Left at London Has a Place For You Here
[Photo by Ro Ramdin.]
About fifteen minutes into our conversation, Nat Puff has some choice words for me. It had taken that long for us to properly introduce ourselves – it was an early morning and we were both very tired – and I joked that it ultimately didn’t matter because I was, in my words, “just a person.”
“You’re just a person?!” she exclaims in apoplexy, as if I had just blasphemed. “You’re just a person?! You’re a living, breathing being in the middle of a coffee shop after two thousand years of…”
She pauses to reiterate.
“Not to get all new-age-y on you, but…I feel like my personal belief is that the word “God” is synonymous with the universe, and if the universe is synonymous to God then we – as people, this building, the grass outside, et cetera – are all small, small, small, small, small parts of God. And if we believe in that, then we actively have to take care of the parts of God that we are given to take care of. And if that is true, then hating yourself is hating a small part of God.”
An intriguing thought, one grounded in gratitude. She watches the realization sweep over my face and chuckles. “I didn’t come up with that on my own; I literally heard it from a friend of mine who I think was studying to be a rabbi at that point, and I’m not Jewish but I fuck with that concept heavily. We’re all influenced by the things around us whether we like it or not, positively and negatively.”
I don’t know what I was expecting from a conversation with Puff, but I certainly wasn’t expecting an impromptu rallying. But lifting up a complete stranger just seems to be the kind of person Nat is. During our two-hour talk, which takes place over two days, she gamely answers my questions with a razor-sharp wit and a wisdom uncharacteristic to the average 25-year-old. We also do a ton of rambling, rolling over myriad topics (the oft-discussed Beatles canon and the cesspool of rateyourmusic.com’s general userbase, among others) like river rapids. Yet the dominant sense I get from her, whether she’s constantly recommending me music, telling me to check out new acts or simply imparting advice, is one of generosity. She appears to radiate it during our chat.
And it’s not like it must be easy for her; reeling from a series of sleepless nights and wearing, in her words, literally the last thing left in her closet (a black T-shirt with a yellow wishbone, in a winking reference to the hook of her new record’s closing track), Nat’s natural benevolence feels less a product of smooth circumstances than a willful gift: given not in ease, but in acknowledgment of the struggle that stems from merely living life.
Whether intended or not, her output (which she writes and performs as Left at London) reflects that generosity. Her first two EPs, both volumes in a continuing series titled Transgender Street Legend, are led by songs buoyed by an “us-against-the-world” mentality. Volume 1’s “Revolution Lover” is structured like a classic soul song but with a contemporary pop edge, hitting enough pressure points for it to be her first significant single. Volume 2’s “Do You See Us?” is similarly communal but more incensed, its energy instead directed outward toward the racist, bureaucratic antagonists of 2020’s incendiary uprisings.
Even apart from her music she’s a giver, providing a bevy of free content – first on Vine and then on TikTok – that’s both wildly entertaining and oasis-like for the legions of fans looking for a place where their own issues are met with a sense of understanding. Like every artist, Nat writes for herself, but just as often she writes for everyone else: for those who look up to her, or who need a pick-me-up, or who at the very least could use a shoulder to cry on.
Her newest record, t.i.a.p.f.y.h., does not disappoint in that regard; while the seven-track album contains plenty of sad moments, overall it’s an uplifting experience, its acronym a reference to two songs whose titles could easily be issuances of comfort from a close friend. The record is Left at London’s longest project to date, and it is also her most ambitious. Irresistible melodies abound, including the bleep-based hook of “Out of my Mind,” the ascending vocals on the chorus of “It Could Be Better,” and the slowed-down sample of Floral Tattoo’s “Bible Dipped Dictionary” that forms the basis for “there is a place for you here.” Across the record, Puff consistently meets that ambition with an equivalent level of execution, and does so with the confidence of a seasoned pro.
You’d need confidence, after all, to lead off with a titan like “Pills and Good Advice.”
The boundless ten-minute epic, which weaves from Part A to Part G and back, bursts with ideas that Puff doles out at a pace measured enough to justify its formidable length. Those ideas are punctuated with inspired additions from other entities, not the least of which includes a soaring saxophone solo from her father Robert (who also appears in the same ’80s-era band that introduces “Out of my Mind,”) nor a clever reworking of a guitar lick sampled from Car Seat Headrest’s 2011 cult classic Twin Fantasy (Mirror to Mirror), which Puff is grateful to have acquired thanks to a fortunate connection with Will Toledo.
Its accompanying music video is also an achievement, successfully capturing the track’s sense of emergency thanks to heaps of footage collected from fans and collated together into an electrifying collage. All of this comes together like clockwork; despite the fact that it’s over twice as long as any song she’s released, its scope makes it arguably her finest moment.
That song would be one of a handful she would submit as an application to an artistic residency at Shoreline Art Cottage. The residency is one of several opportunities routinely offered by Artist Trust, a nonprofit organization based in Seattle with goals to “articulate the ‘edges of change’ that artists are creating and predicting,” and a stated emphasis on raising up the voices of marginalized individuals.
Puff discovered the offer, in all places, as a Facebook advertisement; though she initially assumed the offer was for visual artists, she submitted the application anyway in the off-chance that it would pan out. On the strength of her submission (“Apparently I was one of the highest scoring artists that David – the guy who was running the thing – had ever seen,” alleges Puff) she earned the residency, which entailed two months of access to a private space overlooking the Salish Sea. The organization didn’t provide a bed for overnight stays, but the space did share an adjacency to a slew of natural splendors, including hiking trails, a saltwater park by Richmond Beach, and the dizzying breadth of the ocean itself.
She credits the space as a significant factor in how the new record turned out. “I genuinely think it caused that album to sound as good as it did. I’ve actually been trying to find a separate studio space to do stuff in, but the problem with that is that those places cost money! And I live check to check. I’m gonna definitely try to do residency programs more in the future because, god damn, was that nice.”
“I feel like everything’s been building up to this moment, and this moment is building up to another moment, and so on and so forth. And so the signs were always there. I am an artist; I am not just this comedian.“
Though the majority of its songs had been at least conceptualized before the residency, it took the full two months to get the rest of the writing done. Everything but “Pills and Good Advice” Puff recorded on-site using equipment supplied entirely by her, save for a pair of monitors for mixing. (“Shoreline, if your taxes are a little bit higher, those were for my speakers,” she cracks.) Nearly every day during the residency she would make the drive to the coast and commit to full eight-hour days at the cottage, taking breaks between composing and recording to recharge her batteries or to keep up with the socials, the sea breeze a constant presence throughout.
Altogether the sessions resulted in nine songs, seven of which comprised the full album. Puff left the remaining two as bonus tracks appended to digital and vinyl purchases, respectively. The copy I purchased is digital, so from the download folder I received a soothing, sparse ditty unconventionally-titled “?a.” As a hypnagogic guitar and a violin duet hazily in the background, Puff is in full support mode, acknowledging hard times and urging us to do the same. Compared to the striving, structured songs on the main album, the track’s easygoing sprawl is a significant departure.
“It was scrap,” she says about the song. “It was a love song for the person that I wrote several not-love songs for. I just rewrote the lyrics to be about mental health, and I was like, ‘You know, I can make this a bonus track!” I mean, the seven tracks that are there are there because they need to be. The bonus track doesn’t need to be there, but it’s nice that it’s there.”
The title, she says, is an inside reference to the way iTunes organizes songs. “Every time that I turned on my car for a year,” she explains, “for some reason, it would always go to this track by Arca, which is called ‘?????a.’ That would be the first track, and it would be very anxiety-inducing for an Arca song to start up every time you start your car, no matter what. I mean, all love to Arca, but like, no,” she says, laughing. “So I just got this random voicemail off of my phone and I put into my iTunes and I called it, ‘?a,’ and that would play first instead. So I called it ‘?a’ for the people who have similar problems with their cars playing the first song alphabetically.”
“It’s a little gift!” she finishes with a chuckle. “Because I wanted it to be a calming song, and it is!”
Thanks in part to the change of scenery, the record started slowly coming into focus. Puff had a good deal of the titles ready in advance – two of which would inspire the album’s acronymic moniker – yet until she had the recordings down in Logic it was unclear which songs would take on which names. “I knew I wanted one track to be called ‘there is a place for you here’ and one track to be called ‘THIS IS A PROTEST FOR YOUR HEART!!!,’” she expounds. “That track was going to be ‘there is a place for you here’ until I conceptualized the actual ‘there is a place for you here,’ because ‘there is a place for you here’ I was originally trying to make ‘Kudzu.’
“So ‘there is a place for you here’ was gonna be ‘Kudzu,’ ‘?a’ was gonna be ‘there is a place for you here,’ and ‘Kudzu’ did not exist at that point. So that’s how it went,” she concludes, leaving my head spinning.
“Kudzu,” as it turns out, would become her personal favorite from the record, although the reasons why are simple. “I just like the way it sounds, dude. Plus the Willy Crooks sample, shit.” Her respect for Georgia experimental hip-hop artist William Crooks is palpable; she’s promoted his work in interviews before, and at one point she urges me to check out Stretch Pink Hummer, the EP from which she pulled “PF TEK FREESTYLE” in order to tie “Kudzu” together. “It’s a three-track, six-minute project,” she explains, “and I feel so bad for saying this, but it’s literally my favorite project of his, because it’s so…it’s got a certain style to it that I can’t put my finger on. But “Cuss Mode?” I literally played that for my girlfriend and they literally were like, “I cannot put my finger on what this sounds like. I can’t think of anything else that this sounds like.”
Puff has an affinity for artists who aim to break musical boundaries, which is not surprising; breaking boundaries has become a common goal among the newest generation of songwriters. That subversion is historically baked into Left at London’s oeuvre, but t.i.a.p.f.y.h. bends genre to an even more extreme end. Notwithstanding the stylistic free-for-all of “Pills and Good Advice,” the record deftly weaves through piano balladry, dewy singer-songwriter anthems, spacey beats, and the glitchy detritus of hyperpop. Part of that variety comes from Puff’s newfound openness for collaboration, something she says COVID indirectly ignited.
“That definitely changed with the pandemic. I wasn’t like that before,“ she explains. “I started sort of taking more and more of the Kanye route, where it was trying to listen to what the song needs as opposed to being caught in your own pride. Which is ironic for Kanye, but you know.
“It’s like, if you look at the credits for any Kanye album – actually, the thing that I like most about hip-hop albums is that they’re mostly like that, especially producer/rappers; they’ll have songs produced solely by them but they’ll also have a lot of songs produced with the help of somebody else and they’ll also have a song entirely produced by someone else, and that has always kept things fresh in an album for me. So I tried to take that approach for this album, and I unintentionally took that approach with [Transgender Street Legend Vol. 2], and I think I’m a better artist for it.”
In that spirit, Puff released an exhaustive series of liner notes as a Twitter thread shortly after the album’s release, showcasing the extent to which t.i.a.p.f.y.h. is a product of collaboration. Through it, we learn that 100 Gecs’ Laura Les provided a guitar backing on “Pills and Good Advice,” (“When I first listened to [1000 Gecs], I was so impressed because that’s what I was trying to do this whole time”), that New Jersey experimental pop force Vera Much supplied the piano line that anchors “The Ballad of Marion Zioncheck” (“She texted me at one point after the session was done saying ‘This is one of the only songs I had a hard time playing, not because I was bored of it but because it was such an intense song’”), and that Adult Mom’s Stevie Knipe earned a co-credit for their help in putting together the chorus for “there is a place for you here.”
“Stevie had essentially followed me a while ago,” she says about the joint effort, ”and I kept seeing them in my mentions and in my notifications tab, and eventually I was like, “You know what, I’m gonna follow them.” Didn’t even listen to their music at that point, and then finally I got to listen to it, and I really liked it. It reminds me of the stuff that I was listening to and was inspired by specifically in high school, which were songs that sound completely different to what I make now, and so having Stevie be on this track is really interesting because – not that Stevie was out of their comfort zone – but it was a genre that I hadn’t seen them write in before, and they fuckin’ did it.”
While collaborative efforts are abundant on t.i.a.p.f.y.h., only a couple stem from artists residing in her own city. “I don’t really know that many Seattle artists, to be honest,” she admits. “I’m a little bit of a hermit; I meet who I meet. I don’t really collaborate with Seattle people, not because I’m prejudiced against them but because I just happen not to. I feel like the type of people that make music in Seattle don’t make the music that I want to make, if that makes any sense.”
Though Puff is a lifetime Seattle resident and has nearly become a mainstay on KEXP, she tends to connect to other artists through a similar sense of artistry, rather than via geographic distance. The local artists she does work with occur more out of happenstance than anything: love-sadKiD, a young rapper currently living in Seattle but originally from Texas, featured on a track from Puff’s side project WOW OK, while fellow TikToker Ro Ramdin (of Rose Catalyst, Rohan!, and numerous other projects) contributed a handful of instrumental parts to the new record.
“Weirdly enough, I’m listened to more in Chicago than Seattle on my Spotify at least, that’s what it tells me. And I don’t know what that means. I’m played more on the radio here.” When I mention KEXP’s affinity for her music, she smiles in acknowledgment. “I’m really glad they do. You know, I made a clean version of “Kudzu” for them and I had to remove half the song, you know? But they’ve been playing it ever since, and it’s nice to have that radio play and to know that they have my back.”
Ultimately it doesn’t matter where Puff hails from or where she currently lives, because she’s first and foremost a child of the Internet. It’s not just the way she pulls from all areas of pop culture in her work, or knows instinctively how to pull a meme together; it’s in the way she carries herself, bearing both a personality and a gumption for engagement, that’s ideal for social media platforms. Before she started releasing music, a great deal of her fans used to know her for being a Vine star; as a teenager, she routinely hit viral status with a handful of gut-busting skits and savvy, tongue-in-cheek guides on how to construct songs from popular artists at the time. Since then she’s accrued hundreds of thousands of followers on each of her pages, with the most on Vine’s spiritual successor, TikTok.
During our conversation Puff doesn’t speak at length about her social media stardom, which is more than fair. Over the last year or so, a subtle fatigue seems to have settled over that aspect of her public output. Some of this is residual; over the months-long break she took during the tumultuous summer of 2020, she vocalized her intent to step back and allow other, more vital voices to soundtrack the outrageous events of that time period (Nobi-collab “Do You See Us,” among other songs, would eventually result).
Lately, however, that fatigue peeks out in direct expressions of grievance at the social media’s fickle inner workings. On one post from months ago she admits the irreversible damage to her psyche that being a viral star pre-transition has done to her; in another, she excoriates TikTok for copyright striking her own music in posts explicitly advertising the new record.
More recently she’s noticed such advertisements are being circumvented by the site’s content-based algorithm in favor of her posts that have nothing to do with the record.“I don’t know what about my “Hey, I have an album out” content, like, I don’t know what about that content is so off-putting to the TikTok algorithm, but it sure as hell is. I made this TikTok a couple days ago that was like…I’ll just show you,” she says before pulling her phone out of a small leather clutch, placing it down on the table between us and pulling up a recent video of hers.
@leftatlondon anyways click the link in my bio if u wanna hear my music lol
I have some questions – as a 29-year-old, I have no clue who the Backyardigans are – but the sentiment is blindingly obvious. Like most of Puff’s posts, the skit is simultaneously jocular and pointed, her vexing undercut by an emollient humor. It’s also not hard to sense her disheartenment where it relates to the hollow potential of her considerable social media audience. Perhaps it’s why, in recent interviews, she’s express her desire to take a step back from that material to focus more on the things she’s more passionate about, her music primary among them.
With this in mind, I infer if the ambition coursing through t.i.a.p.f.y.h. is part of that desire. “I’d say, like…” she starts, “I’d say that I didn’t necessarily make the album for people to respect me in the way that I want to be respected, but I definitely advertised the shit out of it so that it could happen. But it’s like…I don’t know, since the Purple Heart EP I feel like everything’s been building up to this moment, and this moment is building up to another moment, and so on and so forth. And so the signs were always there. I am an artist, I am not just this comedian.
“And I still get comments on stupid TikToks that I make. If I make a funny song, they’ll be like, “When’s the album coming out?” and I have to be like, “It came out, like, a couple weeks ago!” It’s like, now I have 300K followers and only a fifth of them are listening.”
“We’re all influenced by the things around us whether we like it or not, positively and negatively.“
Puff’s frustrations are far from uncommon. In a sense, they epitomize a peculiar phenomenon in today’s entertainment landscape, where the allure of social media virality clashes with the actual utility of that achievement.
In an environment where artists of every discipline are forced to self-promote incessantly, and where any discarded thought can be picked up by hundreds of thousands of people, playing the social media game can feel a little like playing the lottery. With a stroke of luck, and a penchant for repartee, any dream could become reality. The irony is that real, meaningful engagement is never guaranteed from such an event. It’s actually quite rare; there’s a reason why “check out my Soundcloud” has become a punchline. And to people familiar with the feeling, it must feel like a cruel joke to feel secure in the numbers, backed up by the statistics, only to have your passion projects – albums and songs fueled by hours upon hours of concerted, thoughtful effort – met by a vast ocean of deaf ears, as if they were but set pieces: billboards looming over Times Square.
Puff keeps pushing onward. It’s what she knows how to do. She’s got two more projects in development that are almost ready for release; the anticipated third volume of Transgender Street Legend and a long-teased record called You Are Not Alone Enough. If you check her profile pages or happen to follow her, most every day she’s offering another nugget of wisdom, or a killer joke, or a stinging callout, or a thoughtful lesson to people who may not be aware of the nuances of gender identity. In similar fashion, her brain never stops coming up with wicked clashes of pop tunes, whether it’s the AI-generated voice of Jay-Z reciting the Navy Seals copypasta as a fantasy diss track or a catchy remix of another viral TikTok involving an ode to a cat.
The music never stops; the generosity flows unabated. And Left at London continues to wear that cheeky, dispossessed half-smirk through it all, singing the hook:
“Wishbones don’t break for me/If I get it I’ll believe that it was meant to be.”
[Photo by Ro Ramdin.]
t.i.a.p.f.y.h is available to stream on all streaming platforms, and is available for purchase on Left at London’s website and through Bandcamp. You can also donate to her ongoing Patreon for exclusive content.
Lives in Seattle, terrible diet, loves music, has hope for people