The Wonders of Loren Kramar

Two spotlights frame the stage as a figure floats his way towards a microphone with elegance and poise. The opening chords of ‘Glovemaker’ echo around the room, bouncing off the high ceilings as the expectant crowd watches and waits. Kramar sways to the music before beginning to sing. His voice runs up and down scales with an ethereal, yet effortless ease. He is a born performer, his cabaret-style movements fluid, confident, but comfortable. Behind the show, he’s funny and charismatic. He jokes with the audience about his outfit, a sparkly dollar sign attached to the front of his shirt, surrounded by cascading waves of ribbons and fabric. Every gesture, every note, every quip, pulls the audience into his sonic world. The world of Loren Kramar. 

Born in LA, Kramar has seemed to have lived a million lives. He’s written music for movies, soundtracked an Eckhaus Latta show in New York and debuted his first album in 2024.  But when sitting down to chat, he seems grounded and grateful for the opportunities he’s had so far. Discussing his involvement with On Swift Horses (2024), directed by Daniel Minahan and starring Daisy Edgar Jones, Jacob Elordi, and Will Poulter, he reflects, “it’s such a Hollywood story”. 

“A friend of mine had posted some songs from my album, Glovemaker, on Instagram, and a film producer named Peter Spears, who worked on Call Me By Your Name and Nomadland, discovered the music that way. I happened to be performing at The Troubadour in LA, maybe a week after he discovered the music, and so I invited him to the show, and he came. I met him after the show and told him how much I loved his work. The next day, he said, ‘Oh, you know, can we hop on a phone call? I’m working on a project, I think you might be right for.’ And then he sent me an edit of the movie on Monday.”

On Swift Horses (2024) blends themes of queerness, longing and the search for identity, under the backdrop of 1950s Americana. Much of Kramar’s debut album discusses these same notions, with lyrics addressing loneliness, love and the anxieties of LGBTQ+ life in a modern world. Over the light-hearted brass section and a lively piano of ‘I’m a Slut’, he sings “I’m a slut and a witch / Tomorrow is just a wish / But I prayed for it / And I’ll pay for it”. ‘Gay Angels’ contrasts heavily in terms of tone, with Kramar’s voice shaping the ballad into a soulful exuberance of vocal power, accompanied by an eerie division of strings. 

For this project, though, he had to put himself in the shoes of another. ‘Song for Henry’ is sung from the perspective of Elordi’s character, Julius, to his lover, Henry. After spending much of the narrative restlessly trying to please his brother Lee and wife Muriel while suppressing his identity, Julius finds comfort in Henry. Though their bond is fraught with tension from societal expectations and fear, they together navigate the line between liberation and self-destruction. 

“I’ve never been asked to contribute to a film in that capacity before, I mean, it was really terrifying. It was terrifying because I didn’t want to retell the entire story of the film in a song, and I wanted to match the tone, but not overstate it.” Kramar commented. “Where do I have a lived experience that I can speak from, so it’s not just sort of a projection or fantasy? Where’s the entrance from my life into these characters? Where is my story in this person’s story?”

“I went to Toronto for the World Premiere. I was terrified. But I was when the song came in for the first time in the film, it was very unreal. I thought it was beautiful, and I was relieved. I thought everyone did a beautiful job, so I was just really pinching myself.”

Away from film, Kramar has recently released Living Legend (2025), an EP of five Lana Del Ray covers. Initially, this may seem like an unusual decision following his debut album of original material. Many artists stick to the rigid structure of making an album, promoting the album, taking it out to the world on tour, before repeating the process all over again. In the modern world of digitally distributed music, though, artists can, if they dare to break the cycle, do whatever they want. And that’s exactly what Kramar has done. He’s brought Lana’s hauntingly beautiful lyrics and embellished them with his own style and direction. 

“The way that that project happened, I had done a live soundtrack to the fashion show for the brand Eckhaus Latta at New York Fashion Week a year ago, and one of the songs that I sang was Hope Is a Dangerous Thing.” “I’ve loved Lana’s music forever, but it wasn’t until Norman Fucking Rockwell! and then the albums that followed that I really started to listen to every release. I would listen front to back, and I’d say for each of the albums, there’s always one song, maybe one or two songs that just became addictions in my life.”

While the thought had crossed his mind that he could record an album of the covers he performed at New York Fashion Week, Kramar reflected that the project didn’t feel high priority at the time. “I can record a covers album whenever I want,” he noted. However, after realising he wanted to exclusively record Lana’s music, his direction and sense of urgency changed. “I thought nobody’s done that, and if somebody did it before me, I would be so angry at myself for not having had the courage to do it. And so I thought, okay, now it’s a race. I want to win the race. There wasn’t a grand plan to do this, but it suddenly felt urgent.” 

The track list of Living Legend was chosen to reflect Kramar’s life. “I was dating someone, and then we broke up, and then got back together over the span of recording this EP. In some ways, it felt like this relationship was informing the music selection, and there was a lot of braiding going on. I remember, there was a date that we went on at a diner in LA and on the jukebox, they had Lana Del Rey music, and we were listening to ‘Ride’ at the diner. Then the last song, and I knew I wanted there to be five songs on the EP, and I wasn’t sure what the last song should be. And then I was listening to her albums, I came across ‘Beautiful’ and I thought, oh, my god. That song is for this person in my life, and so I have to sing that to him.”

The EP itself blends cohesively into the rest of Loren’s work, stripped back in terms of sound, but still inherently his. “We were thinking about it as the magic number three. It’s the voice, it’s one instrument that is very much the spine, and then there’s a third element, which would be another instrument that’s doing what the voice can’t or doesn’t want to do.” “I think what helped was that most of the musicians did not know these songs. They knew Lana, maybe they knew ‘Ride’, but they didn’t know ‘Living Legend’. They didn’t know ‘Beautiful’. So already, we sort of avoided the risk of copying the originals, because the musicians were not totally familiar with original songs.”

Throughout all of his work, there is one string that seems to have wrapped its way around each project, each song, each release. Kramar is from Los Angeles, Lana identifies herself with the idea of LA, and On Swift Horses is set predominantly in the city. “I mean, it’s so funny, it’s something I was thinking about, even just getting to Europe yesterday. I am this American guy travelling the world. And not only that, but you start to narrow down your profile when you travel, and then I’m this gay guy from LA. I want to be synonymous with Los Angeles. I want to be a little hometown hero, I can’t help myself. When I wrote that song, ‘Hollywood Blvd’, and all of the imagery we built out around it, I want my friends to drive down Hollywood Boulevard and think, ‘Oh, I wonder how Loren’s doing.”

This week, Loren has set out with Father John Misty as support on his UK tour. “The phenomenon of life is that Father John Misty has been a hero of mine for a long, long time. And so the fact that I’m this is now my second tour with him, it’s completely miraculous to me.” “I love the UK, and I’m not even just saying that. BBC Six played my song ‘Hollywood Blvd’ when I released it.  I’ve performed here now a few times, and the shows are always really fucking fun and rowdy and engaged.”

He has a voice that will stop you in your tracks, a charisma that will charm a crowd into silence, and a presence so magnetic it lingers long after he’s left the stage. If you can catch him on tour with FJM, please do. Loren is certainly one to watch.

Words by Arabella Wright