Q&A: Avery Lynch is Unapologetically Vulnerable in Her Newest Single “Love of My Life”
CONJURING CINEMATIC MELODIES THROUGH ROM-COM MEMORIES — singer-songwriter Avery Lynch believes wearing your heart on your sleeve is key to creating a fulfilling connection with another person. In her newest track, “Love of My Life,” released May 20, Lynch lets her desires override doubt, leaving all words out on the table in the present moment with certainty that her newfound lover will pick them up.
Orchestral instruments stack onto a steady piano refrain and swell over the course of the track, evoking the fairytale feelings one may get when professing their emotions to a love interest for the first time. Lynch’s vocals are soft and passionate, cleverly admitting to her romantic sentiments in the form of questions. In this way, she confesses her optimism for their budding relationship while also leaving the song open-ended about their answer.
Hailing from Pennsylvania, Lynch has collaborated with musicians such as Alessia Cara and JORDY and found great streaming success with her debut EP, To Love Someone Else. Her star power is propagated even more by her supportive fanbase on TikTok, and songs like “To Love Someone Else” have amassed millions of streams without official playlisting, an impressive feat in the digital age. Fans of Holly Humberstone and Olivia Rodrigo will find themselves immersed in this ballad as well as her previous work, such as “Round & Round.”
Read below to learn about the process behind Lynch’s most recent EP, When It Ends, what inspired her to make “Love of My Life,” and how she infuses her love for film in every sound and word she creates.
LUNA: How is your year going so far?
LYNCH: It's good. I just moved to California in November, and then I came home right now for Mother's Day and everything. I'm home for a month. I don't do planes, and I live in Pennsylvania so we do road trips twice now to be home for Christmas and be home for Mother's Day and birthdays and things. But it's good. I think I like the East Coast better, personally, but I do like it. It's really cool.
LUNA: Let’s dive into the lyrical content of your single: Is it based on a real experience or person?
LYNCH: So the first version of the song existed before I even decided to write more, and I wrote it about my current boyfriend. I write a bunch of breakup songs when I'm in a happy, healthy relationship. I wrote a bunch of breakup songs because it's kind of what I do. So I decided to switch up and [posted] a little snippet … on TikTok — people ate it up. It's very sweet and people just liked it. So then I was like, “I should add to it.” And then when I added to it, I tried to embellish it a bit so that it could be good for a wedding song. I wanted to make it disconnected from me and from my exact situation so that it could be more applicable for other people in a bunch of different situations, scenarios, relationships. But I also wanted to make it like a young love, jumping the gun. That's a big thing to say. Like, “You're the love of my life” when you haven't even lived a long life yet. But the whole thing is about that lust feeling, like feeling so in love so quickly that you want to be like, “This is the love of my life.”
LUNA: I was thinking it reminds me of a cliffhanger. Because she's asking so many questions, and then nothing is necessarily getting answered.
LYNCH: You never actually know. It's just like a proposal.
LUNA: Exactly. I felt like it would be good on a show where someone's confessing their love and then that's where it ends and you're like, “Oh my god, what happens next?”
LYNCH: It's pretty open. I'm just going to express everything I'm feeling right now and then you can answer. It reminds me a little bit of— do you watch “Grey's Anatomy”?
LUNA: I don't.
LYNCH: So in “Grey's Anatomy,” the show is known for all the characters having these monologues where they’re like, “Shut up on talking. Now, let me say everything,” and they say all these things like, “I don't know if you want this,” or blah blah blah. But they don't give them a chance to speak. A full three minutes of the show is their monologue to the guy and/or the girl, whichever scenario it is. When they're done, the guy is always like, “That's exactly what I want,” whatever. And then everyone's loving now. It’s like, “I'm just gonna throw it all out there. And then when I'm done, let me know.”
LUNA: I listened to your other songs as well and I feel like you are very straight to the point.
LYNCH: I tried to be blunt. Sort of. Just because there are so many beautiful songs that dance around things but don't like actually say it. And me as a person, I like to say things how they are — I'm not gonna dance around it. Let's just talk about it. I guess that’s why I write like that too. Because when I'm writing a song, I'm thinking about, “Well, what would I say here?” That's literally what I write as the lyric, what I would say. So it's all very blunt.
LUNA: What is it that you like about writing breakup songs? Are there other topics that you'd like to discuss? I heard your song “Shit People” by the way and I really liked that song as well.
LYNCH: So I'm like a huge movie person, and my favorite kind of movies are romantic movies, or rom-coms. I get so into that. And I just love writing about these tragic situations; I don't know how to explain it. But in my song “When It Ends” on my last EP, When It Ends, I've never experienced it before in my entire life. But it's the concept of right person, wrong time. You know it's going to end, you want to say everything that's going to make you feel good now but that will make it so much harder when it actually ends.
It's a duet with another artist named JORDY. It’'s so pretty and I love it. This EP is the only project where every song is something that I am making about me. So, I don't I don't really know why I do it. I just imagine the most heartbreaking scenario and then make it a song.
I don't know why — I just love sad songs that make you say, “Oh my god, wow, that really changed the way that I think of this and that,” and it puts you in a different space. You can just listen to it and then move on with your day — it's a little bit more impactful, or it's something that can directly correlate with how you're feeling.
But I have a bunch that are about my life, like “Shit People” and “Out of Love with You.” I wrote that during a breakup. This EP is something I'm really excited about because nothing is that heartbreaking. I only have, truthfully, two ballads. And one of them… it's not even a full ballad. It's a cinematic type of experience, and it's very happy and nice. So it's a little bit different from my normal stuff.
LUNA: You almost create your own little world of sadness or happiness that someone can walk into and feel something.
LYNCH: Have you seen the movie 500 Days of Summer? I'm obsessed with that movie. I have a strange obsession. I guess I see such a beauty in those tragic love stories where it just didn't happen. You guys loved each other, and it didn't work out. There's something so beautiful about that — it's so sad. But I love the way that it ended, and no one likes the way 500 Days of Summer ended. No, it's awesome. I'm so glad that they did that. Because it's such a real relationship, and that's what I tried to do with my sad songs: make them mainly about that sort of thing.
LUNA: What brought you to the kinds of genres that you like to make music in?
LYNCH: I have a quiet voice and I wasn't trained vocally. So I never had the ability to be loud and do cool, crazy things with my voice. I just sing how I sing, and then I’ve played piano since I was a little kid. I've always played so soft, like, if I play on a real piano, I sometimes don't press the keys down hard enough for the piano to actually play sound. I'm just a very soft person. So that's kind of a natural thing … the music that I make matches me.
The acoustic stuff— I really want to be able to exactly recreate the songs that I make in a studio live. I think there's something so cool about being able to do the whole song exactly how it is. Obviously nowadays in production there are elements that are added to every song that you can't really redo unless it's like a completely stripped-down acoustic type of song. But this whole EP is all live instruments, nothing computerized. It's my vocals and guitars and drums and piano, and it's live piano, which is also cool.
None of it is MIDI — MIDI like a recorded piano. And I'm starting to move towards the mid-tempo sound, which sits in a really nice part for my voice because I always did either really upbeat or sad ballads. And now I realized by listening to new, different music — Holly Humberstone being one of the artists — there's this whole area in the middle, this mid-tempo, middle ground area, where I can sing and my voice fits perfectly in it. It's not dragging like a slow song. It has energy to it, but it matches me: it's my kind of energy, not like I'm just trying to make something upbeat just so that when I do shows; it's not like everybody's crying all the time. So this is very cool.
LUNA: We've touched on it here and there, but what are some other movies that you're inspired by?
LYNCH: Honestly 500 Days of Summer is the most inspiring movie I've seen for some reason. I am completely obsessed with it. I watch a bunch of shitty rom-coms, also all the classics like 10 Things I Hate About You. I'm obsessed with it. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. No Reservations, it's so good. I love all of them. I also love the Netflix ones, because those go so hard. The teenage high school love story type stuff — those have more like feelings than all of the adult relationship movies, because they dance around the feelings in those. But in the high school ones, like To All the Boys I've Loved Before, The Kissing Booth. They're just in it, and you are like, “Wow, there's a lot going on here.”
There's just so much to pull from. I love the kind of stuff I'm reading right now: It Ends With Us. I'm trying to read it because a lot of people keep commenting on my videos when I play my song “When It Ends” saying that it matches this book, which is funny because it's called It Ends With Us. They're making a movie for it, and that song could be like a movie song. So I'm trying to see how closely it is actually like that. I also love “Bridgerton,” which is basically like an eight-hour frickin’ romantic movie. I love that stuff. But yeah, I tried to pull from all of it as best I can. It's also just so fun.
LUNA: Do you have any projects or shows planned for the rest of the year?
LYNCH: So other than the EP, we have this song “Love of My Life” and then we have two more singles, an EP hopefully coming out in August, and then trying to do some pop-up shows here and there in LA. They’ll be 15-minute long shows where I'd just play one of the new songs on the EP and then an old one that people might know. Then make a content series of some kind, maybe on YouTube and TikTok.
Then we're looking at doing support tours for the fall. We don't know though, we will see since I'm a strictly driving person. It limits us a little bit. But yeah, that's kind of what we're looking at for the rest of the year, and then we're still making music all the freaking time. So it's just a bunch of fun stuff.
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