Spotlight: Grammy-Nominated Producer Roy Lenzo Reflects on His Career Ahead of This Weekend’s Awards
THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD ROY LENZO sat at his computer, staying up late so he could perfect beats on GarageBand and unknowingly keep his mom from sleeping through the night peacefully. It started when he fell in love with songs by pop icons like Britney Spears, Katy Perry and The Backstreet Boys. The sound behind his favorite artists caught his ear and led him to trace back to producers like Max Martin, DJ Khaled and Kanye West. One day, he decided, he was going to top the charts like them.
He recalled hearing “What’d You Say” by Jason Derulo and becoming obsessed with the sample from Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek.” “I was like, ‘Well, what is this?’ So I found it on YouTube and I tried to recreate that same exact beat, like over and over again to learn how they sampled it, what different drums they added to it because that sample is just incredible.”
From there he started to perfect his own style, using the building blocks from his favorite producers to eventually make it to college and study audio production.
Post-grad, his dream took him to New York, where he fulfilled the classic sit-com storyline of the young artist sleeping on basement floors and spending extra hours in the studio just to make it big. Faith in his music and the connections he was building at the studio got him through the times he still wasn’t making placements. He told the whole story with a dreamy smile, like he was reveling on the “simpler times” when he couldn’t make rent, wasn’t putting out albums, and wasn’t yet nominated for multiple Grammys. His incessant positivity was inspiring, but it also made me beg the question: “Did you ever feel like you hit a low point?”
“For sure,” he said. “I found on Airbnb a shared bedroom for one night. It was $50 and I was just tired of sleeping on the couch.” He sits up straight and smiles as he paints the scene. “I walk into the room and it's just like three other grown-ass guys in this bunk bed...there were beer bottles all over the floor. It was disgusting and I had to sleep on the top bunk,” he recalled.
“I was like, Oh my God, I feel like these guys are, you know, almost homeless. I had to sleep with my backpack wrapped around my ankle in case anyone was going to try to steal something. There's only one bathroom that all four of us had to share”-- at this one, he shivered a little bit, then quickly recovered.
“I was just like, ‘Holy shit I will never forget this moment ever again’” he laughed, “I really thought I was done at that point.”
Those three guys in that clammy SoHo Airbnb had no idea that in less than a year, Lenzo would wake up to several missed calls from his manager, calling to tell him he had been nominated for the Album of the Year at the 2020 Grammy’s.
“I remember I told my family and they were super excited, probably more excited than I was at the time, because no one in their close circle has ever experienced something like that before. So it was crazy.”
It was a special moment for everyone, from his friends at the studio, to his family, and even his old teachers from grade school, but Lenzo said he was most excited to tell his mom the good news. ‘She [always] knew that I was on my way to doing something really special. When I told her, I think I heard her crying on the phone.”
This year, he’s up for three more Grammys due to his work on Lil Nas X’s hit album, MONTERO. His nominations include Album of the Year, Record of the Year, and Song of the Year for “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)”.
Montero alone took him ten months to make, requiring him to put in several hours at a time in the studio collaborating and perfecting mixes. It’s a tedious process that he uses for every song, though some processes are admittedly more unusual than others. Take “Tales of Dominica,” for example. To come up with the layered sounds, Lenzo compiled several bits he recorded on his iPhone, from banging cabinets to jingling key chains. “Pretty much 90% of that song was all iPhone,” he said, “so honestly, that's something I'm super proud of, and I get excited every single time I hear it.”
Seeing the fruits of his labor after countless hours in the studio or recording in his own apartment is not only a gratifying experience, but one he’ll never get tired of. “This is what I've worked towards for more than half my life,” he explained, “so I feel like, if I got tired of it, then I’d be doing myself a disservice.” If he ever tired of producing the music he loves, I feel he’d be doing the rest of us a disservice too. There’s no doubt that with less than a decade of production experience under his belt and multiple chart-smashing hits like “Montero,” “Rodeo,” and “Industry Baby,” Roy Lenzo’s potential is still yet to be fully realized.
Though he insisted he is past the point in his career where he feels he needs awards and recognition to feel inspired, he understandably still couldn’t help but get starry-eyed when I asked if he did win a Grammy this weekend, where he thought he might put it.
He smirked a bit before correcting my grammar. “If I win two or three multiple ones,” he proudly noted, “one of them has to go to my mom at her house. I'll probably keep the other two in my recording studio. Hopefully it inspires other people that walk in to strive for the same.”
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