Just over a year ago, Eckhaus Latta staged its fall 2024 show in an empty industrial office space in Hudson Square. Against the backdrop of a hazy gray Manhattan skyline, a makeshift stage—a lighting rig, a microphone, a few speakers, and not much else—had been set up at the center of the runway. From there musician Loren Kramar kicked off the show with a cover of Lana Del Rey’s “Hope Is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have — But I Have It.” As his deep, mellifluous voice echoed around the concrete walls, the audience—if videos of the event are anything to go by—was left entirely bewitched.
After a few false starts in the music industry by Kramar—a record deal signed in 2015 led to a scrapped album and a parting of ways three years later as he became determined to strike out on his own creatively—the show seemed to prompt a new wave of interest. It also happily coincided with the release of his debut album, Glovemaker, a few months later: a playful yet sophisticated slice of big-band pop that married the croon of Kramar’s astonishing voice—one part Jeff Buckley, one part Celine Dion—with lyrics addressing love, loneliness, and the anxieties of contemporary LGBTQ+ life. (A sampling of the tracks includes the exquisitely eerie strings and soulful warble of “Gay Angels” and the joyful bombast of “I’m a Slut,” in which he proclaims over rollicking piano and brass: “I’m a slut for all my dreams / I’m a whore for them.”) It felt like Kramar was finally poised for his breakout moment.
More important to Kramar, however, was discovering the catharsis and joy of belting out Del Rey’s music live, and before long it became a project in its own right. In the weeks after the show, he headed to the studio to record with Daniel Aged, a producer and session musician who has worked with Frank Ocean and FKA twigs, and with whom Kramar had already collaborated on Glovemaker. “We thought, ‘Well, since we’ve performed [these songs], we may as well record these. But once we started recording them, I thought, ‘It would drive me insane if somebody else released a Lana Del Rey covers album,’” Kramar says, breaking out into a laugh. “I was a little bit terrified to go about it myself, but I thought, ‘You know what: I have to do that.’”
The result of those efforts is Living Legend, an EP made up solely of Del Rey covers. (While the title track comes from Del Rey’s eighth album, Blue Banisters, the track list also includes “Heroin” from 2017’s Lust for Life and “Ride” from her 2012 EP Paradise.) “Taking songs that are basically from yesterday may seem strange, but that’s what excited me about it,” Kramar says, noting that he looked to a handful of past cover records—by Harry Nilsson, Cat Power, Rufus Wainwright—to inform his approach. “This idea of reemphasizing this shared culture that obviously informs my imagination and informs me as an artist…it’s not about tipping my hat to Bob Dylan or one of these artists who’s already been canonized and been around a few generations, but tipping my hat in real time. It just excited me for some reason.”
It does make a certain kind of sense: If any modish up-and-comer were going to record a covers album, it would be Kramar. There’s something distinctly old-world about his sensibility: the flamboyant style and fashion-model cheekbones, the unabashed showmanship of his live performances, his reliance not on production bells and whistles but the sheer force of his voice. Indeed, there’s never been a better showcase for what his rich, roiling instrument can do than Living Legend, from the delicate tremor of his vibrato on “Hope Is a Dangerous Thing” to the full-throated howl of the choruses on “Ride.” Despite Kramar’s art-school background, there’s something about the purity and timelessness of his vision that feels rare; the new EP is the kind of thing you can imagine hearing in the smoky basement room of a Sunset Strip dive bar decades ago, while also feeling entirely appropriate performed live at a downtown fashion show.
“I’m interested in fiction,” says Kramar. “I’m interested in a little bit more beautiful, a little bit more special, a little bit more perfect. But when it comes to making the music, recording the music, I’m not thinking about any of that. It’s a spiritual and personal act. I want full revelation. I want total nakedness when I’m making music. So if there’s a character, it’s Loren, naked, in pursuit of that.” He adds, after a pause, as if he’s just discovered a new mantra: “In pursuit of nakedness.”
One assumes Kramar only means nudity in the metaphorical sense, because if there’s another aspect of his work that feels especially thrilling, it’s his gimlet eye for the world-building potential of fashion. In the video for Glovemaker highlight “Hollywood Blvd,” you’ll see him swanning around a Los Angeles soundstage (Buster Keaton’s former studio, it turns out) in his dandyish uniform of a peasant blouse, waistcoat, and bell-bottom trousers, like a 21st-century Mick Fleetwood; for the images accompanying this story, he pulled pieces from his own closet, including an eye-popping waistcoat and flared trouser set that once belonged to Filthy McNasty, who owned the club that later became the Viper Room. “It looks like an American flag melted and dripped over a Barbie doll or something,” he says. “But I wanted to dress that dream, glamour, fantasy for these photos. It’s for Vogue, so let’s be Queen Bitch!”
Part of the reason Kramar wants to seize the moment with both hands is that he’s simply tired of waiting around for it. At 37 he’s already had a few creative lives—running an indie magazine, that aforementioned record deal, even working as a fashion designer in Zac Posen’s studio back in the early 2010s—but this time he finally feels ready to take things to the next level. “This is most certainly the story of a late bloomer,” he says. “There’s no fucking doubt about that. I wish I had all of the experiences that I’ve had when I was 24 years old, but it just doesn’t work that way. Some days I wish I were younger, some days I don’t. Some days I wish it happened a different way, some days I don’t. The story is the story. What am I going to do today? Go and make some work. I can’t dwell on what could have been.”
Part of that newfound freedom comes from the community of collaborators Kramar is surrounded by, many of whom crop up on Living Legend: Aged, who Kramar has known for over a decade, as producer; artists and New Theater Hollywood founders Max Pitegoff and Calla Henkel, who are directing the videos; Gaylord Fine Arts gallerist John Tuite, who shot the artwork; and the experimental pop musician Zsela, who sings backing vocals. “I am really trying to put a rope around my peers, my friends, people who themselves are working on their own projects that I feel are defining a moment,” Kramar adds. (To wit the downtown artist and nightlife mainstay DeSe Escobar, a friend of Kramar’s, appears on the cover of the EP; as Kramar explains it she’s the closest thing to the contemporary version of a Warhol superstar that he could think of.) Also: Keep your eye out for limited-edition Eckhaus Latta merch set to drop alongside the EP. When we speak, Kramar is about to head off to meet Zoe Latta to put the finishing touches on some of the T-shirts. “I’m not going to bullshit you, we still have a few different ideas floating around right now, but I’m excited,” he says.
Just one question remains: Has Kramar ever actually met Del Rey—and if so did she live up to his expectations? “I have met her, but she wouldn’t remember. If I were to meet her again, I’d pretend we’d never met,” he says, laughing again. “We have a mutual friend, and it was that friend’s birthday party at the Chateau. And I thought that I was getting to the party fashionably late, but it turned out I wasn’t. And there were maybe 12 people in the hotel room, and Lana was one of them. I met her, and we were all drinking, but she was just having a cappuccino. I thought it was so glamorous.” Well, where else would one hope to meet Del Rey than at the Chateau Marmont? “That’s right,” says Kramar. “Straight from the mood board to reality.”
