Chris Lanzon on self-talk, “Iris” and his collaboration with Harmony Tividad

by Billy Burgess | Wednesday May 08, 2024 | Features

Chris Lanzon, Photograph: Sully Enayatzada

Singer-songwriter Chris Lanzon was born and raised in Sydney, the city he still calls home. Lanzon’s latest single, “Angel Litany,” was written in Los Angeles with Harmony Tividad, formerly of LA indie rock band Girlpool. Lanzon met Harmony while in LA for a bunch of co-writing sessions, and the two of them developed an immediate rapport.

“We were only together for a few hours and we made the whole song in that one moment,” Lanzon tells Check Check.

“Angel Litany” is the first taste of what will be Lanzon’s fourth EP in as many years. His most successful release to date is an unironic cover of the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris,” which featured on his 2021 EP, Far From Perfect.

The “Iris” cover is a callback to Lanzon’s days as a popular YouTube covers artist. Most videos on Lanzon’s YouTube channel – including bedroom covers of songs by The 1975, Coldplay, Bon Iver, Harry Styles, Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo – have gained more than a hundred thousand views, but Lanzon’s energy is now focused on his original music.

Lanzon will support Sam Fischer on his three-date Australian headline tour this month. Ahead of the run, Lanzon speaks to Check Check about “Angel Litany,” his changing attitude to releasing music, and his feelings about that “Iris” cover.

Check Check: Was “Angel Litany” the only song you and Harmony worked on together?

Chris: Yeah. We met in an afternoon and we hadn’t met each other before and we clicked really well and just started writing. We were only together for a few hours and we made the whole song in that one moment.

How did you land on the theme of overcoming self-doubt and insecurity and accepting love?

I pulled up a little voice memo on my phone and it was just the guitar chords and that first lyric: “Your mouth’s so pretty / It’s all I think about when you’re with me.” And then Harmony was like, “That’s really cool, let’s just work on that.”

I think that lyric was quite love-themed, so from that theme, we were just exploring all the different ways that could go. I think it really captures the nice parts of love and maybe the parts you don’t talk about as often, which I really love.

Does writing with someone else change your attitude to lyrics – like, does it require you to be less insistent on everything having a precise meaning and resonating with your own lived experiences?

Very much so. There were a lot of lyrics that Harmony was coming up with that I would’ve never thought of and didn’t even fully understand in the moment. It creates a really beautiful thing because usually when you write a song, you’re being very intentional about the meaning of it. But because of these new ideas that are introduced… like, this song itself, its meaning has evolved in my mind over the last year and a bit since we wrote it. It has never been this one set thing in my mind.

It’s three years since Far From Perfect and four years since Melancholy, the two releases that built your profile. Have your ideas about what you want from a release and how you define success changed in that time?

Yeah, a lot. The first one, I was in this mindset of, like, I want to start putting stuff into the world and establish myself as an artist. And then once that was out, I felt all this doubt creeping in of, “Oh, is this even good?” and just so much thinking about how others will perceive what I’m doing. That was really quite debilitating for a while, and that second project was kind of about that.

I feel like my relationship with putting music out into the world is a lot healthier now. I think I’m a lot more focused on making things that I feel good about rather than worrying about how other people are going to feel about it.

How did you find your way to this healthier attitude?

Just a lot of working through the reasons why I feel that way. Like [asking], “Why was I doubting it? Why was I worried about what other people would think on the internet?” All these things that you can’t control.

I think just realising, if I can’t control it, then there’s nothing I can do about it so it’s not worth my energy to worry about it, and just really shifting my focus to what I can control and making sure I’m really proud of that.

How do you feel about people associating you with the “Iris” cover?

I’ve been doing covers on YouTube for years and then releasing one on Spotify as an official track was always this thing like, I’m never going to do that because I don’t want to be known as a covers artist. But I think with that song in particular – I mean, obviously everyone knows that song, but the version I did of it felt like it wasn’t necessarily like, oh, here’s me doing this song. It almost felt like it was one of my own songs.

It felt really natural and the response to it was really lovely online and I was like, “You know what, I feel like this ties in nicely to everything I’m doing. I’m just going to put it out there. It doesn’t matter. I can let my ego go away for a little bit and just give something nice to people.” I don’t regret it at all.