Will Jones
When Jade LeMac answers my call from New York, she has just done something a younger version of herself might have found nearly impossible to imagine. She played Madison Square Garden. Twice. LeMac is in the middle of the biggest tour of her career, opening for Hilary Duff, and our third conversation begins less like an introduction than a chance to take stock of a life moving unusually fast. The first time we spoke, Jade was still learning how to manage the nerves that came with stepping onto a stage. This time, she has just walked onto the Madison Square Garden stage and enjoyed herself. “I’m at a place now where I can go on stage and feel confident and excited and just really have fun,” she says. “I used to have a lot of stage fright. So it’s cool to be at a place where I’m excited to get on stage and play.”
The timing is fitting because LeMac is currently surrounded by reminders of her younger self. My Life With the Walter Boys, the Netflix series that helped turn a song she wrote at 16 into a streaming phenomenon, has returned for its third season. At the time of our conversation, the show has just launched as the No. 1 show on Netflix worldwide. This time, LeMac isn’t showing up with just one song. Four tracks from her EP It’s Always At Night appear throughout the new season, including “Running Home,” “Intertwined,” “Sleeping with the Lights On” and “Sweet Dreams.”
Audiences are already finding the music. “Running Home,” which appears in one of the season’s most pivotal, emotionally charged scenes, has seen a fivefold increase in streams since the sync, according to LeMac’s team. The song is also now drawing some of its strongest streaming numbers of the year across multiple international markets. Meanwhile, “Constellations,” originally released in 2021, continues to do something remarkable for a five-year-old song. It’s refusing to become old news. According to Spotify for Artists figures, the original recording has recently been generating approximately 500,000 streams a day, with its piano version adding another 100,000.
For LeMac, it’s another reminder of one of music’s stranger truths. Once you put a song into the world, it no longer entirely belongs to you. “I think I see the song differently than I did when I originally wrote it,” she says. “As I watch so many people interpret it differently, it’s even made me see myself and the world in new ways.” There’s something wonderfully circular about a 22-year-old artist discovering new meanings in something her 16-year-old self created. We tend to think of songs as snapshots, as a feeling captured, recorded and preserved. LeMac’s experience suggests something more fluid. The song stays the same, but the person listening to it doesn’t. And sometimes millions of new listeners come along and find new meaning, too.
LeMac remembers being stunned by what happened after “Constellations” appeared in the first season of My Life With the Walter Boys. “I was just blown away by what the show did for the song and what they did together,” she says. “That just doesn’t happen to the extent that it did with ‘Constellations.’” What fascinated her wasn’t only how many people found the song, but what happened once they did.
Season 3 takes that relationship much further. LeMac didn’t choose the four songs herself. There had been conversations about trying to find another track for the series after what happened with “Constellations.” “Running Home” came first, then another possibility emerged, then another. Suddenly there were four. LeMac has since done what any curious artist might do. She’s skipped through the season looking for her songs. “Sweet Dreams” particularly surprised her. “I was so amazed at how well I feel like it fit,” she says. “I’ve always seen that song to be a possible sync song. So to see it as part of such a special show was super, super cool.”
Part of what fascinates LeMac about sync is the handoff between storytellers. She may write a song with a particular person, feeling or imagined story in mind. Then someone else places it beneath characters on a screen and suddenly the same song carries emotions she never intended. “To have something in mind and either see it come to life in a scene that I had nothing to do with is so cool,” she says, “or just to see it used in something that I never thought about for the song.” It has also taught her not to assume she knows a song’s lifespan. “Music is so beautiful, and it’s like an art, and you never know when it has its time to shine,” LeMac says.
She tries not to obsess over streaming numbers, although recently curiosity got the better of her. “About a month ago is when I looked, and I realized that ‘Constellations’ had another bump,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is crazy.’ So since then I’ve been doing a little stalking just to see.” Right now, though, streaming statistics have competition for her attention. “I’m really enjoying touring world.”
When we’ve spoken in the past, LeMac has been candid about stage fright. Performing was something she loved, but also something she had to push herself through. Lyrics were a particular source of anxiety. She worried about forgetting them. Then came Madison Square Garden. “If [16-year-old Jade] knew that I had gone on the Madison Square Garden stage last night, she’d be like, ‘You’re crazy. I don’t get how you can do that.’”
Maybe confidence isn’t the absence of the thing that scares us so much as reaching the point where it stops being in charge. LeMac hasn’t simply become more practiced at performing. She sounds liberated by it. “I have so much fun on stage now.” At the same time, she has been thinking intensely about what the person on that stage should look and sound like. Over the past few months, LeMac says she has been focused on “who I am, who I want to be, my brand, look, aesthetic, everything.” Onstage, that has meant a new visual language. It’s all white and slicked-back hair, a sharper look that she feels reflects the music she’s making and the artist she’s becoming.
LeMac still loves It’s Always At Night and considers the songs authentic to the artist she was when she made them. But authenticity, in her telling, isn’t a destination you reach once and occupy forever. “It was as much ‘me’ as it could be for what it was,” she says. Now she wants to push somewhere else. “I’m trying to get away from that kind of pop right now, and to let what I really want to do continue to come out.”
Her next project is beginning to reveal where that instinct might take her. LeMac has been performing an unreleased song called “Pretty With Your Mask Off.” There is no release date yet, but she describes it as part of a project digging deeper into R&B and hip-hop, with a darker sound than much of her previous work. The song itself is about Stockholm syndrome, though LeMac likes that its meaning isn’t immediately obvious. “I don’t think you hear that right away unless you fully read into the lyrics,” she says. “But I love it.” For an artist whose earliest breakthrough keeps resurfacing years after she made it, there is something fitting about LeMac refusing to make her future sound like her past.
Some of that evolution has nothing to do with arenas or Netflix. LeMac recently moved out of her family home and now lives with her girlfriend. Alongside the less ordinary parts of her career, she is dealing with something much more familiar. She’s learning to be an adult. “I’m really having to be an adult and doing all that,” she says. That means becoming more organized and disciplined, learning time management and making sure the work gets done even when inspiration isn’t flowing.
Her advice for younger artists reflects that increasingly practical side. “Put yourself out there,” she says. “Social media is what controls the industry right now.” She also tells them not to worry too much about looking foolish. “I say don’t be scared to be cringe,” she adds. “You have to think of your music and your brand and your art as your job.” But she quickly returns to the idea that has followed our conversations over the years. “Figure out yourself so that you can best represent yourself, because I think people can see when you’re authentic and you’re true to yourself.” For LeMac, figuring herself out is clearly still a work in progress. And that’s the point.
There is, of course, one other subject I have to revisit. By our third conversation, asking about LeMac’s Maltese, Chewy, has become a tradition. “Oh my God, Chewy’s great,” she says immediately. While LeMac is on tour, Chewy is home with her girlfriend. The separation has been unusually long, and Jade is counting the days until she gets back to both of them. In her absence, Chewy has reached a milestone of his own. “He went swimming for the first time.”
For someone whose life currently includes Madison Square Garden, four songs in a massive Netflix show and a new musical identity taking shape in real time, there is something grounding about how excited she is to go home. LeMac is living through an unusual moment. Her past and future are evolving at the same time. A song written at 16 is still finding hundreds of thousands of listeners a day, while the woman who wrote it is standing on the Madison Square Garden stage testing out music that may introduce an entirely different Jade LeMac. She doesn’t seem interested in choosing.
When I ask what her 16-year-old self would find hardest to believe about her life today, she doesn’t mention the streaming numbers, Netflix or even opening for Hilary Duff. She comes back to Madison Square Garden. The girl who was afraid she might forget a lyric would be astonished by the woman who can now make a mistake in front of thousands of people and just keep going. That may be the more meaningful measure of how far Jade has come. The numbers tell one story. Being unafraid to walk onto the stage tells another.
Photos by Meredith Truax