No labels, no rules: Johan Lenox talks ‘Eclipse’ and his new musical chapter
Johan Lenox has never been a fan of labels. Even though he comes from a classical music background and has worked with artists like Kanye West, Travis Scott, and 070 Shake, he doesn’t really see what he does as a genre mash-up. For him, he’s just making songs. Sure, his classical roots influence how he structures his music, but it’s not something he tries to force. In his words, he just grabs whatever sounds good, no matter where it comes from.
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With his new track “Eclipse,” featuring KayCyy, Johan shows a darker, more emotional side of himself. The song came together quickly, almost by accident, but ended up being one of the strongest pieces on the project. In this interview, he talks about his creative process, how he approaches collaborations, and how he’s trying to start fresh musically in a world that feels like it’s constantly on the edge.
We understand your musical background is rooted in classical music, so how and when did the idea to blend classical with pop and more modern sounds come about? When and how did you discover that this was your artistic language?
Honestly, I’ve never thought about it as blending anything. I’m really allergic to crossover stuff and just generally “classical-inspired” music. To me, this is just pop music. Obviously, it’s going to have the influence of whatever else I’ve done in my life, but to me, classical music just serves a completely different function from pop songs and albums.
I do think you learn stuff working across multiple formats, though. Like, the way I structure a song might be influenced by what I learned having to structure 30-40 minute stretches of classical music in my previous life. And I’ve also put out projects like “isomonstrosity” and “Johan’s Childhood Chamber Nostalgia Album,” which I would describe as clearly classical music but which benefit from recording and production techniques I learned from pop and hip hop.
You’ve worked with huge names like Kanye West, Travis Scott, and 070 Shake. Do you approach songwriting differently when you’re creating music for someone else versus when you’re making it for yourself?
I’ve learned to be mostly very hands-off when it’s for other artists. Either I’m in the room with them just completely following their lead and offering ideas to solve the problems they’re working through, or sometimes I take full control over a very narrow part of the process like a song outro or a string arrangement, complete that work as if it’s my own, and then pass it off to them like a sample they can do whatever they want with. I rarely get into an extensive back-and-forth with other artists about their own work, which is something I’ve learned over the past few years. I preserve that level of anxiety and intensity for my own music and try to be more Zen when it comes to other people’s. Generally, if they bring me in, it’s because they know what they want from me already, so I try not to overthink it.
Let’s talk about “Eclipse,” your latest single released in collaboration with KayCyy, another artist known for pushing boundaries. How did that connection come about?
I think we met through 070 Shake, or possibly just online through the greater orbit of artists surrounding Kanye West. I’m a huge fan of his genre experimentation and just openness to collaboration. He’s insanely prolific, too, which is something I relate to. I think his voice does a ton to affect the feeling of this song; it’s really much more than just a feature. I’ve also featured on his music a bit and had him on a song of mine called “What Happening” in 2022.
Sonically, the track blends some really interesting textures with a powerful beat. Personally, I wasn’t having a great day when I first heard it, but it instantly lifted my mood. What kind of emotional energy were you hoping to transmit with this song?
Wow, that makes me very happy to hear that. To be honest, I barely remember making it. I think I was finishing my album and just wanting some different ideas to put into it from what I already had and made like 5 very rapid-fire ideas in one night, and then the next day was going back through them and was like, Oh sh*t, this is something. Once Kaycyy got on it, it became something really special. I think now the mood I most associate it with is just midnight in New York City because that’s where we were when we made the video for it. The piano really reminds me of that place a lot. The overall darkness of it feels more appropriate to a denser city like NYC or Tokyo than to the very breezy and naturally lit studio in LA that I spend a lot of my time in.
You’ve said you make “music for the end of the world.” Why do you say that?
That just seems to be the overall context of everything right now. Lately, it’s with AI, which is something I’ve followed for a long time, but the threat that it poses to humanity is just lurking in the background of everything I do. This album is actually a very optimistic one for me, and I’m mostly abandoning the apocalyptic imagery for the videos for this one, but I can’t pretend what’s happening isn’t happening. For me, I personally feel like I’m in a musical rebeginning right now, which has really nothing to do with the state of the world, which doesn’t feel that way at all. But I guess part of the spirit of humanity is just to assert your own narrative on your life and the world, regardless of what else is going on, so that’s maybe what this is about.
From your entire musical catalog, which track would you assign to the day the world actually ends?
It’s really hard to know how that’s going to feel if we get there. I’d like to think I would still be able to mentally categorize it as a beginning, or at least a transition of some kind. Right now, I’d probably play “When Morning Comes,” which came out in January and is the first song on the upcoming album. Optimism seems like the move. Why dwell on what you already know is happening? Also, it would sound pretty massive in that context, I think.
You recently took part in the Cannes Film Festival with your work on the original score for ‘The Plague’ by Charlie Polinger. What aspects of composing a film score did you find most challenging?
People have been asking me about doing film scoring for years, and I’ve mostly avoided it or passed on opportunities until now, but Charlie was a close friend, and I really liked his script. I was lucky that our process was very loose compared to most film scoring processes, from what I understand. A significant amount of the music was written before he had even shot the movie, and most of the remainder of it was written during editing before I had even seen a cut. By the time I was watching a finished cut, my music was basically all edited into the movie, and it was really just a matter of me re-recording some things, suggesting notes, or tweaking timing on stuff. There was very little I had to do from scratch at the end, so it was a lot less stressful than it could’ve been. Honestly, it was very relaxing overall. If I do another one, I doubt it’ll ever be quite this easy, but maybe we can try.
What can you share in advance about your fourth album, which you’re already working on?
I was gonna correct this and say “third album,” but I guess if you count the Childhood Nostalgia classical album, 4th is right. I do so much different stuff, it’s hard to know what to include in lists. There were EPs before the first album; there’s the collab album isomonstrosity. The film score will probably have an album. I think trying to understand all aspects of me is a complicated prospect, and I haven’t really made it easy for people, even when I think I’m doing that. Even for this next album, I was really like, “this time I’m going to strip everything back and truly focus on just vocals and piano, the two main things I’m good at,” and instead the finished project is like all these different beats from different genres with tons of features and probably sounds nothing like that description. So I don’t know. The genre stuff is also hard because I didn’t grow up listening to a particular genre of music other than classical, and I like musical theater albums. So when I approach putting drums on a song, for example, it’s not out of loyalty to any particular music I grew up listening to, for example, or any scene I’m in; it’s very context-free borrowing from anything that sounds good to me. Which, again, I think confuses people. So I don’t know. I’ll just say it’s supposed to sound like a restart, and it’s gonna have a lot of piano and vocals in it! And we’ll see what everyone else says.
Do you have any dream collaborations still on your wishlist?
I used to have a long list, but I’ve done so much with so many people that I crave it less now. These days, I mostly just work with 070 Shake, or I’ll do the one-off thing with A$AP Rocky or whoever if it comes up. I like working with other artists, but ultimately, I think maybe I belong in a room by myself doing this stuff. I think maybe I’ve been a bit too open to trying stuff. Maybe I’ll start trying less stuff.
