Just over a year ago, Eckhaus Latta staged its fall 2024 show in an empty industrial office space in Hudson Square. Against the backdrop of a hazy gray Manhattan skyline, a makeshift stage—a lighting rig, a microphone, a few speakers, and not much else—had been set up at the center of the runway. From there musician Loren Kramar kicked off the show with a cover of Lana Del Rey’s “Hope Is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have — But I Have It.” As his deep, mellifluous voice echoed around the concrete walls, the audience—if videos of the event are anything to go by—was left entirely bewitched.
After a few false starts in the music industry by Kramar—a record deal signed in 2015 led to a scrapped album and a parting of ways three years later as he became determined to strike out on his own creatively—the show seemed to prompt a new wave of interest. It also happily coincided with the release of his debut album, Glovemaker, a few months later: a playful yet sophisticated slice of big-band pop that married the croon of Kramar’s astonishing voice—one part Jeff Buckley, one part Celine Dion—with lyrics addressing love, loneliness, and the anxieties of contemporary LGBTQ+ life. (A sampling of the tracks includes the exquisitely eerie strings and soulful warble of “Gay Angels” and the joyful bombast of “I’m a Slut,” in which he proclaims over rollicking piano and brass: “I’m a slut for all my dreams / I’m a whore for them.”) It felt like Kramar was finally poised for his breakout moment.
More important to Kramar, however, was discovering the catharsis and joy of belting out Del Rey’s music live, and before long it became a project in its own right. In the weeks after the show, he headed to the studio to record with Daniel Aged, a producer and session musician who has worked with Frank Ocean and FKA twigs, and with whom Kramar had already collaborated on Glovemaker. “We thought, ‘Well, since we’ve performed [these songs], we may as well record these. But once we started recording them, I thought, ‘It would drive me insane if somebody else released a Lana Del Rey covers album,’” Kramar says, breaking out into a laugh. “I was a little bit terrified to go about it myself, but I thought, ‘You know what: I have to do that.’”
