Embodying a Love Ethic in DJing with Lovie
“I have always given myself the utmost grace to follow wherever my creativity is going to take me”
H: Thanks so much for joining us! Can you start by introducing yourself?
My name is Lindsay, but under my DJ name, I go by Lovie. My pronouns are She/Her. I currently live in Bedstuy in Brooklyn, New York but I'm originally from Washington, DC.
I play mostly within DJing and nightlife. I'm a regular at these places where it's more of like slow, deep, intentional listening, and then every so often, I play in a club setting. When I'm in these spaces, I play disco, house, soul music, jazz- just overall music that’s really fun, uplifting, affirming, empowering and just feels good to move to.
G: It sounds like that encompasses the name Lovie. How did that name come to be? What does that embody for you?
I mean, look, I am a student of the school of Bell Hooks, so when I think about living by a love ethic, I think that definitely informs the kind of value system that I want to maintain as a person but also in my DJing and in my music sharing.
It's rooted in love and abundance and generosity and compassion. But also I just play a lot of love songs by Black people from the sixties and seventies where men were really singing their heart out about how much they loved a woman. When I'm playing certain sounds, it feels like this makes sense for Lovie to be playing this- you know, a deep love song.
G: I know you mentioned you had a theater background, what was your life before DJing? and how did it come to be what it is now?
I studied theater in Seattle and I lived there for about five years. I went to a very small, like less than 800 people, private conservatory arts college. And I had these friends who, you know, throughout different departments were interested in DJing or VJing, which is the visual-audio kind of synchronicity. And I went one time and it was like everything that I had understood about how much I loved music.
It really wasn't until I had taken some time off from theater and wasn't auditioning as much that I could finally look at this library of music that I had from watching Boiler Room mixes while I sat at the computer and did work study jobs or listened to NTS and The Lot Radio all day.
But as far as considering, ‘Okay, what can it look like for me to put mixes out?’ it really wasn't until we collectively got that space and time in the pandemic to consider, ‘Okay, how do we live digitally now’ that I had the time to sit down with a controller and a laptop and just start putting stuff out on a weekly basis.
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G: For someone like myself that doesn't really know what goes into DJing, what goes into a 30-minute or 60-minute set? Obviously, there's a lot of prep work, can you talk to us about what that experience is like?
The prep work is kind of all of the long-term behind the scenes of truly just listening to music. I think it's really underestimated how much of that informs how I'm showing up.
Like I may come to the club and I may play an hour's worth of music, but that one hour may have a song that I found back in like 2016 or 2017 that I've just been sitting on. So I'm able to kind of show up to these spaces and play for an hour or two hours, but it's years of collecting and curating and work. And that is kind of like the lifetime work, right?
So those are the behind the scenes hours that go into it. But then on a more regular like logistical basis, there's the booking of the gig, the self-promotion, the sitting down in my DJ software, putting it into a playlist, making sure I'm familiar with the party or club that I'm playing to make sure that when people are showing up, they're showing up with a certain set of expectations of what they're gonna hear and get down to that night. And also being able to pivot in the moment and not exclusively rely on that little playlist I brought. There's a lot of moving parts that goes into it.
H: I'm so interested in people that have such a deep musical knowledge and historical and technical understanding of music. What does your education process look like for learning more about music as you play more and more?
I love that question because research is like my favorite part.
One thing that I feel like I've transitioned to doing since I've started DJing is listening to full albums. Albums really give you context. Playlists help you find songs and find new artists. Listening to full albums really helps you to get to know an artist on a more personal level. So while I'm listening to an album, I'm also on Wikipedia. I'm also on Reddit. I'm also on different forums, just researching and getting more context for how did this person get to this place and to this album that I'm listening to right now. And the more and more that I do that, the more that I realize how small the music world truly is.
That's a big change and growth point that I've had personally as someone who listens and invests in and researches music. That collecting context and gathering context for artists just gives such a deeper life and meaning to the music that you're listening to.
G: What is something that you wish more people respected about DJs?
Yeah. Oh my gosh. Every time I'm in the booth, the amount of mindful awareness that I have to have. Because all I'm thinking about is, is somebody going to critique my transition when I move from one song to the next? If there is one thing that I can tell, ask, plead of everyone, is that they just give so much grace because you just have no idea, honey, the buttons?! Come take a look at the buttons, at the mixers, at the amount of movement. But as long as you are having fun, don't let it tick you out. Just stay in the moment.
H: What is something you think people need to hear right now?
Instinctually I wanna give people a music recommendation, but I also wanna give people an intention. I think hearing music without words, I don't know that we collectively sit with that as much as we can. And I don't know that we get that from new artists as much as I feel we should. Some of my most all-encompassing and resonant music experiences that I've had is with music that is entirely rooted in feeling and sound. And if I can encourage people to listen to Bobby Hutcherson, Lonnie Liston Smith, Alice Coltrane, some of these Black elders and ancestors that we have, whose music was entirely rooted in spiritual feeling and channeling. Sitting in that stillness creates a lot of room for so much to come to the surface.
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