Luna Li is finding her wings

After growing up and launching her career in the Toronto music scene, she decided just over a year ago to pack up her life and move down to Los Angeles. Coming on the heels of a big breakup, the move was a much-needed reset. A chance to start over and make room to grow.

A performance career found its way to Li – born Hannah Bussiere Kim – as much as she found it. She was raised in the core of downtown Toronto, where her mother owned the Classical Music Conservatory with her partner. She was, as a result, steeped in a community of young musicians with whom she could try out all different kinds of lessons and instruments. Piano was where she started, but she eventually grew into classical violin, acoustic guitar, and songwriting.

From her hometown, she went to study classical violin at McGill in Montreal. But it quickly became apparent that though music was going to be her full-time profession, she wasn’t sold on dedicating the rest of her life only to violin. Her stint there only lasted one semester, after a break that was initially meant to be temporary turned out to be permanent.

“Even though I was studying music, it didn’t really feel creative,” Li admits. She floated the idea of pulling out with her parents, and, in the end, it was her mother’s partner, Luciana, who gave her the final push. “Luciana said: ‘Going to university is such a big financial commitment, it’s a big time commitment, and you should be sure about it if you want to do it. So why don’t you take some time off, move back home for a while, and decide what you want to do.’ So she actually suggested me dropping out! Which is very different from most people’s experience with their parents.”

After McGill, Li stripped it back to what she knew. “I moved back to Toronto, started playing shows, and started teaching at my mom’s music school,” she tells me. “I started getting really involved in the DIY Toronto music scene, and started meeting people through that … It all kind of grew from there.”

One friend led to a show which led to other friends and other shows. She joined a three-piece band shortly thereafter, leaning more on rock influences and shying away from her classical background.

And yet, it was arguably that very classical training that laid the groundwork for Li’s distinctive sonic palette, the skills that made her so exciting and accessible to audiences. “I sort of rejected my classical background at the time. I had just dropped out of school for doing violin, and when I came back it felt like playing the violin wasn’t very cool. I wanted to play electric guitar,” she says. “But I think when I really started figuring out my sound was when I actually started incorporating the violin.”

Through her own personal experimenting, Li got set on the idea of buying a loop pedal. Once she had down the basics, she decided to try layering not just guitars but also violins and other instruments to build lush soundscapes. During the pandemic, she started posting these dreamy tracks online. And people started paying attention.

In early Luna Li videos, you can watch her master every instrument, tracking complex arrangements on the go and building them up into enchanting worlds. Initial cuts from this era of Luna Li – like “Afterglow” and instrumental hit “2516” – feel like fairylands. Falsetto vocals and lilting pianos waft in and out over gentle guitar, violin riffs, and harp, which she picked up after being enthralled by a Maylee Todd gig at Toronto’s Great Hall. It’s the kind of music that could easily make you slip into a pleasant trance, and it’s music that makes it easy to see why the world fell in love with Luna Li.

But as she grew into herself and her projects, those gentle floating sounds also gained some muscle. “Silver Into Rain,” her landmark debut with Beabadoobee and one of the hit tracks of her debut LP, Duality, is a clear signpost in this evolution. Still featuring a core delicate, jazz-influenced guitar riff, the song fills out with crunchy leads and sharp, attitude-tinged vocals. “Silver Into Rain,” felt like Li growing into herself, taking her internet-era classical prodigy sound and making it her own. On her sophomore LP, When a Thought Grows Wings, that transformation was completed.

After an intense period of touring in support of Duality, Li found herself on the album cycle again. With the proven success of her debut behind her, she allowed herself the time, space, and grace to not rush her follow-up but to make it on her terms. Through a series of trial studio sessions in L.A. – where she had already begun the process of moving – she got connected to Andrew Lappin and Scott Zhang, also known as Monsune.

“The process for this album was different from anything I’d done before,” she says. “The culture of sessions in L.A. is very collaborative, and that was new to me when I first started coming here. For Duality, I’d written all the songs and then demoed them myself.”

Working with Lappin and Zhang, then, was like a challenge for herself. Both producers brough to the table their own iconic histories. Lappin has worked with indie legends like Cassandra Jenkins, Orville Peck, Marina, and more, while Zhang, another mainstay of the Toronto scene, rose to the top of the Canadian production pile and earned cuts on both Drake’s Certified Lover Boy and SZA’s Lana.

With each, Li would begin her writing process by getting in a room – in Toronto with Zhang, in L.A. with Lappin – and laying down instrumental tracks. Then, she’d take space to write the lyrics on her own, which would often come from scraps of poems or phrases she’d written down here or there. The time alone was useful. Having just gone through an intense breakup, Li says she used the solo writing sessions to sit and process, allowing her to be vulnerable with herself first and foremost. Only then, once she had her own head wrapped around her feelings, did she bring it to her production group or, later, to listeners.

When a Thought Grows Wings sounds like the natural product of this maturation. Sonically, deep, racing basslines and textured rhythms give the record more movement than perhaps some of her early work. “That’s Life,” for example, feels closer to the musical family of Clairo’s “Juna” than the 2019 bedroom-pop style came up in – though it doesn’t do away with that form completely. “Confusion Song,” perhaps the closest bridge to her last LP, still features those lush arrangements and dreamy vocal slides while still distinctively standing on its own through electronic-indie embellishments and markedly serious subject matter. “I thought we were taking space / Held my heart in a suspended place / Never said that I missed your face / Can love regenerate?” she wonders as the song opens, deep reflections juxtaposed with her airy and bright sound.

Through the world Li built for the record, she makes clear that a new version of her has arrived. On the album art, she lunges forward in action with an axe in hand, as if to chop down all that’s old and weighing her down, making space for the new. “For the album cover, I collaborated with my friend Maya Balkaran,” she says. “She had this idea of bringing in an axe as a prop, because she loved the folksy elements of this record. It was serendipitous that she brought in this idea because it tied in so well to the things I was writing about.”

“At the time, I was reading The Overstory by Richard Powers,” she continues. “I was so inspired by his writing about trees and the magic of nature. I already write a lot using elements of nature in my lyrics, and I started using the theme of the oak tree as something that represents stability and comfort. Then, when Maya brought on the idea of the axe, it was like me chopping down that stability and comfort to make room for new growth and new beginnings.”