Some songs are born with a pencil and a notebook. LP’s “Shelly” was born from a catch up call with a friend.
“We spoke briefly about how she was super happy and having fun with a new guy she was dating,” LP says. The details were rattling around in LP’s head when they walked into the studio with producer Mike Del Rio and co-producer PJ Bianco. Mike, listening to a rough track he’d just put down, asked the casual question that lit the fuse: “Oh, how is Shelly?” LP burst out with the line that became the song, “Shelly got someone! He’s younger and Colombian!”, and the rest is history. “It truly became something deep,” LP adds, “and the most intimate portrait of a friend in song that I’ve ever done.”Â
Co-written with Del Rio and Bianco, “Shelly” is an unmistakable summer song, built around the ukulele LP can’t quite put down. It moves at the pace of a long evening feeling slow and a little smoky, like it knows something you don’t. The video directed by Jesse Saunders and Zack Mizurik, is nearly all shadows, with a deep red running through it and a woman caught in low light. And on the table, an old dial phone sits, in case you need a reminder as to how the song started.
Long before the solo records broke, LP was writing for Rihanna, Christina Aguilera, the Backstreet Boys, CĂ©line Dion, Cher, Leona Lewis. The hook on Rihanna’s “Cheers (Drink to That)” is actually LP’s own voice. Label after label signed them as an artist and none of them could figure them out, saying too rock for pop, too pop for rock, and too much voice for any one box. The album that finally cracked it, Lost on You, came out of that exact frustration. LP’s previous record had been buried by Warner and they wrote Lost on You on the way out, about both a breakup and about the label that went cold, releasing it on a new label in 2016. It reached number one in 18 countries and has over a billion Spotify streams and counting.
A decade on and LP is taking Lost on You back on the road. The 2026 world tour celebrates ten years of Lost on You with the album performed front to back, alongside new songs from a forthcoming record, “Shelly” being the first taste and their first new music in three years. UK fans get O2 Brixton Academy and the Manchester Apollo in November and before that, there’s a summer stretch across Europe taking in Heartland, Open’er, Colours of Ostrava and a stop at Salles des Étoiles in Monaco.
LP once described what they do as “a working-class approach to music.” They treat songwriting as both a craft and a job rather than just waiting around for inspiration. It’s how someone spends two decades writing hits and building a solo catalogue most artists would kill for. “Life is beautiful,” they said of “Shelly.” It’s very hard to argue with.
