Ari Staprans Leff (born August 8, 1994), known professionally as Lauv, is an American singer, songwriter and record producer based in Los Angeles. Lauv was born in San Francisco, California. He spent his early childhood in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, before his family relocated to a suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He went to Radnor High School. As a child, he was interested in music and took piano and viola lessons before learning how to play the guitar at the age of 11. He started writing songs in middle school, at around 14 years old. 

During his time in high school, he played in several bands and studied jazz before moving on to electronic music. After graduating high school, Leff decided to pursue a behind-the-scenes role in music. He chose to study music technology at New York University's Steinhardt School. While at university, he studied abroad in Prague and was a member of the Zeta Psi fraternity. He spent two of his four years at NYU as a studio intern for Jungle City Studios, where artists such as Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake and Alicia Keys recorded.

INSPIRATION BEHIND HIS NEW ALBUM

LAUV'S INTERVIEW WITH TEEN VOGUE

TEEN VOGUE: What story did you want to tell with ~how i’m feeling~?

LAUV: The album was kind of born out of an identity crisis, where I felt very boxed into one part of my personality. There’s so many other sides to me. There's so much pressure with social media to sort of be something palatable for people, to have a personal brand, which is fine until it's not, until it drives you crazy. The album was just the process of accepting all parts of myself as a creative, as a person, as an artist.

TV: Why did you want to open with “Drugs & The Internet” and close with “Modern Loneliness” on the album?

L: For me, “Drugs & The Internet” was sort of like the beginning of doing something different. It was just so different for me to write a song like that and so much more vulnerable in a way that wasn't just about love and a relationship. So I thought that would be just like where I really wanted to start and set the tone: this album isn't just a bunch of love songs. “Modern Loneliness” is another side to that — just feeling really alone based on being so connected on the Internet, and not feeling so connected to the people who were actually in my life. Opening and closing it with those vibes just made sense to me.

TV: With the tildes in the album title to the visuals, it feels like you’re experimenting much more as an artist. What did you want to convey with the aesthetic and style of the project?

L: The tildes are a big part of it for me and I hope that people get it. It's very much like, as a person I'm very emotional, I'm very existential. But at the same time, I'm very goofy and I think that it's very Internet-speak, like putting a word in between those little is sort of like, "Ooh, big deal." I wanted it to be kind of like emotional, which is where all the colors come in, different parts of personality, different emotions, but also sort of funny, which is where kind of like the character aspect of it comes in.

TV: We get to see these different characters that are the different sides of you brought to life in the One Man Boyband video series. What’s interesting about them is that they sort of represent different kinds of masculinity. What has your relationship to masculinity been as you embraced being an artist?

L: Growing up I always felt like a mama's boy and having two older sisters, I think I tend to have more feminine energy, if you want to define it that way. For a long time as I got older and as I got to middle school and high school and I wanted a girlfriend, I had crushes on girls and a lot of them weren't really into me back. I felt surrounded by more quote-unquote masculine men and sports players. I just was lying to myself and didn't really embrace the sides of me, and tried to sort of mold myself to fit into that because I thought people would like me better. I struggled with that for a long time, feeling like I was supposed to be a certain type of man. Eventually, it just got to the point where I was like, "I can't do [this] anymore." I remember feeling weird on stage when I first started performing because the way I naturally moved wasn’t really the like “masculine sex icon” [kind of way]. But I've finally gotten to a point where I'm comfortable with it. There's no definition of what a man should be like or what a woman should be like when we're kids, which is a big part of the playfulness of the album. When we're kids, you just are who you are, you love who you love, you're free with the way you act. You're not self-critical. Somewhere along the way I kind of lost that. This album was this process of not taking myself so seriously and just having fun and being myself.

TV: The album is long — did you ever think about pulling back from 21 tracks?

L: Originally it was going to be 15 songs. But then I just kept writing. I was probably choosing from more like 50 songs and then it was just impossible to narrow down. I remember sitting with my managers and being like, "Okay, these are the songs. You're voting on these." Then all of a sudden we were at 21 songs. Especially not being on a major label, we were like, "You know what? F*ck it. We can do whatever we want to do." I really believe in all this music and it shows a lot of different aspects of who I am, so I wanted to put it all out. There's no rules anymore. People can just put out however much music, however often.

ALBUM REVIEW 

"One obstacle to expressing yourself is working up the courage to do so; another is figuring out, on your own terms, who that self really is. As a public figure, Lauv advocates powerfully for being forthright about your feelings, but his album’s whopping 21-song tracklist is underwhelming and repetitive. Lauv calls it “diverse, emotional, and lit,” but ~how i’m feeling~ is mostly temperate, EDM-lite affairs jumbled with piano ballads and Sheeran-style nice-guy folk, plus one blatant bid for a Latin-pop hit (the Sofía Reyes-assisted “El Tejano”). Much of the emotional substance is laid out in the titles: feelings are hard (“Feelings”), I’m lonely as fuck (“fuck, i’m lonely”), I’m so tired of love songs (“i’m so tired”). These are Tumblr posts adapted as studio hits."

- Cat Zhang from PitchFork

"How I’m Feeling doesn’t just bristle with enduring afflictions such as heartbreak and addiction, it’s also full of no-filter confessionals about coming of age in the social media era: the isolation and disconnect (see: Fuck I’m Lonely, Lonely Eyes, Modern Loneliness), as well as technology’s identity-eroding effects. This heart-on-sleeve approach might well be genuine, but Gen Z malaise is also big business: from Billie Eilish to melancholy emo-rap stars, performed alienation and anxiety is currently all the rage. Lauv is well-versed in industry trends, having previously penned hits with Charli XCX and Demi Lovato, and he mostly couples his timely observations with a similarly voguish mid-tempo electropop. Restrained and airless, it is the kind that sounds as if every beat has been placed with a pair of tweezers, and that you have to listen to three times to work out which bit is the chorus. It’s not a particularly thrilling or inventive mode, but then How I’m Feeling isn’t designed to knock the socks off whole populations. Rather, its lightly worn melodies and generically hip sonics seem machine-tooled to creep into its target audience’s subconscious, where its tales of youthful disaffection can be readily absorbed into their own tumultuous inner worlds.

- Rachel Aroesti from The Guardian