'I've never written about heartbreak before': Peach Luffe hits pause on the happy songs
The band from Toronto is known for its cheerful alt-pop. That’s about to change
"A couple of weeks ago, I experienced my first big heartbreak, one of the lowest points of my life," revealed Jong Lee, the singer-songwriter behind the Toronto-based dream-pop quartet Peach Luffe, during a conversation with CBC Music last fall.
While painful, heartbreak is also a time-tested source of musical inspiration, one that may end up being pivotal for Peach Luffe, whose music so far consists of endearingly cheerful songs exclusively in major keys.
"I've never written about heartbreak before," Lee explained, "and I think I've got literally, like, six songs in the works almost ready to go, it's crazy. It's minor, it's major, there's all these things happening — a lot of different aspects of what made the relationship fail."
'The classical thing has always been a part of me'
Born in South Korea, Lee moved to Buffalo, N.Y., as a child and took classical violin lessons.
"In seventh grade, I heard 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams' by Green Day and that made me interested in other types of music," he said. "And I heard a band called Linkin Park playing distorted electric guitar. I kept begging my mother to buy me a guitar; she ended up buying me the cheapest guitar from Guitar Center, and it was like something was wrong with it [laughs]."
Those frustrations aside, Lee eventually enrolled as a classical violin major at SUNY Fredonia. While there, he also played in a band called Sweet Apollo, which split after a couple of years. "The singer became a doctor and the drummer became a teacher, but I always wanted to do music and continue," he said.
He began looking for a singer to perform the songs he was writing. "They were pretty bad songs, to be honest," he conceded. "You know how it is when you start off, it's just like, you got to get the garbage out for a couple years [laughs]. I couldn't find anyone to sing, so I started singing. It was my third year in college and I started losing interest in violin very quickly."
While pop music beckoned, Lee stuck it out and finished his music degree. "As soon as I graduated, I stopped [playing violin]. But it's interesting: the classical thing has always been a part of me. Like, my favourite music to listen to is still classical music, and I record a lot of violin in my songs now."
After relocating to Toronto, Lee released music under his own name for a while. But because his songwriting was collaborative, he felt it was appropriate to come up with a moniker, Peach Luffe, to represent that collective effort. As the band's website explains, "Peach is because Jong likes peaches, and Luffe is because he admires the free and happy-go-lucky Luffy from [manga series] One Piece."
In addition to Lee, Peach Luffe comprises guitarist Sean Yerzy and brothers Michael and Jonathan Friedman, the band's drummer and bassist, respectively. And despite their experience in metal and rock, the biggest influences one hears in Peach Luffe's music are actually city pop (a genre of '80s Japanese music that Lee is "constantly pumping") and popular music from the '60s.
"To be honest, I don't listen to much '60s music," Lee admitted. "I listen to artists who are influenced by the '60s. I just love how interesting the textures are. Like, even the Beatles and stuff, it's very texture-based. Psychedelic stuff, too. I love those things, and I want to incorporate them into our music."
Peach Luffe had only released four songs when the COVID-19 pandemic began, but Lee said the restrictions on travel and live concerts actually helped him focus. "Right now, I'm learning about how my energy works and how efficient or not efficient I am with certain things," he explained. "Having live shows or other events ... just made it harder for me to song-write. I think the pandemic, in a way, made me get in the zone."
That creative zone produced two EPs in 2020, Bloom and Shimmer, as well as the 2021 single "Vanilla," streaming below, and response has been impressive.
"Some people will write me an essay on Instagram and DM and tell me what they thought [of a song], or how they took it," Lee recounted. "And it's quite interesting when it's, like, quite off from what I intended, but it makes it way more fun because people's own experiences and their own lives [are] not how I experienced it. And they're going to take it a different way, and their interpretation is also correct."
Whether making happy dream-pop or exploring themes of heartbreak and loss, as is the case on their upcoming songs, Peach Luffe's focus is authenticity.
"I'm going to make music the way I want to, with my friends," Lee said. "And anybody — they can be any race, any age, whatever — if they like it, I'm happy; if they don't, it's OK, too."