A Velvet Voice Covers A Living Legend

Arriving fashionably late is practically party etiquette at the Chateau Marmont. So when Los Angeles-based musician Loren Kramar strolled into the French Gothic hotel for a friend’s birthday, he timed it perfectly—slipping into an intimate celebration of just ten people without a beat.

Loren, a musician known for his sensitivity to detail since emerging in 2015, remembers the usual scene—drinks flowing, cigarettes lit, everyone playing their part in a series of fleeting vignettes that defined the Chateau Marmont mood. Amid it all, he noticed Lana Del Rey sitting on the hotel room floor, cradling a cappuccino, entirely at ease and untouched by the energy around her. Leaving the party, he thought, “God, I should’ve ordered a cappuccino. She’s so above all this bullshit.”

A reverence for fleeting, intimate moments—with music, with people, at parties—runs through Loren’s new EP, Living Legend, a collection of five Lana Del Rey covers. More than a tribute, the project feels like an act of devotion—not only to Del Rey, but to the private, unspoken histories her songs hold for so many. Kramar set out to honor a living legend while challenging himself to create something quietly revelatory.

Through the five songs– “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have,” “Heroin,” “Ride,” “Living Legend”, and “Beautiful”–Loren explores the infinite private lives between Del Rey and her fans, Loren being one of them. Living Legend flashes back to a late-night drive, a party at the Chateau, a cigarette break, a heartache. For a few minutes, a voice can feel like your closest companion.

The seed for Living Legend was planted in February 2024, when Kramar performed “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have” at the Eckhaus Latta Fall/Winter runway show during New York Fashion Week. Singing a song so intimate in a public space left him feeling exposed, but also newly connected—to the music, to his friends Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta, and to a memory that felt entirely his own. It was only afterward that the idea began to take shape: to canonize a living icon in real time, without yet knowing it would become an entire EP.

“What would kill me,” Kramar admits, “is if someone released a Lana cover album and it wasn’t me. It felt like a cultural race—an opportunity to pay homage in real-time.”

Loren approached the EP like an actor choosing roles—intuitively, searching for resonance. Over the course of a year, while navigating the push and pull of a relationship, each song became a vessel for whatever he was living through: love, heartache, longing. These universal tracks gained specificity through his lens, becoming powerful not in spite of their familiarity, but because they were made utterly personal.

“The context is this moment in time. Thinking of this moment as the party I’m at, not one I’m imagining from 20 or 50 years ago. This is about who is making music right now, who is listening right now, all the artists and fans and lives being lived in this hour,” Loren said.

That world—the one Del Rey constructs so meticulously in her music—is something Loren has long inhabited. The budding artist pulls out the archive of grief and ecstasy in Living Legend, rendering a new retelling. A recent past in perfect pitch. “It’s about addiction, pain, sensuality, nastiness,” Loren muses. “That’s the story I want to tell for myself and commemorate.”

“What was unexpectedly moving in recording these songs was thinking of myself as one of so many fans of this music. Not to say that I represent all of these listeners, obviously I don’t, but putting a voice to a loving listener was unexpectedly emotional and meaningful,” Loren said.

Loren assembled a cast of LA-based musicians—Daniel Aged, Dylan Day, Sam Gendel, Benny Bock, Casey MQ, Stewart Cole, and Zsela—whose clarity and intuition elevate every track. Nearly all of the recordings were captured in a single live take, with arrangements that never crowd the songs but instead honor their emotional scale. Zsela’s ghostly harmonies on “Ride” and Gendel’s tender, aching sax on “hope” are standouts. More than collaborators, these musicians became Loren’s creative community—and you can hear that intimacy in every note.

“[I felt] unguarded, loose, exploratory, and not letting hang-ups get in the way of the curiosity of the love of the respect [for Lana]. The musicians on the album are some of the best fucking players out there,” Loren expressed.

What covers do best is imbue the pain of today, and Loren reminds us through his EP of the extraordinary transcendence of great music. The soulful musician is a velvet crooner who belongs behind the piano at the Chateau Marmont. When he sings Lana, it is a kinetic alloy, both exuberant and heartbreaking.

It’s a strange and beautiful thing—to live one life in the world, and another through music. Loren channels that duality in his vocal performance. His voice and Del Rey’s feel like kindred spirits, drawn from the same celestial register. They don’t just sing—they extend a hand, guide you through landscapes of longing, memory, and quiet revelation.

“There’s so much depth, so much spirit, so much life in the context at this moment in time,” Loren says. “I want to honor the context by giving whatever the fuck I am. Whoever I am. What’s there to hide from? I’m not trying to play it cool. I just want to play it.”

The visual layer of Living Legend holds equal weight, with artist DeSe Escobar on the cover—another gesture of reverence, another thread connecting Loren’s world to Lana’s. In many ways, DeSe is a proxy: a Warholian ingénue, a downtown icon, a muse of blurred realities. Like Lana, she floats between fantasy and feeling, nightlife and nuance. Her presence is a nod to the community Loren has found and the one he’s helping shape.

As he deepens his connection to her music, Loren is also reaching toward what’s next. He’s sober now, less bitter, more grounded, held by experience and the people around him. This project only exists because he said yes to a moment—singing Lana at the Eckhaus Latta show—and followed it where it led.

“I want to surprise myself,” Loren says. “You can’t write a novel in your head. Let's go beyond what we can imagine. Let's prove through our work that it’s beyond what we can imagine for ourselves. That we are capable of making more and doing more than we thought.”