For years there, Livingston felt like an outsider. “And the reality is there are millions of others who feel the exact same way,” the ascendant singer-songwriter says, looking back. “Down to details and their exact waking and sleeping thoughts.” Knowing he was hardly alone in feeling different, though, the artist born Drake Livingston began crafting music that helped him connect to others. He was confident that so many out there could relate to his struggle and feel hope and connection via his music. “It’d be great to write a song for everyone,” he clarifies of the creative approach he takes to his emotional, highly personal and intricately crafted pop songs, “but I want to write a song for the kid who feels exactly like I do.” It’s in this way Livingston speaks directly to his listeners.
The creative, ever-engaging result of his work marks a stunning introduction to one of the most exciting new voices in pop music. On the heels of his 2020 debut EP Lighthouse which amassed over 50 million streams on Spotify, Livingston released An Unlikely Origin Story, undoubtedly his most fully realized and accomplished work yet. Whereas his debut, he says, centered on youth and identity struggle, his latest is “as much about facing a huge brave new world, a massive new environment and feeling like you don’t know how to process it all.” It’s not surprising such themes would emerge from Livingston: over the past year since he signed with Elektra Records, the 20-year-old has been on a rollercoaster ride that’s taken him from his native small-town of Denton, Texas to New York, Los Angeles and back, all as he introduces himself and his music to the world. To that end, “As much as I still feel like the kid in the back of the class, I hope those are the kids I’m speaking to,” he explains. “I hope those are now the kids my music is reaching.”
Raised on a healthy dose of 2010s pop music — Black Eyed Peas, Kanye West, Imagine Dragons — Livingston says he was “conditioned from early on” to gravitate towards pop-influenced sonics. But what makes his music so dynamic is the way in which he plays with pop convention and by using outré production choices, then flips them on their head. The constant in his music, however, is simply that it carries with it a pristine sense of storytelling. Whereas the pop music he consumed on the whole regularly had “incredible hooks that felt empowering and uplifting,” oftentimes Livingston says, “they were so big and so universal that I felt them difficult to apply to my life in particular. By contrast, “I noticed the artists I loved the most” — from J Cole to Jon Bellion — “were the ones that were speaking to me and no one else in the world.”
