YH EXCLUSIVE: Love You Later Drops Transcendent New Single "Brooklyn"!

I first heard Love You Later’s “Lost In Los Angeles” back in January of 2020, and I haven’t stopped crying since. The singer/songwriter, also known as Lexi Aviles, has an uncanny way of tapping into the most intimate recesses of your soul and transporting you into a transcendent state of mind. Perhaps that is because that is where she too draws from as inspiration for her music.

The last time we caught up with Lexi, she told us that another big inspiration for her music was her immediate surroundings (hence the aforementioned “Lost In Los Angeles", whose pervasive beach-soaked loneliness she managed to capture perfectly), but for her newest big city-themed single, “Brooklyn”, the inspiration was a bit different this time around.

“Although I did channel some sonic and ‘vibe’ inspiration from NY while writing it,” she explains. “It's mostly inspired by the discovery of a reoccurring theme in my life over the past couple years. I would connect with someone (friend or sometimes heading in the direction of romance), and just as I would become more invested, they would say something like, ‘Oh yeah, by the way, I’m moving to New York/Brooklyn.’ This happened with a handful of people, including some of my close friends in such a short window of time, and I decided it was this hilarious prank that the universe was pulling on me. So the song is less inspired by Brooklyn, the place, and more inspired by the story behind the song.”

This strange bit of synchronicity wasn’t the only influence on this single. On Love You Later’s Spotify account, you can find a playlist entitled “songs that inspired Brooklyn”, which features an array of auspicious titles like Alanis Morissette's "Hands Clean", One Direction's "Stockholm Syndrome", and Fleetwood Mac's "Bleed to Love Her". When I asked Lexi to shed some light on this, she explained: “I always gravitate to the songs that make me feel a certain way, and the songs in this playlist gave me the same sort of feeling that ‘Brooklyn’ gives. I know they don’t all necessarily hold the same sentiment lyrically, but they still make me want to dance and vibe like ‘Brooklyn’ does. Plus, I’ve been listening to these artists nonstop all year, and it’s impossible not to draw influence from music I love and hear all the time. It’s kinda like how you start to become the people you surround yourself with.”

When it comes to songwriting in general: “I don’t really have a perfected formula that I follow like some do. But 9/10 times, a writing session for me starts with a concept or theme idea in mind, and then I like to get a chord progression down. That helps me come up with melodies, and I usually mumble random gibberish before the actual lyrics come out. It seems to flow best that way for me.”

“Brooklyn”, like a lot of recent music, was written during the COVID-19 lockdown. [It’s] a song I’ve been sitting on for a while because I wrote it all the way back in quarantine,” Lexi says. “So I really just wanted to release it on it’s own.”

So does that mean there’s another EP, or maybe even an album, on the horizon? “Of course, there is more music on the way, but ‘Brooklyn’ isn’t necessarily tied to anything,” she says. “I’m writing a lot for the rest of the year and want to put out more music in the first few months of 2022.”

“Brooklyn”, which premieres exclusively RIGHT HERE at Young Hollywood, evokes images of walking home from a coffee shop at dusk after a fateful meeting with a blossoming love interest that didn’t go quite as planned (we’ve all been there!), and though it doesn’t “take place” in New York, you can almost see the lights twinkling in the Big Apple as you stand in Brooklyn Bridge Park wistfully gazing toward the East River on a chilly Fall evening – as if the narrator of the song is putting herself in the shoes of her lost love now walking the streets of Brooklyn.

All of that is to say, Love You Later has done it again, eliciting a special brand of emotional catharsis with her music as only she can, transporting you to a specific time, place, and frame of mind. And that’s exactly what she wants.

“I write my songs with the intention to make someone feel something. There will never be enough real and honest music in the world, so I’m gonna keep it comin. I don’t usually listen to my own music, but when I’m performing the songs live, absolutely I get in my feels. Most times, I get taken back to where I was when I wrote it and I feel how tangible the feeling was then. It is a beautiful thing to think about the lessons I’ve learned and how much I’ve grown.”

Check out “Brooklyn” below, and keep your eyes and ears peeled for more music in the new year from Love You Later!