Singer-songwriter Lyn Lapid isn’t the ‘situationship’ type

The ‘poster boy’ singer is building a fanbase with a romantic view of love that’s at odds with hook-up culture.

The Boston Globe | January 29, 2024

Singer-songwriter Lyn Lapid describes herself as “delusional” when it comes to love, but she doesn’t think that’s a bad thing. Lapid, 21, just wants to find love as a member of Gen Z, a generation engaged in hook-up culture and “situationships” — an undefined relationship landing somewhere between a friendship and relationship.

Her pop music reflects on being a hopeless romantic and the nostalgia she feels as a Los Angeles transplant who misses her hometown friends in Maryland.

Lapid — who claims the East Coast is the best coast — headlines a sold-out show at Brighton Music Hall Wednesday. She’s currently working on her debut album following the release of her EPs “The Outsider,” “to love in the 21st century,” and the latter’s expanded version, “to love in the 21st century: the epilogue.”

Lapid took classical piano and violin lessons as a young girl, but she didn’t find joy in music-making until she taught herself ukulele. She played through YouTube tutorials until she started uploading her own covers to the site in 2018, inspired by artists like Conan Gray.

Then she started releasing covers and originals on TikTok, breaking through when a demo of her single “Producer Man” went viral on the app in 2020. “I feel like that was the starting point of my professional music career,” she says.

She was a junior in high school when she signed a deal with Mercury Records/Republic Records.

Lapid treats her songs as a place to be open and honest. “I like to be very personal and vulnerable in my music,” she says. “I kind of use it as a diary at this point.”

“To love in the 21st century: the epilogue,” released Dec. 1, tells the story of a girl falling in love with a boy she’s in a “situationship” with. The initial EP release focused on the ebb and flow of Lapid’s feelings toward that person, while the expanded version adds songs about the people who supported her along the way.

“The deluxe really focuses on what it feels like to be surrounded by friends that help you through that situation and are just there for you,” she says. “I knew that I wanted to touch base on that in the deluxe EP because they were such a huge role in the actual story.”

“To love in the 21st century” was adapted into a short film inspired by rom-coms like Jenny Han’s “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” and “The Summer I Turned Pretty.”

“When we were coming up [with the visuals], I was just watching a lot of movies. I was watching ‘500 Days of Summer,’ I watched ‘La La Land’ for the very first time,” Lapid says. “So I took a lot of inspiration from that.”

Trying to find love in the 21st century herself, Lapid is frustrated by her generation’s attitude around romance.

“I feel like nowadays people my age hate commitment, and they’re always just about hooking up and not taking things too seriously and not getting too attached. I yearn for the ability of people to feel deeply and not be afraid to commit to things,” Lapid says. “And that’s what I wrote ‘to love in the 21st century’ about. It’s about how lonely it feels to want something that is committed and long-term, and nobody else wanting to be in that with you.”

Along with heartbreaking tracks like “could’ve been you,” she also released the popular single “poster boy” about a less serious experience: spotting someone beautiful and daydreaming about a life with that person.

She sings, “You were wearing corduroy/Looking like a poster boy/Caught the scent of your shampoo/Yeah, I think that I love you.”

Ahead of her deluxe EP release, Lapid gave her fans the song “east side,” a love letter to her friends in Maryland. “I’ll catch you on the east side/I’ll love you through the state lines,” she sings.

Lapid wrote the song about the nostalgia and longing for home she’s felt since her move to the West Coast to grow her music career.

“It was a very hard transition because LA was very different from the East Coast. The people are different. The buildings are different. The food is different, and it felt very isolating,” she says. “Moving away from my friends was very hard because I see them hanging out with each other, and I’m not there, and it’s just a very bittersweet feeling.”

Even though the dating pool can sometimes seem grim, Lapid advises fellow romantics to never settle.

“Don’t keep talking to a guy that just wants to meet up with you at 3 a.m. Do not settle for anybody that won’t treat you the way that you want,” Lapid says. “I feel like the hopeless-romantic me comes from all the rom-coms I watch. Even though it makes my standards unbelievably high, I truly believe that that kind of love is out there somewhere for everyone, including myself, so I will not settle until I find that and I urge everyone who listens to my EP to do the same.”