walking upstream…
Steve Lacy
photo: c elliott · cc0 ↗Steve Lacy
Steve Lacy grew up in Compton, California, picking up a guitar at ten after hours spent on Guitar Hero, and by sixteen he was cutting tracks for the R&B group The Internet using nothing but his iPhone. "I literally had no fucking idea what I was doing," he said of that setup, "and from that, I got a Grammy nomination." The homemade sound stuck: he co-produced The Internet's Ego Death as a teenager, then built a solo run out of the same instinct, from Steve Lacy's Demo through Apollo XXI to Gemini Rights, whose "Bad Habit" topped the charts. What holds the catalog together is a guitarist's rock changes stretched over a soul singer's melody, a mixing style Lacy traces to a specific list of records that raised him more than to any one genre.
the sound in question
2022
Bad HabitSteve Lacy
walk the tributaries ↓
Prince1980s · Funk / Pop / R&B / Rock
In 2019, days before releasing his solo debut Apollo XXI, Lacy told Apple Music's Zane Lowe how he'd written its lead single: "I think this was in my Prince phase, where I was all Prince... It came with that riff, and then the hook came." The comparison isn't casual fandom. A year earlier, asked whose career he'd want to emulate, Lacy skipped the obvious names and landed on Prince specifically: "I relate to him a lot in the sense that he was a Gemini, produced everything, played guitar." Same instrument, same restless multi-hyphenate impulse, four decades apart.
listen: upstream & heresource: Fantastic Man — Steve Lacy (bio background; Prince "Gemini, produced everything, played guitar" quote) ↗
1986
KissPrince
2019
PlaygroundSteve Lacy
listen forPrince's "Kiss" strips a whole song down to one clean guitar figure and a falsetto that does all the flirting — no bassline, barely a snare. Cue up "Playground" next: the riff Lacy says started the song sits in that same spare pocket, letting his falsetto hook carry the tune while the guitar just ticks underneath. Neither track hides behind a wall of production; both bet everything on the riff and the voice doing the talking.
Dirty Projectors2000s–10s · Indie rock / Art pop / Chamber pop
Lacy's list of formative acts runs heavy on rock bands, but Dirty Projectors get a second, more specific credit. Describing the writing of "Playground," from Apollo XXI, he told Zane Lowe the song also carries "my Dirty Projectors phase" alongside its more famous Prince one. No single Dirty Projectors song is named — the band's off-kilter vocal harmonies and knotty, syncopated guitar writing, heard clearest on Bitte Orca's "Stillness Is the Move," sit inside the same art-rock-meets-soul vocabulary Lacy says he was absorbing at the time.
listen: upstream & heresource: The FADER — Steve Lacy enters his "Prince phase" in new song "Playground" (Prince/Dirty Projectors phase quote) ↗
2009
Stillness Is the MoveDirty Projectors
2019
N SideSteve Lacy
listen forPlay Dirty Projectors' "Stillness Is the Move" against Lacy's "N Side" and listen past the words: both stack an angular, off-the-beat guitar riff under a lead vocal that curls and slides rather than sitting square on the beat, trading straight-ahead phrasing for something more elastic. It isn't a note-for-note transfer — Lacy never named this specific pair — but it's the same harmonic restlessness he credits to his self-described "Dirty Projectors phase."
Paramore2000s–10s · Pop-punk / Alternative rock / Emo pop
Paramore was on the short list of bands Lacy says "raised" him growing up on Guitar Hero, but he gets specific about why: "Hayley's voice and melodies are crazy, because she takes the rock thing and makes it soulful." It's a near-exact description of his own method. Asked about the genre-blending on songs like "Dark Red," he said: "I've always loved doing that — if I have a rocky beat, putting a soulful melody on it." Williams's trick, in other words, became his own.
listen: upstream & heresource: NME — Steve Lacy shares his love for Paramore and Weezer ("raised me" list; Prince melodic-approach quote; Hayley Williams quote) ↗
2013
Ain't It FunParamore
2017
Dark RedSteve Lacy
listen forParamore's "Ain't It Fun" answers its own pop-punk sneer with a full gospel choir in the outro — Williams testing exactly what Lacy praised, rock's clenched energy loosened into something churchy. Lacy's "Dark Red" makes the same trade in miniature: a twangy, minor-key riff that could pass for indie rock, until his own multi-tracked harmonies swell underneath it like a one-man choir and pull the whole thing toward soul.