What makes Loren Kramar’s music beautiful is his voice: warm and confident , all glamor and ease and big, dramatic melody. What makes Loren Kramar great, though, is his sense of love and spectacle. Like Father John Misty or Lana Del Rey, Loren Kramar celebrates and indicts the complex mess that is fame, performance, passion, and art. He arrives to Secretly Canadian as the spotlit star of his Hollywood story, ascendant and armed with his best and most generous music to date.

Loren Kramar grew up in Encino in the San Fernando Valley, where his decidedly non-industry family was surrounded by the art and artifice of Los Angeles. Everywhere he looked there were dazzling possibilities and dizzying stakes– judgment, rejection, attention, fame and tragedy, all of it public and oh so near, sometimes literally next door. The proximity made Kramar’s dreams of a creative life seem achievable. He started singing and writing music when he was a child; he wrote a holiday album at ten years old, and spent Friday nights on the Warner lot with his best friend and her parents. Kramar joined choir and immersed himself in theater and dance. In high school, Kramar had a teenaged band and a teenaged manager, and they’d drive starry-eyed to LA’s beloved studios for a glimpse or a guided tour. Anything to peek behind that curtain.Kramar went on to study fine art and his music became more conceptual, spoken word pieces that were more about their performance than about what got put to tape. “There have been these fractured identities,” says Kramar, “and they have always felt very real, but they were pieces of me. They were exclusive, private, they felt like they had to be.”