the likes of “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” its profile is rising.
On the show, LANY performed its hit single “ILYSB.” And LANY recently released a new single called “The Breakup.”
While writing the album, Klein says he tried to open the personal door a little bit more.
“There are a couple of songs on this album that scare me,” he says. “There are going to be people close to me that are going to hear them. I have a song about my mom and people will know it’s about a mother figure. There’s another I wrote when I was in a relationship and it’s too honest. But that’s the key. These songs will relate to listeners.”