It’s awfully convenient that Stella Lefkofsky can abbreviate her last name to “Lefty.” Not only does it forge some distance from her father, billionaire Groupon co-founder Eric Lefkofsky, but it also grants the 24-year-old singer-songwriter an association with one of the greatest country songs ever made. Critics aren’t exactly rushing to name Stella Lefty the best new thing out of Nashville, but her stage name does feel like a pretty blatant assertion of some higher aspiration. Thank God that Townes Van Zandt died before he heard “Boston.”
To Lefty’s credit, she at least doesn’t pretend that her dad had no influence whatsoever on her career. She promises she’d still be doing this regardless of her father’s profession; he’s one of the richest people in America, but he’s also a totally regular guy who loves popular country music. “Country radio was blasting in the car no matter where we were going,” Lefty once recalled. Brad Paisley, Tim McGraw, and Taylor Swift thus became her early creative guiding lights, although most of those family drives they soundtracked likely happened in and around Glencoe—the highly affluent Chicago suburb where Lefty was raised—rather than Tennessee or Texas. Lefty took guitar lessons as a young child, too, but stage fright held her back from performing the songs she’d written. It wasn’t until she was studying public health at Tulane that she made a crucial discovery: a lot of country singers don’t write their songs. She set out to become a professional songwriter, happily keeping her own identity at arm’s length from the music she’d be making.
But sometimes, a more lucrative way to circumvent stage fright is to just sing to your phone instead. After a couple of years of posting front-camera acoustic covers to TikTok—including myriad renditions of Noah Kahan’s folksy smash “Stick Season”—Lefty’s rasp began catching the attention of industry veterans. Subsequently, TikTok became ground zero for Lefty’s breakout hit “Boston” this past March, which is famous largely because it sounds a lot like Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season.” Finding out artists don’t always write the songs they sing, it seems, really did alter Lefty’s career trajectory after all.
In August, four months after “Boston” left the train station, the song was included on Lefty’s debut album Long Way Home. Half of its 14 songs first appeared on her May EP Is This Heaven?, a release strategy that portends a race against the vicissitudes of social media relevancy. The songs on Long Way Home sure feel like they were churned out on a time crunch, and the proof is in the puddin’: beyond “Boston,” “Why Wouldn’t We” boasts incriminating similarities to Blake Shelton’s 2017 song “I’ll Name the Dogs,” “Summer You Were Mine” sounds like if you removed everything great from The Chicks’ “There’s Your Trouble,” and I doubt I’m the first to notice the likenesses between “Good at Leaving” and Justin Bieber’s “Ghost.” Interpolations can make for exciting musical moments if the artist doing so has a strong point of view of their own; Lefty’s point of view, however, is tragically nearsighted.
Long Way Home follows a painfully unimaginative formula. A handsome, whiskey-drinkin’ man catches Lefty’s attention. We learn little about him aside from his affinity for whiskey—four different songs here mention whiskey because she’s a country star, dammit—and the fact that he smells like cigarettes, has chest tattoos, and probably isn’t looking for anything serious with Lefty, who admits on “Good at Leaving” that she’s pretty emotionally unavailable herself. One guy did throw a wrench in Lefty’s method, though: her now-boyfriend, the fellow rising country star Vincent Mason. He’s the inspiration behind songs like “Boston” and “Something to Lose,” the latter of which is a duet by the two of them. If you can believe it, they met during a songwriting trip in Nashville: “There I was, out of place / 2 a.m. in a southern state,” Lefty sings, quite a conspicuous lyric from a newcomer who just headlined the Grand Ole Opry.
Not every country-pop hit needs to unveil deep truths about its narrator, but it should at least sound catchy. That’s simply not the case for Long Way Home, where basic chord progressions and unremarkable instrumentals fail to make up for Lefty’s uninspired declarations: “Thinking ‘bout You” does not make me think of anybody, “Slow Dancin’” does not make me want to dance, and “Feel Better” makes me feel worse. The only song on the album that doesn’t reference a love interest, “Feel Better,” is where Lefty admits that she, too, sometimes crumbles under “the weight of the world”: “Yeah, on paper, I’d say everything’s great / But when will I feel better?” It’s frustratingly shallow as it is—and when you remember that Lefty has never needed to work a day in her life, it’s almost insulting.
Maybe that’s the crux of Lefty’s online scrutiny: the fact that she has all the world’s resources at her disposal, and all she has to show for it is forty minutes of songs that sound like other songs and lyrics that recall other lyrics. She could afford to employ the best songwriters and performers, or she could take the time to creatively challenge herself and—god forbid—read a book. I’ve listened to fourteen Stella Lefty songs and have yet to glean any new information about Stella Lefty as a person, because absolutely nothing is at stake except for her already-fleeting virality. Rich kids can still make good art; non-Southerners can still make good country music. But doing so, at the very least, requires a hook and a story to tell.
