Credit: Whitney Wilson and Hannah LaJoye photography
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Spencer LaJoye’s music feels like taking a long walk on cracked pavement. Their dynamic acoustic tones and layered vocals are reminiscent of melancholic sixties folk songs - but Spencer’s genre-bending doesn’t end there. Resonant vocal loops spin these classic sounds into delightfully boppy songs that are both mesmerizing and haunting with their detailed, autobiographical lyrics.
Based in Boston, Spencer is a folk/pop singer-songwriter, violinist, and vocal loop artist who has garnered a growing fan base around the world through live performances, live streams, and an ever-increasing loyal Patreon community. Charming, humorous, and acutely self-aware, Spencer’s live performances leave audiences crying, laughing, and wanting more. With a dreadnought as big as they are wrapped around their waist and a voice that can fill a city,
Spencer’s ability to connect with a crowd of friends, family, and strangers is nothing short of remarkable. They grew up as one of eight in a family of musicians in rural Southwest Michigan. At the age of 5, Spencer picked up a violin and pursued classical music until college, when they swapped their bow for a pen. Spencer wrote their first EP as a closeted queer kid in a historically conservative Christian college while pursuing a degree in theology. Spencer’s songwriting and theologizing became tools of self-empowerment amid a culture of shame. Now, an outspoken nonbinary bisexual, Spencer’s goal is to foster a life-affirming community through music and to “bring people to church” at their shows.
Spencer’s first EP We’ve Been That Way Before won the WYCE Jammie Award for Listener’s Choice in Grand Rapids, MI, and most recently, Spencer was chosen as a winner of the 2021 Kerrville New Folk Songwriting Competition.
This fall, they will release Remember the Oxygen, a four-song EP written before, during, and following their coming out as gender nonbinary. “The songs document me becoming myself, a journey which involved just as much looking to the past as it did moving toward the future,” Spencer explains. “As it turns out, I knew who I was from the very beginning. I knew how to breathe all along. To re-become myself, I just had to let some things burn, let some things hurt, and finally...remember my own oxygen.”