LANY Frontman Paul Klein On His First Kiss And The Whirlwind Of Touring Life

"This feels like therapy, man," says Paul Klein. "I don't know why I'm telling you all this." The 29-year-old LANY leader is recounting his formative musical experiences, which are indivisible from his formative adolescent experiences. "[The first songs I ever wrote] were love songs, about this girl named Maura Morris. I wanted her to go to prom with me, so I wrote her a song, asking her to go to prom with me. I loved that girl, man. I played it live for her — gladly, there is no recording — while she was sitting on her bed, and I was sitting on a chair at the end of her bed. On acoustic guitar. She said yes. And she was my first kiss!

"I was the latest bloomer in the history of late-bloomers," Klein continues. "I had my first kiss the week before I turned 17. I didn't get armpit hair 'til I was 18 years old. When everyone else grew, I didn't."

"[The songs] are about heartbreak and disappointment, and unmet expectations. They're written when whatever relationship I'm in kinda sucks."

Klein grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma ("It was pretty safe, pretty white, pretty middle-of-nowhere"), and studied "music and music business" at university in Nashville. There, he met future LANY cohorts Les Priest and Jake Goss; but first, Klein moved to Los Angeles, trying — and failing — to start a solo career. Returning to Nashville in 2014, he meshed his "singer-songwriter stuff" with Priest and Goss' electronic productions. They anonymously uploaded their first songs to Soundcloud, and the reaction was unforeseen. "Six days later, we were getting emails from record labels," Klein recounts. "It was unbelievable. I thought it was spam."

In 2015, they toured with Tove Styrke, Troye Sivan and Halsey, signed to Universal, and set about making their debut LP, which took 15 months due to their volume of gigs. "We played 115 shows last year," Klein reasons. "We've played in 21 countries. Touring is constant. We don't have the luxury that Harry Styles has, going and camping out in Jamaica until you get it all done."

The self-titled LANY LP matches a polished pop sound to uniformly sad lyrics. "[The songs] are about heartbreak and disappointment, and unmet expectations," Klein says. "They're written when whatever relationship I'm in kinda sucks. The last 12 months of my life has been really good, but really hard.

"On the road... the first thing that you do when you wake up is get out of the bus — where sometimes, there's 200 kids waiting for me, and I've got slobber on my face and look like a mess — and go find the nearest coffee shop, use the restroom, shave my face, brush my teeth. When you're on tour, it's like you've pressed pause on your real life, whereas the people you leave back home, their lives go on. You've got some relationship that's just on hold, with this person who's 'so in love with you' but they've sent you no text messages, no phone messages, but you can see what they've been doing, all their posts on Instagram. It sounds petty, but this is real life, man. This is my life."