Q&A with Lovechild
"Costume Boxes", the latest single from New York City-based trio Lovechild, feels like generations of classic records wrapped up in a modern love song about the city the group calls home. While Lovechild's music feels very late-'60s / early-'70s and is sonically of a similar sound to Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones, their latest offering certainly has a unique voice of its own.
As the drum machine loops across four minutes, singer Leo Liebeskind croons his way through themes of change, from dropping out of college, to falling in and out of love as well as the bars of the Lower East Side. Before we know it, we are washed up in a swell of ambient and distorted guitars, and the track leaves us nostalgic for that pre-covid world of late nights in New York City. But considering we still live in a pandemic, and that's all but a distant memory, I think the closest I can get for now is to start this song again and bask in the nostalgia it brings.
"Costume Boxes", is the third single from Lovechild's upcoming debut album. With previous songs having attracted attention from Classic Rock and Impose Magazine, Lovechild and their 60s-sounding indie-rock have a very bright future ahead. Below, we spoke with Leo about his musical influences, the process behind "Costume Boxes", the music video, and many other things.
IndieWavves: Here's a tough question to start with, if you were cast away on a desert island and could only take an album from each of these decades, what would it be?
The '60s | The '70s |The '80s | The '90s | The '00s | The '10s
Leo Liebeskind: Oof. Very tough question, especially considering most of my favorite records were made in like a four-year span from 1968-1972. The '60s is especially tough because if I don't choose the Beatles, I lose them forever. But if I don't choose Dylan, then I have to choose Dylan in the '70s; otherwise, I lose Dylan forever more or less, and in all honesty, there were just too many excellent albums made in the '70s to go with 'Blood on The Tracks' or 'New Morning' in good and honest conscience. So, I guess I'll just have to go with 'Highway 61 Revisited' and throw the Beatles away because I would never, ever give that album up. Sorry chaps. The '70s is a toss-up between 'Sticky Fingers' by the Stones and 'Blue' by Joni Mitchell, depends on my mood. 'Sticky Fingers' for the average day on the road. 'Blue' if I'm feeling either in love or heartbroken or both. The 80s, uh, I'm lost, man. Wasn't there that guy Prince? No, in all seriousness, the self-titled Lucinda Williams album came out in '88, and I would definitely take that one to the grave. Would it be crazy also to say Lucinda for the '90s, 'Car Wheels on a Gravel Road'? The 2000s is an obvious choice in 'American Idiot' because you just can't doubt those goddamn songs. In the 2010s, I'm taking 'Blonde' by Frank Ocean over Kendrick or Sturgill Simpson to rectify that I threw out 'Abbey Road' and left the Beatles behind in favor of Dylan back in the '60s.
IW: I can hear many classic rogue storytellers in your songs (Bob Dylan, The Stones, Joni Mitchell, etc.), but your music also has something fresh and new about it. How do you manage to reference and draw on such a great music history while also keeping your songwriting fresh and authentic? Is it in lyricism or production, for example?
L: Well, as you know, those are some of my favorite artists ever. So to be in any conversation with names like that is an honor. I think soaking up the history is the easy part. I spent most of my teenage years writing songs that I would hear in other people's voices, usually Dylan's. I definitely feel like I had to work a lot in my early 20s to try and find my own voice, and I'm thankful to have found people like Wyatt and Aaron who've trusted that voice enough to push it further and to work on creating a unique sound with me while we're all at it. As far as lyricism vs. production, it really depends on the song and what makes things feel fresh and what is making things feel reminiscent of something older. The music's timbres, the chord structure, the rhythmic feel, these things are always relevant to the lyrics, and I would just stick to writing poems if they weren't. At the end of the day, as long I'm singing and don't lose my hair, I don't think I'll ever fully escape the Dylan comparison, but I can certainly live with that.
IW: Could you tell us a bit about the new single "Costume Boxes". It seems quite a reflective track. I saw that you called it "a meditation on dropping out of college and coming home to New York to learn how to really be a musician". Were you studying music, and this just wasn't cutting it for you?
L: Actually, I was a history major. I studied music from three years old until I graduated high school, so I was pretty over the academic side of music by the time I reached college. But I already knew that music would be my life going forward somehow. And I was in rural Ohio with no driver's license and no car. So that made it tough to be a songwriter who wanted to play shows without feeling constricted by the college scene's limits and social pressures. I spent a little time driving around, playing solo singer-songwriter shows, but eventually settled back in NYC to try and start a band. About five years after that, I decided to finish the degree I'd started, this time at Columbia, where I had to be enrolled by 26 to get my mom's benefits (she was an 8th-grade teacher at the time at their K-8 school). It wasn't a decision to leave music or anything, but it felt like a monumental turning over of a stone in my life. "Costume Boxes" was the last song I wrote before starting college for the second time at nearly 26 years old (I'll finally be finished this summer!), kind of feeling like a failure for it. However, still feeling good about the last five years I'd gotten to live through all these songs, shows, loves gained and lost, late nights on the streets of New York, etc.
IW: On top of being a great song, "Costume Boxes" also sounds very good. What was the process behind recording this song? Do you self-produce and engineer your own music?
L: Wyatt, Aaron, and I produced the whole upcoming record together. The process was mostly: I write a song, bring it into the band, we play it, and then the three of us produce it with Wyatt taking the role of lead producer and engineer, Aaron the lead guitarist/general dude who can play anything, and me being the stubborn songwriter. In the end, we all come to decisions together on everything. "Costume Boxes" was one of the only ones off the record that we didn't play live until after we'd started recording it. There were a few different versions we messed around with, but eventually, we settled on the drum machine plus piano template to base the song around, and we were able to fill that version out in two quick late-night sessions, and that was it—one of the easier ones to record on the album.
IW: Lovechild seems to be a product of NYC dive bars, basement venues, and the Lower East Side. How have you found being an artist during covid and not being able to play live? Have you found it a creatively stifling period?
L: It's definitely been challenging and generally just a boring time socially because shows aren't happening. But creatively, there's been a lot of time and space to work on new material. At first, I struggled to write because I'm so used to being out and about all day around the city, and that's where the fuel for a lot of my songs comes from, but if you want it bad enough, you'll get it somehow in life. So, it didn't take long to find ways to get inspired to write again. Recently I've moved to Brooklyn, and I have my own car in the city now, so things have been much more focused on the roads and my rusty old honda than the subways and the dive bars.
IW: I love how the "Costume Boxes" music video (out March 12) works with the song's lyrics and atmosphere. What is the story behind the video? Where was this filmed?
L: Aaron and his wife bought this cool-looking old airstream for their property where they live upstate, so we had the idea to shoot something there. We brought in our friend Benjamin Lieber and our photographer and videographer Jack Tumen to create the video. He had the idea to essentially use the airstream's windows to turn the vessel itself into what looked like the inside of a subway car. It's ironic because initially, we thought the video would be more of a country-setting video. You know, green fields and what not as the sun goes down. But it's definitely appropriate that this is probably our most New York video yet.
IW: Finally, is there a fun fact about Lovechild that our readers might not know?
L: The band is collectively obsessed with Chinese food, or really any kind of spicy Asian food in general. Aaron is working on his kitchen skills, and maybe we can convince him to open a restaurant one day.
Written by George Barnett
Photos by Jack Tumen