Lido: An Artistic Blueprint

Lido was quick to pick up my FaceTime call, sporting a cozy hoodie and his usual buzz cut hair with a beard to match. This year, he had just bought the first house he’s ever owned, situated in the heart of Northeast Los Angeles. He had told me before about his shed in the backyard, which he converted into a home studio. To optimize the flow of creative juices, Lido keeps everything in the shed on at all times, so his musical ideas can immediately be recorded. During our general catching up, Lido got himself comfortable between the coffeemaker on his kitchen counter and a piece of abstract art hanging over his couch, objects that are both integral to feuling Lido’s artistic drive and inspiration. I’m generally not a coffee person, but I presumed that no homemade coffee could ever beat the iced coffee of Red Window, a small stand on the side of Ventura boulevard that Lido’s brought me to many times. After I promised him that I would visit his new digs during my next visit to LA, we quickly began to unpack his career path, a fruitful and unorthodox one for someone just shy of 30 years old. 

Born Peder Losnegård, he grew up in Norway as the son of a gospel choir director, picking up multiple instruments at an early age. He described his experience in the Norwegian music scene as somewhat of a “training boot camp” for the American side of the music world, learning how to make radio hits, produce albums, and go on tour when he was just a budding teenager. By the time he was 20, Lido had received accolades and awards such as the Edvard Prize, appeared on Norwegian TV, and gone by several aliases, from Lil’P to Trippy Turtle. Around this time, Lido also began uploading remixes and covers of songs he loved to Soundcloud, which brought him attention and traction from overseas. He revamped classic tracks such as Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine” and Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill”, amplifying them with boisterous synth chords, playful sound effects, and complete structural reworks, all characteristics that would go on to become trademarks of his production. After those remixes went viral on the platform, moving to Los Angeles seemed like his next logical step, as he felt he was “not only welcomed, but wanted”, and had a wealth of work opportunities ahead of him.

Coming to America was a thrilling experience for Lido, his humility and affability allowed him to easily construct a network of industry friends and collaborators. He embarked on an industrious circuit of concerts, performing for venues of all shapes and sizes from festivals to colleges, meeting plenty of artists and producers along the way. An exhausting experience for sure, but one that would more than pay off for him in the long run. He cultivated a romantic relationship with fellow musician Halsey, who was a little-known artist at the time, and would later go on to have multi-platinum albums and award-winning songs co-written by him. In 2015, The two began to work on her acclaimed debut album Badlands from his first apartment in LA. While working on the album, the pair also supplied an alternative version of the album’s opening track “Castle” to the Universal Pictures film The Huntsman: Winter’s War. When he was offered the chance to be a part of the movie’s soundtrack, he took to the internet to download a multitude of string libraries, music software add-ons that replicated the characteristics of a real orchestra, in order to make the arrangement “sound like a movie.” It was through this opportunity that our paths first crossed: My father, who works for Universal overseeing the production of film soundtracks, met Lido at AIR Studios in London while working with Huntsman’s composer James Newton Howard. The following year, I was introduced to Lido at 2016’s Coachella, where Halsey was among that year’s lineup. At the time, my passion for music production was nascent, and Lido became an instant role model and inspiration for me. We hit it off and exchanged numbers, and to this day we still keep in touch, discussing our thoughts on recent albums and learning from each other. He taught me about Cubase, the music creation software he works in, and I introduced him to Discord, a niche online instant messaging platform.

Later in 2016, Lido and Halsey’s two-year relationship came to a close amicably. They were able to continue a professional relationship while they focused on their own careers, eventually realizing that focusing on themselves was more important than prolonging the relationship, as both of them were feeling varying degrees of imposter syndrome. Their respective contemplations on the former relationship manifested in Halsey’s Sci-Fi inspired hopeless fountain kingdom, and Lido’s purifying venture, Everything. Lido’s album showcases how he used music creation as therapy to help cope with his breakup, looking to concepts such as the five stages of grief as a guidebook for its progression. Lido deliberates over the many meanings of the album’s title on the song “Crazy”, desperately singing over brass synths, “There is nothing real when you got everything / You can take everything, ‘cause you were my everything”. Lido’s overall confusion of how to proceed leads him down a dark path of anger and frustration, but eventually he comes to terms with his need to move on. A heavenly voice closes out the album on a sanguine note, asking him to rethink the meaning of its title. Lido is left with the final question of “What if everything's not everything?” Compared to most breakup albums, Everything differentiates itself by primarily focusing on the aftermath of a relationship, rather than recalling the event in great detail. Centering Everything around such a painful life event wasn’t easy, but he learned a lot of valuable lessons through the process of doing so. After its release, having to constantly perform and talk about a tangible representation of a low point in life was “probably really healthy, but exhausting.” He felt that making music about and attached to people other than him was “out of [his] control.” Ultimately, he jokes, the biggest takeaway from Everything was, “don’t spend so much of your brain on girls.”

When he began to work on his second and latest album to date, Lido moved away from writing music about other people and instead wanted to tell a story that was “fully [his] own,” and decided to channel his inner curiosity into a story of self-discovery through the guise of fantasy. Inspired by stories like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, Lido represents his discovery of music and his experience as a foreigner in the American music industry on 2020’s Peder. The album tells the story of a boy born on a spaceship, who hears music for the first time through an earthly radio station before he crash lands in a desert. While it parallels his own past and upbringing, the tone of the album conveys a juvenile and naïve sense of hope and optimism, whereby Lido channels the power of manifestation through his art. This otherworldly journey is embellished by soulful vocal performances and dynamic chord progressions, like on the album’s closer “Pure / Santiago”, that evoke his gospel roots. Even after the release of Peder, Lido’s still trying to understand this shift in mindset. “Maybe I grew up a little bit and just realized… I wanna make music that I feel good going back to,” he said.

While Lido is an exceptional producer and musician, what sets him apart is his approach to collaboration. Lido has had the opportunity to work with a wide variety of artists from rappers such as Towkio, EarthGang, Smino, Chance the Rapper, and Jaden, to pop stars including Mariah Carey, Ariana Grande, Ella Mai, and JoJo, just to name a few. Often in genres like pop and hip-hop, collaborations between musicians and producers can be very transactional and one-sided. Lido’s collaborations on the other hand, whether it’s for his own work or for other artists, are very evocative of his personality and abilities. Lido aims to fill in whatever gaps are present in a session however he can, resulting in him being able to become a chameleon in most studio sessions due to his wide skill set. When working on a session, no matter how many people are in the room, Lido feels that, “At the end of the day, my mentality is always ‘how can I help?’” Rather than viewing sessions as an artistic dogpile, where each individual contributes purely to tack their name onto the project, Lido sees it more as a puzzle, going into sessions knowing that “I’m gonna be a part of this regardless, let me figure out where I fit.” 

As more artists gravitated towards him, Lido went from titles like producer to executive producer, like on Portland rapper Aminé’s latest full-length album TWOPOINTFIVE. Even when he’s at the helm of a project, Lido’s approach remains the same. In addition to assisting the artist wherever they need it, Lido understands that “I’m not only trying to fill in the blanks… I’m also the quality control,” whether it’s finding the right individuals to be involved with the project or making sure everything sounds up to par with what the artist wants to accomplish. His work on TWOPOINTFIVE, for example, encourages Aminé to push sonic boundaries, and presents the Oregon native in the most experimental way we’ve seen from him yet. Even if he’s not contributing as a producer, Lido’s end-goal is to bring out the best in the artists he works with, and adapt to how they think about themselves. He recalls one of the earliest lessons he learned about executive production while working alongside legendary record producer Rick Rubin on Chicago rapper Towkio’s debut album, WWW. “There are artists that don’t believe in themselves enough, and there are artists that believe in themselves too much,” Rubin said. In either scenario, Lido’s able to figure out what he needs to do to accommodate the way the artist views themselves and their music, and adopt the role of executive producer knowing what needs to be done to make the project the best it can be. “Whenever I’m given that title,” he adds, “I take [on] the responsibility of making sure that every little detail is as cool as it could be.”

In a musical landscape where the concept of genre is becoming harder to define, Lido finds himself in between many traditional genres, but also wants to create his own niche genre amalgamations and become an example of them. He used to describe his sound to me as “Galactic R&B”, citing Peder as its textbook, but the latest evolution of that genre has been dubbed “Twilight Music”, which he describes as “music that doesn't fit in the daytime and doesn’t fit in the nighttime, but that’s really good when the sun is either coming up or down.” He isn’t confined by the restrictive nature of genres and instead creates from a stream-of-consciousness perspective, inspiring listeners to partake in the evolution of the newly created genres that result.

Many of Lido’s fans, myself included, are passionate about music and its craft, and many of us are able to latch on to even the smallest details that Lido hides in his music and appreciate them. When it’s a field recorded sound effect, a satisfying chord walkdown, or his 4-note musical signature, Lido hides musical Easter eggs in many tracks, even if they’re not his own. Even though Lido knows he’s appealing to people with a more critical ear for music, he views this aspect of his fanbase as an upside, feeling freer to create what he wants and not hold himself to the high standard that some other artists do. “I think fans that are true music lovers will always be curious and give your music a chance based on the fact that they don’t know what it’s gonna be,” he points out, in contrast to the belief that more casual fans already anticipate certain sounds, lyrical themes, and emotions from their favorite artists. This could result in artists feeling stuck, thinking they have to do what their fans expect them to do, whereas Lido knows his fans will love whatever he does for what it is. Lido even invites his fans to peek behind the curtain, giving them stems of his music to make remixes and partnering with companies like Native Instruments to produce videos breaking down his techniques. Beyond music, Lido aims to inspire listeners to rethink parts of their day-to-day lives and question why what we come to expect as routine has remained stagnant for so long, hoping listeners will believe that, “Maybe I can do these things that I thought were impossible.” Lido goes on to observe that, “I think a lot of my decisions throughout my career have been for that reason: doing something different is the only way to change anything.” It’s with that mantra that Lido has been able to amass a strong group of inspired fans, a network of diverse collaborators, and a discography that will inevitably grow and develop as the years go on. He’s perfectly comfortable and at the same time motivated by the amount of creative freedom he has by going about his work in this way, even though the traditional view of success is not the end goal. “Whether or not that’s the best way to make money as an artist? Probably not, but it’s definitely the best way to remain free.” Rather than becoming an unattainable idol, Lido aims to set his career up to be an example for aspiring talent, and I can attest that he's had an indelible impact on my life and work since I met him all those years ago.