Meet one of Brooklyn's most original young singer-songwriters
Interview by Jim Testa
Leo Lovechild may look more like a skinny rabbinical student than a cowboy, wearing an almost cartoonish spin on Nashville finery, but looks can be deceiving. In the tradition of Kinky Friedman, Leo writes and performs his own take on country music that's winning an appreciative audience, not just in his native New York City but beyond. With a crack band, Lovechild recently released "All My Friends," an impressive EP of catchy, winning, and occasionally humorous songs that's the harbinger of a forthcoming full-length. He's also outgoing, humble, and articulate, and someone we think you should know.
Q: Where did you grow up? Are you a born and bred New Yorker? Where did you go to school?
I was born at Beth Israel Hospital on 17th street in Manhattan. We lived on the Lower East Side on Grand & Lewis Streets for two years, before moving to the Upper West Side. I went to a hyper-competitive school called Hunter from ages 5 to 17. After graduating high school, I took my first opportunity to escape NYC and the psychological mess of my parents' very recent divorce and went to college in Ohio for two years. After dropping out of school due to what I’d call a lack of interest in traditional academia and a desire to play music more seriously, I moved back to NYC and started my real life. Five years later, I found myself slightly lost and failing to earn a living via being a singer-songwriter, so I went back to college at Columbia and finished my degree.
Q: When did your interest in music start? Were you always drawn to country and Americana or did you evolve from a hardcore/punk/emo kid? Who were some of the artists who most inspired and influenced you in this direction?
Music has always been something that’s been second nature for me. My late grandfather, Eugene Becker, was a violist in the New York Philharmonic and later a professor at Juilliard, so he started me on violin at the ripe old age of 3. I loved learning music, but I realized quickly that classical violin was not my thing. I moved into learning piano and music theory with a fantastic teacher named Anne Farber when I was 10, and things grew from there.
As far as my early influences, I was absolutely not a hardcore/punk/emo kid whatsoever! My parents raised me on the Grateful Dead and folk music like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. The first album I have real memory of connecting with was a CD that lived in my parents’ car called “The Music Never Stopped: The Roots of the Grateful Dead,” which is a collection of songs that the Dead covered in their original form. The album is a treasure trove of American roots music, with songs from people like Howlin’ Wolf, Merle Haggard, Jimmy Reed, Marty Robbins, Buddy Holly, and of course Bob Dylan. I think I was about 5 or 6 when I first got into Dylan. Obviously, I had no clue what he was talking about in most of his songs, but for some reason, that style of songwriting just really resonated with me. From Dylan, I started branching out to other ‘60s and ‘70s music, and became obsessive with that by the time I reached my pre-teen years. High school was a somewhat lonely time when I would come home and spend hours using this new thing called “iTunes” to discover what, to me, was new music. Then my mom would come in my room and say, “Oh, I haven’t heard this in years. I used to love this in high school.”
So, ultimately, while my taste has definitely grown over the years, I’d say it’s pretty much always been the same. I first realized I loved music because I was exposed to folk, country, blues, soul and rock & roll in the back of my parents’ car. And hey, if “Americana” is not just a combination of all these genres, then I’m sorely misunderstanding something.
Leo Lovechild's new EP, "All My Friends"
Q: The new EP sounds great. Tell me about the band who plays on it and where it was recorded? Was there a producer involved and if so, what was their contribution. Who plays the pedal steel on K*LL BOB?
So glad to hear you’re digging it! I produced everything on these tracks (as well as the upcoming full album due out in August) along with my longtime guitarist, Aaron Mones, who played pedal steel and most of the lead guitar on all these songs. We went into a makeshift studio at our bassist’s house in March of 2024, with my live band, which includes Aaron on guitar/steel, Jared Nelson on drums, and Ariel Acevedo on bass. I also tapped my friend Sam Talmadge, a great guitarist who I know from the Brooklyn country scene (though he’s sadly left us for Nashville now), to sit in for these sessions. He brought in an extensive knowledge of country music to the sessions and also some super eloquent guitar playing, adding a great extra dynamic to a band I already love playing with, which has delved into various genres ranging from rock to indie to folk to country. We went into these sessions aiming to do something that was more of a live, not so produced feel compared to stuff we’ve done in the past. We tracked six songs over two days, some of which we’d never played before, some which we’d been playing for a while at our shows. In the end, Aaron and I did a fair amount of over-dubbing work after the initial sessions, but our goal was still to keep things feeling I guess you could say “old school.” Anything besides over-produced…Since then, we’ve added a few extra songs to the project, some I’ve done by myself in my room in Brooklyn, some that we’ve done at Aaron’s home studio. When the album comes out in August, it will be a ten song project, mostly country songs with some Americana/folk-rock material mixed in, such as “K*LL BOB.”
Q: “K*LL BOB” reminds me a bit of John Prine, who’s one of my all time favorite songwriters, largely because of the humor inherent in the hyperbole in the song. A lot of musicians think that being funny is the kiss of death commercially. What do you think is the role of humor (irony, sarcasm, etc.) in songwriting? There’s also the matter of your appearance, the white suits and the big hat. What’s the impression you’re trying to make there?
The whole concept for this album is more or less the band and I fully going “country,” at least for this album cycle. We’ve definitely dabbled in country music throughout our time as a band, but we’ve never leaned super hard into the country thing, and Aaron and I for years have talked about making a real country album at some point. I’d say the turning point for us starting to focus our main attention towards that side of things was when I wrote the song “All My Friends” about a year and a half ago. It didn’t fit into the more indie-folk-rock, sad boy singer-songwriter material that I was releasing at the time, and I’d always had songs like this that I’d write here and there over the years.
So I just kind of thought to myself, “Oh damn, I actually have a fair amount of country or country-leaning songs that have piled up over the years, so I guess it’s finally time to do the country album.” Once I started assembling the songs that would go on the record, I started to realize that I tend to use country music as a vessel to write more sarcastic, fictional material. Country music has this magical way of being super lighthearted and fun while also being super dark and serious. Rock & roll can have that too, but not necessarily so effortlessly, the way a Dolly Parton or George Jones song can be so smooth and charming and make you want to dance around merrily or waltz with your sweetheart, but then when you listen to the lyrics it makes your soul cry.
Furthermore, I always thought it was kind of silly that I would be a guy writing country songs. As a Jew from New York, I’m not the guy people expect to sing country music. For me, it’s just songs…country, folk, blues, rock & roll are all pretty much the same, they just have different ornaments. But I can understand that as a fan of music, the ornamentation and the stylings mean a lot and say a lot. I’m also simultaneously a very sarcastic and very serious person. So, I think I just naturally ended up writing a lot of country songs that have toed the line between fiction and non-fiction, and I think country music provides a space for me to be an outsider and acknowledge that life is ridiculous and silly anyways. The white suit and cowboy hat combo is an $85 suit I bought years ago for a photo shoot and plastic hat I got from a party city gift basket that my girlfriend’s ex-roommate took home from a party she was at, which came with some cheap, heart-shaped sunglasses.
This is all to say that when it comes to humor and irony, if it’s the kiss of death commercially then I guess I’ll die on that hill. I have noticed that it’s been a bit difficult to convey the sardonic essence of this project through social media, but so be it. Lots of songwriters in the past have leaned towards more sarcastic songs for an album cycle or more (Randy Newman, David Allan Coe, etc.). In their day, they didn’t have to publicize it on social media though. Now you have to create a character for yourself to show to the world on Instagram. I feel like the character I’m creating right now is a joke but also authentic. Kind of like a Father John Misty thing. Once the full album comes out, the full story will be there, because at the end of the day it all starts from the songs. It’s a country album about a guy stuck in New York, struggling for success as a songwriter, going through the ups and downs of life. It’s real but at the end of the day, it’s not so goddamn serious. Many of the songs are at least somewhat fictional, but good fiction comes from an authentic place. I’ve never been one for making easy to understand, commercially driven art, so for me, it’s all work that will translate and make sense to anyone who pays enough attention, especially if they come to a show and see us live.
Q: What’s it like being a Brooklyn musician in 2025? Do you find any sort of community at play? It seems like there are plenty of venues but maybe not a lot of gigs where you can play in front of a sizable crowd and expect to get paid something. What’s your experience been?
Yeah it’s definitely kind of tough. The music scene here, like any place where there’s a big market for it and a lot of people, is oversaturated with bands willing to do anything to play a show and venues trying to make a buck to stay afloat. Add in all the other factors like Covid and rising commercial rents in NYC that have thrown a dent into the live entertainment industry’s ability to profit, and what do you expect?
Venues care about people coming through their doors and buying drinks, so if some NYU Sophomores who just started a band can bring more people through the doors at Mercury Lounge than honest musicians who’ve been doing it forever, then they’re going to get the best slots. Simple as that. Recently though, I’ve been dipping my toes into the burgeoning country-rock scene around New York, and so far I’ve been experiencing a slightly more friendly and true-to-the-music vibe from this scene than I did in my many years in the indie rock scene. That being said, I think there are good people and bad people to sift through no matter what field you’re in, so I do my best to focus on cutting through the bullshit, putting my head down, and continuing to put my foot on the gas pedal, which is easier said than done.
Q: I know you’ve done a bit of touring. Do you find people outside of NYC know you and your music? Is that always the ultimate goal, to be able to get in a van and play in other places instead of to the same two dozen faces in your hometown?
I love to travel and meet people around the country and the world, and I live to play my songs on stage, so I’d definitely say that figuring out how to tour more regularly is my main goal for this project at least in the short term. We have a base in upstate New York in the Hudson Valley, where my bandmates all live, so we play in that area a lot. As far as the rest of the country, we have fans scattered throughout, but need to put in some more time and effort to really hone in on fanbases all around. We’re currently in the process of setting up some touring this summer and fall to support the release of the full album, so definitely keep an eye out for that.
Q: What’s cooking in terms of more new music?
We’ve got another single coming out on April 20th, and then we’re going to do some work finishing the full album, which right now is set to come out on August 1st. I’ve been working with a label called Wally Opus for the past few months, so once we have the next single out, we’re going to go back to the drawing board a little as far as marketing strategy and what not and start working on album preparations, tour planning, etc.
Q: Let people know how to find you, and recommend any other acts they should be checking out.
Anywhere you listen to music, I’m there! Just type in “Leo Lovechild” and you’ll find my catalogue. I strongly encourage anyone who’s interested to come check out a live show, as that’s where I think we are best. Right now, we’ve got Skinny Dennis on April 2nd and Jones Bar on April 12th coming up!
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