Living Legend
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hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it
Living Legend
Heroin
Ride
Beautiful
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Released March 28, 2025
Loren Kramar - Vocals
Daniel Aged - Producer, Bass, Pedal Steel Guitar
Dylan Day - Guitar, Piano
Benny Bock - Piano
Zsela Thompson - Backing Vocals
Casey MQ - Keyboards, Additional vocals
Sam Gendel - Saxophone
Stewart Cole - Trumpet
James Riotto - Additional Engineering
Mixed by Kenny Gilmore
Mastered by Steve Fallone and Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound NJ
When Loren Kramar sings Lana Del Rey, it is not merely a series of covers, it is an exercise in purity – he has gone straight to the source of poetic love. We all know that there is no singular Lana. She is an entity, a character, a spirit which belongs to the public imagination. Through her songs Lana has provided the world a script, but like with all scripts, only rarely do they find the right actors. However, with Loren it’s another story. He is a child of Los Angeles, he is a velvet crooner who belongs behind the piano at the Chateau Marmont, and when Loren sings Lana, it is a kinetic alloy, both exuberant and heart breaking.
There is a slowness to the type of synergy that is Loren’s Living Legend – it took two lifetimes to get here; both Lana’s and Loren’s. In this way, Living Legend acts as a double portrait. An impression of two lives overlapping on an axis of poetry, grief and addiction, Loren’s voice pulling Lana’s past into our immediate present. This is what the best covers do, they imbue the pain of today, reminding us of the extraordinary transcendence of great music. When Loren sings the words hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me, it means something startlingly new.
At any given moment there are thousands of people mid-song, curled up in the smoke of Lana’s music. Listening to Loren’s covers is a nod to the scale of this choir, there are so many of us that know these words and he is just like us, an ecstatic member of the ensemble – and with that, comes the invitation to sing along. What is so powerful about Loren’s rendition of these universal songs is that they become singular to him. Loren becomes a mirror for all of us who love Lana. He transforms the radio sing-a-long into something operatic, magnificent and dark. This album is a reminder that it is ok to find yourself in other people, that this is how we survive.
The group of musicians who accompany Loren on this album, Daniel Aged, Dylan Day, Sam Gendel, Benny Bock, Casey MQ, Stewart Cole and Zsela, all hail from LA and their musical clarity is astounding. Almost each recording was done in one live take. The arrangements of voice and instrument never get in the way of the song itself, and everyone seems to innately understand how to render both the scale and focus of these covers. Zsela’s backing vocals on Ride are haunting while Gendel’s sax on hope is both soft and wrenching. Loren has found his community with these musicians, and you can feel that through every song.
The portrait of DeSe Escobar featured on the album cover is another nod to community. DeSe is in some ways, a stand-in for Lana. DeSe is also a living legend, she is a slippery ingénue, a Warholian downtown princess, a nightlife icon that is both artist and muse. Like Lana, DeSe is an emblem of a scene. She has haunted all the right parties, just as Lana’s music has filled in the soundtrack. They are both lightning rods for the collision of fantasy and reality.
Loren’s house is filled with relics, he is an emotional hoarder, driven by the idea of the time capsule and the question of how one can capture the butterfly-like-nature of existing. He has long saved the scribbled upon cocktail napkins from nights out with friends. He loves these napkins because they trace the time spent with others - they are a shared history. Just as Lana’s songs are a shared history with so many. They are the collective unconcious’s cocktail napkins of rough nights out, lonely taxi rides, and salient dusk walks. These songs trace the weaving in and out of so many heartbreaks on so many pairs of headphones and car speakers. Loren pulls out the archive of grief and ecstacy, rendering a new retelling. A recent past in perfect pitch.