LVCHLD is led by singer, songwriter, poet, and multi-instrumentalist Leo Becker Liebeskind. The group have just revealed their epic new single “Baby, Won’t You Pass Me the Light?” which is filled to the brim with indie rock tendencies.
The son of novelist Eve Becker and visual artist Bill Liebeskind, Leo was born in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and raised in a community in Upper Manhattan full of New full of art and music. His maternal grandfather and first teacher, Eugene Becker, was the second chair violinist in the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein, and pushed Leo to play music and start learning the violin at just three years old. Though the violin didn’t seem to click, Liebeskind did spend hours as a young child at his dad’s piano, teaching himself until his parents let him quit violin and take piano lessons instead when he was ten.
Leo Becker Liebeskind of LVCHLD shares:
“I wrote “Baby, Won’t You Pass Me the Light?” on the 2 train, walking through the 14th street station, and then the F train — crazy story, I know. I was terribly infatuated with someone who I could tell it was never gonna work out with, but we got high together, a lot, and so it felt like I had to write a song about coming to terms with just asking her to pass me a lighter, if nothing else — taking people and relationships as they are, something like that. After that, “Baby” kind of became the anthem of this band: you can take the lighter out of the baby, but you can never take the love out of the child…don’t you ever take that love out of that baby, or you’ll never get that lighter off that child. It’s a song that took about 5 minutes to write and about 5 years to record, but I’m proud of the track that it’s finally become, and I’m excited to see it enter the world, the pregnancy’s over.”
After a brief stint at Oberlin College, Leo returned home to New York to focus on songwriting and performing, where he met twin brothers, guitarist Aaron Mones and producer/multi-instrumentalist Wyatt Mones. The trio began playing together and found an immediate chemistry, with the Mones brothers’ deep background in ‘90s and early 2000s music meshing seamlessly with Liebeskind’s ‘60s and ‘70s roots, eventually coming together to form LVCHLD. Over the years, the band has brought on a rotating cast of friends to round out the live band, ranging from stripped down, acoustic sets, to a full 6-piece rock & roll sound. The band has become known around New York for its vivacious, dynamic, and emotionally raw live performances.
After working quietly in home studio set-ups from 2018-2020, LVCHLD has released a slew of new music since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Their first two releases, “Love Me All Up” and “Hats Off,” introduced a frenetically energetic rock & roll sound that is at once vintage and modern, looking to bands throughout rock & roll’s long history, like Derek and the Dominoes and The Strokes, for inspiration, and highlighting Leo’s trademarked high octane vocals, Aaron’s virtuosic guitar work, and Wyatt’s precise and sculpted approach to production. Their next two singles, “Sunshine” and “Costume Boxes,” showcase Liebeskind’s more lyrical work, as well as some of Aaron’s most nuanced playing and the trio’s most intricate orchestration, drawing on the work of some of today’s forward-thinking and genre-bending artists, like of Blake Mills, Frank Ocean, Sturgill Simpson, and the Alabama Shakes.
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