On the Rise
Stella Lefty

Blowing up across TikTok and beyond with her ultra confident smile, joy-filled performances and hook-packed song teasers, it’s impossible to think LA-based singer-songwriter Stella Lefty ever wanted to work behind the scenes. She’s instantly friendly and chatty on our call, wanting to run the gamut on songwriting with passion and a natural charisma. 

Born and raised in Chicago, which she describes as “the best city in the world,” her dad is the billionaire entrepreneur Eric Lefkofsky, a fact that forms the basis of much online critique, but for Lefty, is a relationship she takes pride in. “I'm very, very close with my family. My dad in particular was the first intro to music that I ever had because country radio was blasting in the car no matter where we were going,” she says. “He's the biggest Swiftie! So I feel like he just had a huge impact on what I grew up loving.

“When I was going through my first ever breakup, we sat in the car for hours and just listened to Brad Paisley, Tim McGraw and all these things that just formed the way that I view relationships now, the way that I view everything now. So I love talking about him. He's my favorite person on the planet. Obviously there's going to be all the negative things that are said online and there's going to be all these opinions that are thrown around and I totally understand that. But I think for me and my individual relationship with him, even if he was not in business at all, I would bring him up all the time. That's our relationship. He's my musical everything.”

Lefty learnt guitar from the age of seven. “There's really funny photos in my phone of me being really awkward-looking at ten or something with a sparkly guitar. I was always playing the guitar. All I wanted to do was go to the guitar lesson and learn the most basic chords so that I could write when I would go home,” she says. “I just was so afraid of singing in front of anybody. Terrified. My worst nightmare when I was younger.”

She never considered a career in music, assuming all singers wrote their own songs. Instead, she went to college to study the very unmusical subject of public health. “I was really passionate about public health and medicine, and so that was my focus until my junior/senior year when I realised you could be a songwriter,” she says. “I didn't know that Tim McGraw, all of his songs were songs that amazing songwriters in Nashville had written. When I figured out what a songwriter was my junior year, I became set on being a songwriter. I wanted to write for other people.”

For part of her studies she was based just outside Amsterdam. Fresh from a breakup and away from home, Lefty experienced what she described as “a funk.”  “I was just in this weird spot and my friends that I was with abroad, they'd be sad for me to say, but they were super mean to me when I was abroad. They were not being good friends,” she says. “I was really alone, which would have been hard enough, but I was also in a completely foreign country feeling super by myself. I was writing every single day about everything and posting it every single day because my only relationship was like, me and my phone.”

Off the back of her posting, Lefty began to receive industry attention from labels, which she mostly ignored. It wasn’t until a publisher reached out about signing her that she began to get excited, realising songwriting could be a pursuable career path. “Literally I graduated college on a Saturday, flew out to Nashville on a Sunday, and I went to go be in my first ever writing session with somebody else,” she smiles. “I'd never written with anyone else. So all of the sudden I'm in Nashville writing with two dudes that I didn't know. And I loved it.”

After a week of writing the deal fell through, but it was the feedback Lefty received that really rocked her. “One thing that they had said to me was, ‘We don't want to sign you as a writer because we think that you want to be an artist,’ she laughs. “I was like, ‘What?! That's so annoying. You don't get to tell me what I am. I want to be a songwriter. I feel passionately about this. I don't want to be an artist.’ That really had me spiraling, but then long story short, I ended up finding out a few months later that I actually wanted to be an artist. They were right, even though it was annoying to hear.”

Realising her talent not just for writing but for connecting with an audience, albeit online at the time, she made the move to LA and refocused her ambition. While she still experiences stage fright, she’s learnt to manage it. 

Arriving in the UK and Ireland this week for a run of shows, including supporting Mumford & Sons at British Summer Time, she’s sharing new single “Good At Leaving” today. A much-teased stomp of summer country heartbreak, it has the power of a big field singalong. “I was like, this song has to come out,” she laughs. ‘Even though my last songs have been about being in love and this song is a bit of a pivot of that, I just love it. But truthfully, there's just so much music. There's going to be an album that's coming out really soon and I'm just like, maybe people are going to be bombarded with so much stuff, but better that than none. I want to give it.”

Recent single “Boston”, an instant cut of confessional pop that (unintentionally) interpolates “Stick Season”, is all over Radio 1 in the UK and in the top 30 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the US, with over seventy-million streams. “I wrote the chorus by myself. I was in Nashville for a week, sitting at the piano, and I wrote the chorus and posted it and wasn't thinking about anything. Then comments were coming up being like, ‘My god this sounds familiar.’ ‘This sounds like Stick Season,’” she laughs. “I'm such a Noah Kahan fan. I've been listening to Noah Kahan since the fucking beginning - ‘False Confidence’, that was my song. Obviously as a songwriter I pride myself so much on being original. I'm not out here trying to interpolate other people's songs. But what ended up happening was because of all these comments, his team ended up reaching out and we had a conversation about it and I was just like, I want to do whatever accommodates him. When you're alone, the pro is that it's the most free-flowing, but also the con is that no one is there to tell you, this might sound like something familiar. I was feeling free.”

It’s that good nature and collaborative spirit, both in and out of the writing room, that will benefit Lefty as she continues her ascent across a huge year that includes US and Australian tours. “I am exhausted, but it's a really good exhausted. I'd be so bummed if it wasn't like this, so I think it's easy to be really grateful,” she smiles. “I've been writing every day my whole life, so I'm like, this is really ultimately the dream. This is what I always wanted. So, as much as it is, I would be so pissed if it was any other way. This is all I ever wanted.”