A few minutes after Steve Lacy arrived at a dingy, weed-clouded recording studio in Burbank, the 18-year-old musician flopped down in a plush leather chair in the control room. Vince, one of the studio's proprietors, came in to show Lacy how the mixing boards and monitors worked. Lacy didn't care; he was just in it for the chair. He picked up his new black-and-white Rickenbacker guitar, then reached into his Herschel backpack and yanked out a mess of cables. Out of the mess emerged his iRig, an interface adapter that connects his guitar directly into his iPhone 6. He shoved it into the Lightning port and began tuning his instrument, staring at the GarageBand pitch meter through the cracks on the screen of his phone.
Guitar ready, Lacy relocated into the studio. He usually works in the vocal booth, where he'll light candles and hang for hours, but since I had a cameraman with me he agreed to sit somewhere a little more visually appealing—and bigger. Lacy, wearing jean shorts and a plaid khaki shirt underneath an unzipped blue hoodie, sat on a drum throne in the center of the studio and re-assumed his previous pose: right leg crossed over left, Beats headphones on his ears, iPhone perched precariously on his bare knee (he swears this isn't how he cracked the screen) and connected to the guitar in his lap. Then he went to work, kind of. He'd never call it work. He doesn't even call it recording, or songwriting, or producing. He calls it "making beats."
It's a weird recording setup, but it's working for Lacy. Last year, he was nominated for a Grammy for executive-producing and performing on the 2015 funk-R&B-soul album Ego Death, the third release from The Internet and Lacy's first with the band. He's a sought-after producer, featured on albums like J. Cole's "4 Your Eyez Only" and Kendrick Lamar's new "Damn." Earlier in 2017, he released his first solo material, which he's playing as part of the setlist for The Internet's worldwide tour. (Somewhere in there he also graduated high school.) The only connection between his many projects? All that music is stored on his iPhone.
That night in Burbank, Lacy had no real agenda or deadline. It was just a brainstorm, a jam session. He paged through the drum presets in GarageBand for a while before picking a messy-sounding kit. With two thumbs, he tapped out a simple beat, maybe 30 seconds long. Then he went back to the Rickenbacker. He played a riff he'd stumbled on while tuning, recording it on a separate GarageBand track over top of the drums. Without even playing it back, Lacy then reached down and deleted it. It took three taps: stop, delete, back to the beginning. He played the riff again, subtly differently. Deleted it again. For the next half hour, that's all Lacy did: play, tap-tap-tap, play again. He experimented wildly for a while, then settled on a loose structure and began subtly tweaking it. Eventually satisfied with that bit, he plugged in his Fender bass and started improvising a bassline. A few hours later, he began laying vocals, a breathy, wordless melody he sang directly into the iPhone's microphone. He didn't know quite what he was making, but he was feeling it.
All night, Lacy goofed around. He found a sword in the studio, and made up a shockingly catchy song called "Sword in the Studio" that's still rattling around in my brain. He paused every few minutes to snack on Sour Patch watermelons or let out a deafening burp. Occasionally, when I asked him a question, he'd respond with a British accent. He paced around the room, took a call from his mom, and joked with his manager, David Airaudi. And even when he'd get back to making beats, it still looked more like play.
Lacy's smartphone has been his personal studio since he first started making music. Even now, with all the equipment and access he could want, he still feels indelibly connected to something about making songs piece by piece on his phone. He's also working this way to prove a point: that tools don't really matter. He feelds a tension that's been part of the music industry since the Tascam 424 Portastudio made mobile recording easy in the 80s, and has come up time and again since then. He wants to remind people that the performance, the song, the feeling matter more than the gear you use to record it. If you want to make something, Lacy tells me, grab whatever you have and just make it. If it's good, people will notice. Maybe even Kendrick Lamar.
One of Lacy's earliest music memories comes from fifth grade or so. This was circa 2009, when Jerkin' was the new dance craze. At school in Torrance, California, a bunch of eighth-graders would tell him to grab two pens and tap out beats while they jerked. "I was so honored," he says, "because they were the cool kids!" He quickly learned to use erasable pens, which are plastic, because the glass ones would break and get ink all over his hands. He also learned he had a knack for making beats, though everyone else seemed to know that already.
When Lacy and I first met, on the Venice beach a few hours before heading to the studio, he seemed to be thinking about his musical history for the first time. (He was also distracted by the half-finished cheetah tattoo on his abs, which itched like crazy.) Most of his stories go the same way: our young protagonist shows up, goofs around, and something magical happens. Like when Jameel Bruner, a high school senior when Lacy was a freshman, took Lacy under his wing. Bruner played keys; Lacy had learned guitar and bass. "He puts me on all this new music," Lacy says of Bruner. "I looked up to him a lot. On keys, that man? Crazy. Playing with him felt so good."
Bruner started bringing Lacy around to a Hollywood recording studio in 2014, where he was working on a new album with his band, The Internet. Lacy watched and learned, seeing the production process first-hand. Then one day, Matt Martians, one of The Internet's founding members, needed a bass player. Bruner said, hey, Steve plays bass. "And we get to the studio," Lacy says, "and we're just instantly making bangers." Much of what Lacy and Martians made in those early sessions wound up on Ego Death, but at the time Lacy just thought he was jamming. "When people ask how it felt to know you're co-executive producing an album," Lacy tells me, "I'm like, I didn't know?"
It was only after Ego Death got a Best Urban Contemporary Album Grammy nom that Lacy decided a music career was for him. (Some signs are hard to ignore.) But he was going to school in Harbor City, 25 miles and untold traffic away from the Hollywood studio. He didn't own a laptop, either. But he did have a phone. He jailbroke his iPhone, which gave him access to an app called Bridge that could save songs straight from the internet. He also tore through the App Store, experimenting with iMachine, BeatMaker 2, iMPC, GarageBand, and others. Mostly he started making beats all the time. At home. While driving. In class. Once outside a barbershop, when there were a bunch of people ahead of him in line and he had a hook idea in his head. Lots of musicians use voice memos to record and remember snippets of songs, of course. It's just that for Lacy, the stuff stayed on his phone. He'd build tracks in pieces, then put them together and upload to Soundcloud or Tumblr. At first, nobody was really listening, but song by song, beat by beat, he gained a following.
Making music on his phone is mostly about the simplicity, the convenience. It's a little about skipping the traffic on the way to the studio. But there's one other advantage: since it's all in his pocket, Lacy is ready to play his stuff at any time. Which was particularly handy last fall, when Lacy found himself in the studio with Kendrick Lamar.
Normally, Lacy does all his dealing artist-to-artist. He'll DM other musicians who follow him on Twitter, or just call them. But he got to Lamar a slightly more traditional way: through producer DJ Dahi, who he met thanks to Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig. Dahi, Lacy says, "brought me in to see Kendrick just to make some beats with him, just work on some ideas." At one point, as things naturally do, the room got quiet. Everyone was on their phones, nothing was really happening. So Lacy pipes up. "Let me play you some stuff," he told Lamar. That's how Lacy likes to work—not jumping straight to collaborating, just playing everyone what he's working on. If they're into it, great. If not, no worries.
With Lamar's attention, Lacy played him a couple of songs from his demo, and then a track he'd worked on with singer Anna Wise, a longtime Lamar collaborator. Wise and Lacy had recently been in the studio together—Lacy's more versatile with his tools when he's working with other artists, some of whom think the whole iPhone thing is weird—and all the equipment was screwing up. So Lacy told Wise, "OK, let me make a lick on my laptop, bounce it to my phone, and we'll play this acoustic." He showed Wise how to use GarageBand, and sent her into a vocal booth with a phone and a pop filter. As soon as she sang the track, which they called "Wasn't There," they both knew they had something special.
So Lacy played this track for Lamar, his beat with Wise's singing. "And as soon as I played it," Lacy says, "[Lamar] goes, 'Yo, put your number in my phone.'" Lamar hit Lacy up later, saying he might want to do something with the beat, so Lacy sent it to him. He hoped for the best, but didn't expect much—plans change all the time, especially when you're Kendrick Lamar. A few months later, after never hearing back, Lacy texted Lamar to see if he wanted to get together again. Lamar responded he couldn't, he was in the studio finishing his album. So Lacy replied, "Got the tracklist?" followed by the eyes emoji. Lamar responded, "Lol, 'Wasn't There' is Track 4." (It's actually track seven on the album, now called "Pride.") Suddenly Lacy, who's been a fan of Lamar's since middle school and still rues the day his M.A.A.D City CD got stolen, had a hand in the most anticipated hip-hop album of 2017. He sat in his car for a while, screaming with joy.
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When I ask Lacy what he thinks of how far he's come, he seems almost afraid to overthink it or jinx it somehow. Nothing he's accomplished so far was planned, he says. "I literally had no fucking idea what I was doing," he says. "And from that, I got a Grammy nomination. So I'm like, OK, this is my life." Not planning got him here; he's going to keep not planning. But now that he's out of high school, and putting off college for now, there's a lot more to do. Lacy and Airaudi are trying to figure out how to make more money off all these collaborations, for one thing. And there's that tour coming soon, too. Lacy's still deciding how that'll work: He digs the idea of a backing band playing his songs, but says "the DIY in me wants to do a one-man show."
It's immediately clear that Lacy's not interested in fitting into anyone's idea of what a musician should do or what music should sound like. Some of Lacy's songs are 90 seconds long, verse and chorus meant to be played over and over. Others are more traditional. "He talks about changing what it means to be pop music," Airaudi, his manager, tells me. "Why doesn't that include song structure? Why doesn't that include song length?" Lacy refuses to call his solo debut, "Steve Lacy's Demo," an album, and hates that iTunes labeled it an EP.
Even the style of his music is hard to pin down: he'll take the melody from a folk song, pair it with a soul-heavy bass, and then funk the funk out of the guitar line. "The hybrid sounds a little odd at first glance, I know," The music website Consequence of Sound wrote about his song "Dark Red," "but just think of Mac DeMarco kicking it with some Motown records." Lacy calls his style "Plaid," a jumble of colors and patterns that somehow work together to make one awesome design. Whether it's wild shirts, Prince songs, or the movie Get Out, Lacy says he has a thing for art that's one of one. Musically, he experiments with everything, trying not to sound like anything you know.
One thing won't change, though: Lacy's going to keep making music on his iPhone. He does own a laptop now, and he knows how to use the producer-preferred Ableton software. But there's something about the freeform creativity the phone allows, the fact that recording in GarageBand isn't the hacky first step in the process but the whole thing. He's even come to like its sound better. He's made a few songs on his laptop, which "sounded too clean," he says. "The beats I make in Ableton, I feel like I have to get those mixed by a professional to beef them up. But GarageBand masters it so it's at a cool level already." But it's more than that, even: When Lacy tried to work on his laptop, he says he found himself creatively bare, just completely out of ideas. So he grabbed his phone and starting goofing around. Suddenly the juice started flowing again.
The most recent addition to his studio setup? A second phone. Mostly because too many people now have his number and it won't stop ringing long enough to let him work, but also because it helps with the process. "I can play the instrumental" on one handset, he says, and "and record the voice memo on my other phone." The previous setup was clunkier—and the way Lacy did it, downright dangerous. "I would have to drag the beat into GarageBand, try to get the vocal as I'm driving." What he does now is just as illegal, but probably a little safer.
The problem is, the new phone is an iPhone 7, which doesn't have a headphone jack. That means he can't plug in the iRig and hear the track played back at the same time—he tried a bunch of dongles at the studio, and nothing worked. So it was back to the cracked iPhone, at least until he can get his hands on the iRig HD2 and its integrated headphone jack. The cracks don't seem to bother him, though. He doesn't care what he's using. He's just there to make beats.
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