It’s well established that Lauv is a one-man boy band. He’s the hopeless romantic, the class clown, the existentialist, and more, all in a single vessel. He channels that multiplicity — the ability to shape-shift and encompass an entire color palette’s worth of emotionality — all over his debut album, How I’m Feeling (stylized, of course, as ~how i’m feeling~, since it’s 2020 and everything is online).
He’s also channeled it for his extensive work with other artists, including Charli XCX, Julia Michaels, Troye Sivan, and quite fittingly, BTS. They’re the biggest boy band on the planet, and perhaps even the biggest band in general. So it’s only natural that a one-man boy band would pick up a few tips on how to do the damn thing.
“I could probably learn some dance pointers,” Lauv told MTV News correspondent Brian “B. Dot” Miller in the office earlier this week.
“The first time, when they asked me to do the remix for ‘Make It Right,’ they were super gracious and just asking me to interpret my own version of what the original message of the song was,” he said.
That collaboration continued well into Lauv’s creation of How I’m Feeling, which included another team-up with BTS. This time, it was for his song “Who,” a silken ballad plagued by confusion and the haunting inevitability of change. “I just thought, for my song — I honestly wasn’t necessarily expecting that it would happen,” he said. “I was kind of taking a shot in the dark, but they ended up loving it, and it’s really cool. It’s one of my favorite songs on the album.”
During Lauv’s visit and performance for MTV News Office Hours, there wasn’t enough time for every song on How I’m Feeling. But armed with a keyboard, a bass, and an acoustic guitar, he strolled through highly charged renditions of “Changes,” “Tattoos Together,” and “Modern Loneliness.”
It was also a chance to showcase Lauv the re-inventor: “Tattoos Together,” a pulsating rhythmic track on the album, got a downbeat makeover in the absence of its percussion. Bar-closing sing-along closer “Modern Loneliness,” meanwhile, found Lauv stripping away its vocal bombast to reveal an intimate, soul-searching skeleton underneath. It’s enough to make you evaluate how you’re feeling, by the time he puts down his guitar.
Watch MTV News’s cozy Office Hours set with Lauv in full in the video above.
