Me And My 75,000 Darling Friends: An Interview with Boy Jr.

Erica Lubman on TikTok, the Jonas Brothers, and her artistic identity

Welcome to my Substack! I’m Joshua Copperman, also known as Hannah Jocelyn, also known as Fell From The Tree, also known as the millionth person to start one of these but I didn’t even get a spammy Congratulations, You Won! pop-up. I’m calling this The Only Times I’ve Ever Known as a reference to Billy Joel’s “Summer Highland Falls” - the full line is “they say that these are not the best of times, but they’re the only times I’ve ever known.” And I’m trying to make the best of these times. Follow me for interviews, reviews, and other antics.

The year is 2020. Nobody is seeing anyone, and no one is being seen.

For some people, the lack of contact leads to life-changing revelations; for virtually everyone, it leads to mental health deterioration. Yet for people like Erica Lubman, it’s an opportunity to innovate and build momentum when the world has otherwise stopped. Garnering 60K followers on TikTok and creating a full-length album Starter Pack under her stage name Boy Jr. Though TikTok’s roots are translating longer songs into one-minute clips, Lubman’s done exactly the opposite, creating short songs and expanding them based on audience interaction. Her most popular are either re-interpretations of songs in the style of other artists —what if Billie Eilish wrote The Strokes?What if 100 Gecs wrote Sufjan Stevens’ Mystery of Love? —o r videos about her own sexuality and gender identity. (Lubman uses she/her and they/them pronouns per her TikTok; I’m using the former on her request.)  

A typical video follows her process in fleshing out a song, listing the various tropes she’s using - normally I’m very interested in the process of creation, but she so frequently lays it out that I thought it would be redundant this time around. She’s currently queued up several covers based on those TikToks, entitled the Costumes EP. This includes a full version of Sufgec — it helps that both the Gecs and Boy Jr. use Logic Pro X, meaning she can nail the sound as closely as possible. A more down-to-Earth St. Vincent is the easiest comparison, but I also hear Sidney Gish (one of my first interviews in 2018) and Slow Club singer Rebecca Lucy Taylor’s underrated side project Self Esteem. Fellow SUNY Purchase alumnus Mitski also comes to mind.

Lubman is similar to her TikTok persona over FaceTime — just like she’ll put on different guises in those videos, she’ll often dramatically drop or raise her voice to represent what people say to her and just as often when she’s imitating herself. It’s not all goofiness during our conversation, though: there’s a distinct focus on content creation and keeping up with what fans want from her — she refers to statistics surprisingly frequently during our conversation.

 As we discussed, this newfound dedication to content is sometimes at the expense of the more thoughtful music she makes; live staples like “You’re The Best” and “Me And My Darling Friends” sit alongside TikTok hit “It Still Fits (My Pikachu T-Shirt).” But all of that is integral to understanding who Boy Jr. is as both a content creator and a person. 

I graduated from the University of Rochester in May and I really appreciate the indie scene in the city — Lubman even put together a playlist of her friends who make music. I thought this was an ideal opening. Enjoy!

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How did you become interested in making music?

Both of my parents were music teachers, so I think growing up amongst the value of music and hearing a lot of different kinds of music and just having access to instruments is like the real seed of how things started. And then just like, as an angsty middle schooler, I was like, “Oh, I'm going to start putting my feelings into songs.” Like I'd come home and complain about kids at school who made me feel bad. So I just started writing songs. I also wanted to be the Jonas Brothers and was also in love with the Jonas Brothers in middle school. So like, especially at that point that I was starting to learn some chords on acoustic guitar and my big obsession was these guys who wrote their own songs and they were in a band. I was like, “that's it, that's what I want to be.” That's what I'm going to do. Everything I do is because of the Jonas Brothers. 

Why make an album now?

It was easy to get a lot of things done when quarantine started and didn't have to go to work. And because I got over some fears of putting out music when I put out “Suck My Finger Again”. And I actually, by that point, liked making videos on TikTok and having some sense of a place online that actually made me feel like it would be worthwhile to put out something a little more complete because it feels like some people are listening and interested. Plus I had a dream that I put out a double EP and I was like, oh I guess I can just do that.

What were those fears?

There are so many steps to getting a release out there: if I want to put out a song, I have to finish the song and I have to make the mix sound really good, and I have to find somebody to master it and I have to come up with like a release campaign and I have to tell blogs and I think I was a little too caught up in the protocol of like “how to be an indie artist.” And the idea of that task being like a fork with too many prongs instead of a spoon, it really scared me away. Cause people have been telling me to put music out for years. Like I would play songs in high school and people were like, you should put this on iTunes. People would buy it. And I was like, Oh my God, I should, but I won’t. To actually produce my own stuff with confidence now and mix with confidence is a huge wall down that makes me feel very confident about putting things out. 

What made you like TikTok as opposed to YouTube or Twitter?

It's quick, it's easy and it's free. That's pretty much it. I downloaded the app because I was interested in it and then I was just enjoying it a lot and then started to have ideas for songs. And the fact that you can make the video on the phone took away some of those barriers to entry, sort of in the same way that having confidence to mix my own music has allowed me to put music out online more than I used to feel comfortable [doing.]

I've thought about doing YouTube. But I'm very overwhelmed by the amount of content that's on there and the way that people work is so much different than TikToks that I never felt like I had strong enough ideas or enough of a drive to stitch together different takes and make a full thing The level of skill and craftsmanship on YouTube, it's different than what it is on TikTok. There's a lot of raw energy on TikTok, people like chaotic videos and things that are silly and very real. Whereas I associate YouTube videos with like, you know, people make a whole series. People make things that are super well edited, things that are 30 minutes long. I feel like I missed the bus for YouTube.

How did you come up with the idea for the Sufjan Stevens/100 Gecs video?

I had started getting into hyperpop this summer and wanted to pick a song that was also popular, but really unexpected. Honestly I think it was just going through my head and I was like dang I could hear this being a 100 Gecs song.

I loved doing that video because it basically got me into Hyperpop even more than I would, I think music that I like already kind of fits into that vibe. I'm obsessed with Caroline Polachek. I feel like had I heard 100 Gecs at any other time or any other artists with a similar sound that sort of go for something extreme, It would really have to hit me at the right moment. Otherwise I think I'd be very turned off by the music. Cause it's just, you're not ready for those kinds of timbres... your ears might just be like, this is wrong. This doesn't sound like good music.

The funny thing with that video, I think part of the reason it did so well is that it was really polarizing. And there were a lot of comments from people who didn't like it, but even people commenting things about how they don't like it made the video more popular within the algorithm because it's just getting comments [regardless]. So everybody who's like this sucks. I hate 100 Gecs. I'm like, thanks, thanks for your input. Cause now it's going to get passed around and even for people who do like 100 Gecs.

You’re defining yourself through pastiches while also making original music —  has that been an issue?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no, the part that it is a concern is that no one's ever going to be interested in my original sound because if I start to base my entire online presence on like, look how well I can masquerade as a different artist, I wouldn’t get a sense of what I want to do and be unique, how I want to be unique and how I want to push my own sound and make something different. But I also feel like I'm never going to lose that drive to do that because songwriting is also just a therapeutic thing for me to do. And I don't think I'm going to stop wanting to make my own songs just because of a couple viral videos. But also I really like doing sound-a-likes — I'm loving teaching myself or just realizing that I can tap into these things and transforming myself and putting on musical costumes.

I love doing that kind of stuff and I want to be versatile and I consider myself a versatile person as an art-maker in general. I want to be a diverse artist. I want to be one of those people where it will be expected that any more bodies of work I put out will go in a couple of different directions. And I do want to continue learning and growing and being able to change my [sound] for as long as I make music. So if people start to know me as someone who can make lots of different kinds of music, well, that's great. That just leaves a field wide open. Cause no, one's going to be like, oh, this doesn't sound like her last album.

With that in mind, how did you choose the covers?  I know “Last Nite” started out as a TikTok. 

There's three songs on the album that came from TikTok videos, the Pikachu T-shirt song, “Just Wanna Go To Bed,” which started out as a “Let's write an early 2000s garage rock song,” like sort of a Strokes and Killers vibe. And then the Last Nite cover... Three of those songs all got in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of views. So I just decided that like, those would be good to make full versions of cause people clearly seem interested. And now what I have to do is go back months into those old videos and for anybody who asks for a full version, I'll be like, “I know it's been months, but here's the link it's finally out!”

“Everybody” was a school assignment that I just fell in love with and was like, “this is going to be my song forever.” The assignment was literally “take an 80s song and fuck it up. Just do like the weirdest shit you could think of with a song from the 80s.” And I love Tears For Fears’ writing and that was like the end of my senior year. So I was really starting to get comfortable in Logic and using Native Instruments’ guitar rigs for all my guitar stuff and using that to build my instrumental beds. And just having a lot of fun with the different effects. And that kind of pushed me into everything that I did after college, which was like really, you know, using that fusion between live physical instruments and digitally manipulated things to create my own little world. 

How did you choose the original songs for the album?

I just have been playing those live for awhile. And I like the songs a lot. I was like, I'm gonna put them out. I had the idea. I think what I was thinking of doing first, like before TikTok was involved, is that I had a number of songs that I did at like every live show that I knew I needed to just put out cause people like them. And I guess it was just those four. I was playing those for like every live show, the past year or two. So those were going to be released regardless of TikTok or not, I guess.

The first song, “Seventeen.” is the oldest on the record. I wrote that several years ago just on guitar after I got into Mitski and, and I think the peak of my, like “I want to be the Strokes” years. I still want to do the Strokes, but like, different. And that's just about the way that some of those early teenage feelings that we mistake as solely belonging to our teen years do carry over into adulthood. And we might find ourselves in our young adult lives, feeling like the vulnerable things we feel perhaps about love and relationships or that have childlike teenage feelings. And it's treated as though it's something to be ashamed of.

The opening line of “Me And My Darling Friends” (“a subtle glance across the class/that human touch I crave so bad”) made me wonder if that was written during lockdown.

Oh no, I wrote that my senior year of college where I was feeling just very vibrate-y about everything. I was very anxious about graduating and very anxious about wanting to work very hard and really go out with a bang and impress everybody. And I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to like, be like, you know, desirable to everybody at once because I was very scared of losing all my connections post-college and being very lost. And just floating, not being tethered to anything. It's about a lot of things I guess, but the first lines are just describing. I think it literally came from like I was in a class and like made eyes with like you know, an acquaintance of mine that I thought was cute. And I was just feeling like I am a powerful God, I am looking at people and they are looking at me and we are all creative and we're all amazing.And we're working so hard for our dreams and we're all the hottest people alive and like that's the energy I was just being like, I’m so stressed, I’m just a little person, but also I'm so powerful. If that makes any sense at all.

The album, particularly “Drop at 1:01”,  is sometimes very minimal.

I wrote that one after Masseduction came out. I was like, Oh, I can write songs like this. I want to write so many songs. So I wrote, I wrote that a little bit after that. And I was also very much trying to channel “My Song 5.” And I wanted to give it this sort of slow burn effect that the base doesn't come in until the last time that riff comes around. And I don't know, I thought it was fun to work with negative space in a sense. I also have such a tendency to over compose and over arrange. Cause it's just so exciting. It's so easy to just like layer stuff and layer stuff, but then you lose the effect. So that was kind of a challenge to allow that to be a little bit bare-bones. 

Did you think you were going to make “Pikachu” a full song? 

I definitely didn't think that that was going to be anything longer than what it was for the TikTok. But now that happened once I've had that in the back of my mind for other things, especially with the full covers of like the cover songs. Because those tend to get more requests for full versions than any of my original stuff. So I've definitely taken that into consideration when  I'm going to choose an artist to cover has gotta be an artist that I already am kind of familiar with and really into, cause I do not want to like bite off something like bite off more than I can chew or like bite into a project or a sound that I don't like that I'm going to have to be stuck working with. But, I have had that in mind for the most popular video I made, that “Are they actually attractive” song. And that's an original that got really popular, which was awesome because it's an original! When I want to work on a new song or I want to finish a song, those are always there and I can go back to them.

Have you felt pressure to make things sillier to get more attention on TikTok?

Yes. I tried to think of ways I could make TikToks to get word out about all the songs on the album. And for some, I feel like it's too much of a reach and I don't have to make everything into a joke. And hopefully, you know, if people like the stuff that I'm putting out on TikTok and they listen to the full album because they like my sound, hopefully they'll still be enticed for the more serious stuff too. I don't usually make funny stuff. I mean, like I'm always funny and silly. And that was the joy with doing live shows, that I would be playing these like very emotionally driven songs about things that have made me really sad or really angry. And then I would like, crack a joke afterwards. And I'm like, we're having a good time. That's the fun thing about being on TikTok is like, it feels like it can kind of all be the in between stage banter. But then I've been doing a lot of livestreams where I am playing serious songs and people like those too. So that's been really cool.

It’s great to see you find success on TikTok. But I can imagine monetization being an issue.

Yeah. I think with their creator fund, unless you are like a wildly popular account with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers, it's the give and take that you get some money for your videos, but they cut your views a lot. So you kind of get shadow banned. I'm like, what's the point of that. Right. So I'm glad I didn't sign up for that. I was like, Oh, that's interesting. That's cool. I might consider that. And then I did not do it. And I'm glad because it's not worthwhile to try and make money from it. I just want to make fun content and connect with people. 

It's definitely a novel way of promoting your own music and especially if it feeds into your own music, making a full song inspired by TikTok rather than making kind of short videos of full songs, which was like the original purpose, is definitely new.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. That's a really good point. I have been doing it the other way around, cause it's just, it's been the thing that's pushing me forward to make new stuff. I need that drive to survive.

There’s a lot I didn’t include about why someone primarily known for hip-hop mastered the record, the thinking behind changing a song about Two Door Cinema Club to Two Door Cinema Lub, and an extended analogy comparing getting to know an artist to getting to know a close friend. These things and more will be on an extended edition I’ll release on a paid tier later this year.