True to his name, Love Spells (aka Sir Taegen Harris) sees romance in ritual. “I feel like a lot of my friends don’t think about being romantic enough, even in the way that they live their lives, not just between partners,” the 20-year-old musician says, dialing in from his hometown of Houston. “Waking up can be a form of romance, making breakfast in the morning, in your kitchen. There’s romance in your everyday life.”
Romance can also be showing someone who you are through what you love. Harris speaks with the passion of a collector, rattling off memories of the artists who’ve shaped his life in easy, unguarded fragments. One minute, he’s telling the story of finding Lana Del Rey on YouTube in fifth grade, sometimes only a corner of his face visible as he paces around his apartment. The next, he’s talking about putting Earl Sweatshirt’s I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside on repeat, laying down the vinyl and letting it play while sprawled out in his room. Just recently, he got into Cigarettes After Sex after receiving comparisons and loved them, relating to their sensual arena anthems.
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“I want people to be able to do what I did — just put it on in the dark and listen to it. Then I want the music to keep you awake,” he says. “You’re lying in bed trying to go to sleep, and you’re making up imaginary scenarios in your head. You’re thinking about all these other things in that way. I want it to keep you up like that.”
Mariah Aguirre
Admittedly, Harris makes staring up at the ceiling and getting lost in those dreamier worlds ideal. He sings in a gauzy, otherworldly falsetto that communicates a sense of intimacy and wistfulness, collaged against a backdrop of dream pop, indie rock, and psychedelia. In an era of cracked, digitally manipulated noise, it’s breathtaking. His delivery is so controlled, even, that it may surprise you that he’s never taken lessons. Instead, Harris has spent years being his own vocal coach. “In a weird way, I would just sing in the way that other people would sing,” he says. In particular, he’d emulate a lot of beabadoobee and Billie Eilish (the latter of whom he discovered after hearing “ocean eyes” on Marvel’s Runaways, soundtracking a moment when his favorite characters became a couple). “It’s bad advice, but it’s worked for me,” he adds with a laugh.
Through a series of loosies, leading up to May’s The Love I Showed You Was Yours To Keep EP, Harris traverses heartbreak, desire, and impermanence — themes that, in the aftermath, revel in careful reflection, rather than someone who has lost hope in relationships. In that way, he has a humble but admirable goal — wanting to score your life in the same way that his favorite artists have done for him. With his latest song, “Wish I Didn’t Love You,” released last month to coincide with his first headlining show in Los Angeles, he succeeds, delivering a story of a withering mental state, searching for a way forward but lamenting the way that he still feels the traces of a former love all around him. It’s the type of retrospection that he wants to populate his debut album, which he’s currently at work on. “I’ve just been in the studio trying to figure out how I can have people open themselves up more in a way,” Harris says, intent to evoke nostalgia without feeling beholden to it. “I want them to listen to the album and want to be in love.”
Before he could reach that milestone, though, Harris cut his teeth with other scrappier projects, a wobbly timeline that points to who he’s been all along. When he was in middle school, he created a short-lived joke-rap group called 38 Mama, though the songs are lost to the digital ether. After that, he uploaded emo and punk confessionals to SoundCloud, exposing a desire to be emotionally raw. He’s always been a wayward shapeshifter, using a vibrant palette of genres and moods to reflect whatever state he’s in. It’s fitting, then, that he’s all over Kevin Abstract’s Blush, a similarly minded project that puts numerous collaborators, feelings, and sounds into a mix that prioritizes instinct and community. The songs, and the collective as a whole, operate like a movie where anyone can star as the main character, always shifting and meant to endure beyond promotional cycles, all while documenting real bonds between musicians in a similar environment — in this case, a packed Airbnb in Houston — that foregrounded Abstract’s rise. However foggy those borders may be, it’s opened up space for everyone in the room to get vulnerable and contribute to free-flowing conversations with unknown destinations.
Mariah Aguirre
No two songs are alike, flipping from earnest to brash to melancholic. There are several places, like the back-to-back “Yoko Ono” and “NOLA,” where you’d have to pull up the Genius lyrics to confirm that it’s Harris rapping, revved up with the kind of bravado that, by and large, eludes his usual intoxicating delicacy. “I need 30 bitches, 30 bands/Gold watches on my mans,” he asserts on the former, revealing that the words came to him on the fly. “That first verse, we were just joking around,” Harris recalls, laughing. “I did it in a low voice, and they played the beat. I was like, ‘Oh, this is how Tyler, [the Creator] would do it,’ and I just started rapping in Tyler’s voice, and they were like, ‘Oh, my God, you should put that down but in your high voice.’” More elaborately threaded through the tracks, however, are those spectral peaks that lend counterweight to the album’s busy impulses. Across “Post Break Up Beauty,” Abstract and Harris break into an angelic back-and-forth about growing into a new person while wearing fresh wounds, basking in the possibility of a glass-half-full future. It’s a welcome presence, pulling up for whatever suits the song best. “Love Spells changed my life in so many ways,” Abstract says. “He helped me find my artistic soul again. Allowed me to feel free again. This man has pushed me to be a stronger artist in ways he may not even know. I love him for life, and I will forever be grateful.”
In July, Harris was in Chicago for Lollapalooza, where he brought that unmissable energy to Dominic Fike’s aftershow with Abstract and fellow Blush collaborator Truly Young. While in town, he stopped by a bookstore and picked up All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks, a revered feminist scholar who challenges readers to meditate more radically on how to show and receive love — not only romantically but in all seasons of life. Harris, unsurprisingly, has deeply connected with the text, spotting commonalities within his own life. “There’s a lot of things in it that I’ve taken away long before even knowing about the book,” he says. “For example, she would say that a lot of men, when they write about love in general, it’s rooted in some sort of hierarchy. A lot of women write about it in more of a form of realism, and it’s less of a fantasy. Mostly, I think about that.” When Harris started making music, he would purposefully listen to more women. At the same time, his friend group largely comprised women, and he enjoyed hearing their takes on romance. “I strongly believe that men and women do love differently,” he continues. “I just align more with those things, especially in the way that I sing in a more feminine way on purpose, because I just feel like it resonates more. I don’t enjoy singing in my lower voice. Even on Blush, people would ask me to do it, but I feel like it was better there because I wasn’t singing about love. I was just with my guys.”
Mariah Aguirre
One of those guys includes the 24-year-old Quadeca, a kindred spirit who, like Harris, keeps himself dizzyingly busy, flipping his YouTube rap roots into a series of EPs, mixtapes, and his own record label, which houses this year’s extravagantly produced Vanisher, Horizon Scraper. “Love Spells is on a very small list of people I’ve met who made me wonder, ‘Is this what ‘star’ energy is?’” he says in the weeks leading up to a nearly sold-out tour. “When I first came to Houston to work on Blush, not knowing much about it, I was really excited to listen and understand the songs. When something stood out to me while listening, I would ask, ‘Hold on, who did that verse? Who’s the girl on that hook? Who’s singing on that bridge?’ More often than not, the answer to my question was Love Spells. I believe in him because he has a humble and vulnerable energy, wants to learn and listen to others, but moves with full confidence in his creative direction and abilities when it’s time to work.”
It’s a world away from where he started. Just a year ago, Harris was homeless, struggling to get his music noticed beyond a pocket of Houston but too demotivated and miserable to keep putting out songs. Encouragement from his manager convinced him to relocate to LA for a few months. There, he endured four-hour round-trips on the train to make it to recording sessions, wading through entire discographies — Radiohead, Lana Del Rey — to pass the time while soaking up and recognizing parts of himself in their shared melancholy. “I was so broke,” he says of that period, grateful for where he’s at now. “I don’t know if it was ’cause I was depressed, but I was obsessed with Radiohead. The emotions, the songs… Even when I made ‘Lovers Only,’ I was involved with this girl at the time, and it got easier for me to translate my emotions into the song.” He speaks openly and considerately, someone who’s freshly removed from that apocalypse while continuing to grow into himself, holding close to the tracks that gave off glints of light in an otherwise gray existence. All these months later, he’s been so struck by the experience that he wants his music to induce a similar catharsis. “I remember a year ago, I was so sad that I would just listen to songs on repeat. ‘All I Need’ would be on repeat for an entire night, and I would wake up to it playing — and I listen to music like that still now because I want people to be able to live with my songs like that.”
