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SoundCheck Session: Livingston - July/August Featured Artist Interview
- LJ Portnoy
- Aug 7
- 7 min read
SoundCheck Session - Volume 1, Issue 5: Livingston Featured Cover Story
Coverage by LJ Portnoy, Editor-in-Chief
Photography by LJ Portnoy
If you’ve ever heard a song that felt like it was written just for you, chances are, it was by Livingston. We sat down with Livingston, the alt-pop artist for our July/August Artist Feature, during his A Hometown Odyssey tour to talk about his deluxe album, emotional evolution, and the stories behind songs like “Reverse,” “Gravedigger,” and “Nightlight.”
Livingston opened up about everything from navigating grief and identity to the wildest moments on tour—and let’s just say, you’re going to want to watch this one all the way through.
Check out our exclusive video interview below, and keep scrolling for the full conversation.
A Hometown Odyssey: Livingston’s Story Is Just Beginning
“I didn’t make this album in the last two years. I made it over the last eight. So in some way, I’m paying homage to the version of myself that had the idea for this album and was actively experiencing the things inside of it. But that was a sixteen-year-old version of me. I’m almost twenty-three now.”
There’s something remarkable about watching an artist trace the outlines of their own life in real time. Even more so when the timeline stretches across the better part of a decade. Livingston’s latest release, A Hometown Odyssey: The Story Continues, isn’t just a deluxe album. It’s a living archive. A map of emotional memory stitched together by grief, growth, and moments of quiet transformation. It’s the sound of someone evolving—and letting us hear the process.
What began in a childhood bedroom in Denton, Texas has grown into something far bigger than he could have predicted: 600 million streams, a global fan base, and sold-out shows across the U.S., Europe, and beyond. But Livingston isn’t preoccupied with the scale. For him, it always comes back to intention—and connection.
“I think identity is a lot of this album,” he reflects.
“It’s one thing to create freely. But it’s another to see your creation reflected back at you by other people—and then have them form an opinion about who you are. And then you have to ask yourself: do I like this version of myself? Do I stand by this? Or do I evolve?”
If A Hometown Odyssey was a love letter to the person he used to be, then The Story Continues is an open question. A gentle, aching inquiry into what happens after the dust settles—after childhood fades, and after you’ve lived long enough to revisit your pain with a different kind of empathy.
“Seventeen was rough,” he says simply. “It was this strange crossroads where my career was finally happening, and I was doing what I loved—but I still felt so lost. I thought that would solve everything. But I didn’t know where to take the next step.”
That season, he says, left a mark. But it also became a benchmark for growth—something he still reflects on when new struggles surface.
“I felt isolated and thought that it wouldn’t end. But then it did end. So whenever I feel like I’m running in place again, I remind myself that it felt like that then, too—and something beautiful came next.”
The Sound of Reflection
Livingston doesn’t write songs in a vacuum. He writes them in motion—while on the road, while looking back, while navigating the strange spaces between memory and meaning. And over the last year, that’s exactly what he’s done.
“I’ve basically been on the road nonstop,” he says. “This is the fifth tour I’ve done for A Hometown Odyssey in the last year.”
he shows, he adds, have only deepened his relationship with the music. “They’ve gotten progressively more emotional, more powerful. And I think even more wide-reaching on a demographic level than I ever could’ve imagined.”
With The Story Continues, Livingston wanted to approach the same universe with new eyes. Not a reset—more like a second glance. A chance to revisit the emotional groundwork of the original album and ask: What more is there to say now?
“The original album had just kind of crystallized for me after playing it live and seeing it reflected back at me,” he explains. “So I thought, What if I went a hundred percent into those feelings? What would that sound like? That’s what I did.”
The result is a collection of songs that feel both expansive and intimate—tracks that hold contradictions in their hands and don’t flinch. Take “Reverse,” for example: a sonic uppercut full of swirling optimism and aching nostalgia.
“Take me back to where we were / I could try to break the curse / And if we’re out of time / I’ll find a way to love you in reverse,” he sings. It’s one of his favorite lines on the record.
“I wanted a song that felt both futuristic and nostalgic at the same time,” he says. “It has this retro-future kind of production, but it’s also talking about going back in time, which I think is interesting.”
There’s a kind of emotional duality threaded throughout the record—hope and heaviness, wonder and weariness, beauty and violence. That contrast isn’t just a stylistic choice. It’s the heartbeat of the entire project.
He returns to this theme in “The Game,” a track that started a year before he finished it. One line in particular hits with the force of revelation: “I was a child till I found love and pain and bygones.” wonder and weariness, beauty and violence. That contrast isn’t just a stylistic choice. It’s the heartbeat of the entire project.
“That’s one of the core things for this album—putting really heavy things against very light things. And putting very big things against very small things. That kind of contrast has always been compelling to me.”
“That second verse was like writing to the version of myself who wrote the first verse a year earlier,” he says. “Almost like, What would I say to him now, knowing what I know?”
Grief, Glory, and Growing Pains
Some songs on The Story Continues arrive like gut punches—soft in delivery, sharp in meaning. “Gravedigger” is one of them.
“I grew up to be the gravedigger / My own gravedigger,” he sings—an arresting image of self-inflicted pain and personal reckoning.
“It’s just a memory of all the times in my life where I felt like I’m my own worst enemy,” Livingston says. “Where I’m causing myself more grief than I need to. It’s not the world putting it on me—it’s me putting it on me. And I think a lot of people feel that way, too.”
That emotional honesty courses through much of the deluxe project. It’s present in the frustration of “Millionaire,” a song originally written for Christina Aguilera that eventually found its way back to him—and hit closer to home than he expected.
“I was kind of channeling a couple different periods of my life where I felt like my trust had been taken for granted,” he explains. “And I am more than the check in your pocket”—a lyric that lands with quiet defiance—“that was definitely me reclaiming emotional worth.”
But for every track that delves into grief or betrayal, there’s another that reminds him—and his listeners—what it means to hope. “Nightlight” is one of the most personal examples.
“When ‘Nightlight’ got finished,” he says, “it felt like, this is that Fireflies (Owl City) kind of feeling. All-in wonder. I didn’t dance the line with it—I just went all in.”
“What are the sounds that bring that emotion out? What are the images? The colors? That song is the statement.”
“Look Mom, I Can Fly” builds on that same childlike wonder—glitter and gravity, playing with lions and chasing castles in the silence.
“That one was just fun. Like… Fun the band,” he says, grinning. ‘We Are Young’ was such a big song for me growing up. So it felt kind of in that world—just big and joyful and alive.”
Even in joy, though, there’s always a tether to something deeper. One lyric—“Don’t you leave before me, I just want to feel alive”—hints at the emotional pendulum Livingston is constantly navigating: between light and dark, fear and glory, movement and memory.
“Flying just means moving in a positive direction with agency,” he says. “Not being promised a reward or a carrot at the end of the stick. Just knowing that what I’m doing today is what I’m supposed to be doing. And that’s enough.”
What Comes Next?
Livingston doesn’t just write songs—he builds emotional worlds. Each lyric, each chorus, a breadcrumb trail through identity, grief, and the kind of fragile hope that keeps us alive. And now, standing at the edge of everything he’s created, he’s ready to burn it all down—and build again.
“I wrote most of this album when I was sixteen,” he says. “I’m almost twenty-three now. I’m about to get married. My life has changed.”
That change isn’t the ending. It’s the ignition point. “I want to come back and tell a different story—with a different message, and a different point. Something really meaningful. But also probably really different sounding. That sounds like the most fun thing in the world to me.”
And to the fans who have shown up—who’ve streamed every song, stood in every crowd, and seen themselves in every lyric—he offers this: “Thank you for being a part of this. I want to make something next that’s just as powerful. Maybe even more.”
He called this chapter The Story Continues, but make no mistake—the spark has caught. The next chapter is already burning.
So turn it up. Lose yourself. And hold on—because Livingston’s just getting louder.
And the world is about to listen.
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