The 29-year-old artiste rose to fame with I Like Me Better, which was released on May 19, 2017. It dealt with the giddiness and anticipation of falling in love, and became an instant hit. Love forms a major theme of most of his songs, he says, because of his tendency to romanticise the feelings he has had for people in the past. But his new music, he adds, talks about the emotions one feels towards the people one least expects to love, even platonically. “Love always takes you to interesting places!” 

In the past, the singer has opened up about his struggles with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), depression, and anxiety, as well as his struggles saying sober. His fans, or ‘Lauvers’, connect to his music because it feels like a friend accompanying you through life, validating the emotions you’re feeling. Is that intentional, we ask? “I just focus on telling my truth,” he muses. “People connect to music when it’s the most honest.” 

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It’s a way to process the truth he himself may not be upfront about. “I spend a lot of time in my head, overthinking things and lying to myself about how I feel,” he says. “My music is my space to find my clarity.” While creating music that addresses mental health issues may not have been intentional, he says he is “doing what he needs to do to get better, —transforming the thoughts assailing him into his music. “It relives me to speak about it openly, even on my social media, for example,” he says. “I’m not hiding anything; I’m not hiding from myself.”

On Instagram, Lauv is conversational, almost chatty, with his Lauvers. He posts Notes App screenshots asking about their day and how their year has been, encouraging them to open up about anything they feel like talking about. A recent post reads: “I’m wanting to be more social on here and create spaces for us all to chat. Because social media is so one-sided these days. I want to bring a sense of community back to it”

Perhaps it’s rather apt, then, that the song Modern Loneliness is a favourite of his. He even has a tattoo of it. It was the first time he wrote a tasteful song about depression, as he phrases it. As a line from the song goes: Modern loneliness/We’re never alone, but always depressed, yeah/Love my friends to death/ But I never call and I never text, yeah.

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