Lauv is writing all your favourite pop songs

To most listeners, it might seem Lauv has come from nowhere. An independent artist without a full-scale major label or social media campaign behind him, he’s suddenly all over your radio with the lilting, earnest hit ‘I Like Me Better’; he’s guesting on the latest DJ Snake single ‘A Different Way’, following in the footsteps of Justin Bieber and Zayn Malik; and he’s supporting Ed Sheeran on the Asian leg of the superstar’s world tour, starting later this month.

But like any overnight success, there was plenty of hard slog before Ari Leff hit the big time. “I can definitely tell you there is years and years of me making bad songs and trying to figure it out,” he laughs.

Now 23, he began writing songs when he was 13, after learning the piano as a child and later switching to strings. “I played viola for a couple years. My two older sisters played violin and cello. Then, you know, I picked up a guitar … That was when it really clicked for me. As a way to to express myself – [it] sort of just snowballed into an obsession. Then I started to learn how to produce, cos I was, like, playing in bands and I had to record the bands and stuff. Then I was like, ‘Wow, this is really cool that I can, like, sit in my room and make an entire song just myself.”

At 18, he decided to step away from performing, thinking that production, songwriting and engineering was “the more realistic route”. He left his native San Francisco (he’s now based in LA) to study music technology at NYU, building connections and working on his writing.

While he always gravitated towards writing love songs (“I feel like I should like, I don’t know, talk to a therapist about that!”), he’d never actually had a real-life romance to draw on, and he found himself writing songs to appeal to certain commercial tastes rather than to express himself. But then ‘The Other’ spilled out of him in a 2014 writing session, shortly after a breakup, and everything clicked.

“I was writing all these songs that I thought people wanted to hear. That I thought another artist would want to sing. I sat down with one of my closest friends who is a great songwriter [Michael Matosic], and we just sat in my room in New York in my basement windowless apartment room. I was like, ‘You know what, I have these feelings about what’s been happening, it was a weird time for me – can we just try writing a song about it?’ We did, and it was so different.

“I had no idea that I was going to write that song that day. I didn’t have that concept written down, that title, any of the lyrics, anything. I just sat at my keyboard and the song just sort of started to fall out.”

Leff found himself too attached to the song to give it away, and he released it online under the name Lauv (Latvian for lion, nodding to his mother’s heritage and his star sign, and pronounced like “loud”). Prodded by a tweeted endorsement from Liam Payne, the track blew up, sneaking into the Spotify Global 100 and hitting #3 on Hype Machine.

The experience cements the songwriting philosophy he drew from an old interview with Paul Simon: don’t force it.

“I randomly found this book on my friend’s shelf that had all these interviews from songwriters. I flipped to [Simon’s] interview, and I think what really clicked [was] him talking about how he was never interested in going into a room saying, ‘I want to write a song about this today.’ Or, ‘This is what I’m feeling.’ … [I]t was always about, like, going in and just trying to see what subconsciously he maybe wasn’t confronting, or he didn’t want to admit to himself, or he wasn’t aware that he was feeling.”

The success of ‘The Other’ led to other songwriting opportunities; Leff’s co-written of some of 2017’s best and purest pop songs, including Cheat Codes and Demi Lovato’s smash ‘No Promises’ and Charli XCX’s ‘Boys’.

But he’s come into his own with the ‘I Like Me Better’, which is wildly radio-friendly while also showcasing how inventive he can be – its distinctive instrumental motif, which sounds a bit like the viola he played as a kid, is actually Leff’s voice, processed almost beyond recognition.

“I remember I voice demoed that melody, just humming it, into my iPhone. Just like that, where my voice cracks and everything. All the little beautiful flaws. Then I just emailed it to myself, and I was like you know I’ll pull it into the recording session, and later I’ll change it to another sound. Then I ended up being like, ‘Wait, what if I just mess with it a million times?’ I just processed it again, and again, and again, and again to get all these crazy effects.”

Australian listeners have embraced ‘I Like Me Better’ more enthusiastically than almost any other market; the track has peaked at #8 so far on the ARIA charts and is steadily climbing the TMN Hot 100. So it’s no surprise Leff hints at soon-to-be-announced Australian tour dates. He jokingly says he hopes he’ll be playing arenas – although he’ll likely get enough of that on the Sheeran tour – but at this stage the biggest crowd he’s played to is 4000 at a festival in Milwaukee this year, and he’s still loving intimate shows and direct contact with his passionate and fast-growing community of fans.

“I think it just kind of grounds me that people are reacting to what I’m doing – that they’re actually connecting with it,” he says.

“I have people who show up with tattoos of my lyrics and stuff like that. My parents are scientists and my mom works in vaccine research, and she’s trying to cure HIV/AIDS, you know? “I’m over here making music, and I’m like, some days I feel guilty, and then I’m like, OK, well, at least I could touch somebody’s life and my songs can mean something – hopefully mean something positive for them.”