LeTrainiump Finds His People with “Lost?”
LeTrainiump, by Victoria Conway
The synthpop singer/producer has found his people in New Orleans; his latest single brings this to the foreground.
Neon-blue brick walls. Arcade machines and retro TVs to the left and right. People hunched over occupied with 8-bit games. Up front is a flanneled singer, florescent purple cap on backwards and oval shades dangling from his chain. If not for the modern recording quality of “Lost?”--the song he’s singing--you could mistake this entry in NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest for a long-lost commercial from 1990s Nickelodeon, though probably no Nick ad featured this catchy of a tune.
Growing up in the ‘90s in the small Cajun town of Mamou, LeTrainiump (Tray Richard) always gravitated towards indie pop, despite the town’s indie-unfriendly music culture. “I know it sounds absurd, but it was unheard of for a black kid to know how to play guitar where I’m from,” LeTrainiump says.
LeTrainiump will open for Sweet Crude Wednesday at The Broadside, but a few years back, upon wrapping up mission work in Romania, he realized he couldn’t keep music a side quest. He had an idea to share, inspired by the synthed-out, roller-rink-ready music of his childhood. He took to his home state’s biggest music town, New Orleans, to find a community that would allow his ideas to blossom.
Richard initially toyed with a five-piece synth-funk band, with all members having some stylistic say. But although a genre-blending band suited the city’s culture of genre-blending-bands, the band felt like mere compromise. He ditched the band setup, took up self-producing, and embraced more of a pop star role. Not only did he grow more fulfilled, but his audiences grew more enthusiastic. He had more room to command the stage, which he took full advantage of. His style wound up in a high-energy, summer-fun lane of ‘80s-electro, the inverse of pop artists like The Weeknd who uses the same musical palette to explore more brooding, angstier territory.
Many heavyweights of New Orleans’ alternative music realm swiftly took to LeTrainiump’s beaming onstage charisma and killer hook-writing. Local rapper Alfred Banks, for instance, caught a particularly energized concert of Richard’s and instantly pinned him as a someone to keep on his radar for collaboration. Albert Allenback of Tank and the Bangas acclaim went from knowing Tray peripherally as “the ‘80s guy who wears overalls,” as Allenback describes him, to welcoming him into his tightest musical circles. LeTrainiump found his people--musically-savvy Louisianans who work outside dominant styles in favor of something more good-natured, more openly nerdy, more unabashedly positive.
“I can find kindred spirit in this industry right here in my own backyard,” LeTrainiump says. “I don’t have to go to L.A. or New York. I got these guys right here and it feels great.”
Banks and Allenback are featured in “Lost?”, one of many singles to drop this year from his upcoming debut EP. The two operate under the name SaxKixAve as a rapper and producer duo. LeTrainiump called them when he felt that a tune he wrote five years earlier was still resonant but needed a couple more voices.
“Lost?” sounds like the story of a relationship with holes worth patching (“We used to get high, stay up all night and laugh in the morning,” “Just because we’re down it doesn’t mean we’re out”), but in reality the song is about LeTrainiump’s rollercoaster-like relationship with his 20s.
“It feels like I’m going in circles / Am I lost?” asks LeTrainiump in the chorus. Between starting fatherhood and re-orienting his relationship with music, loads changed for the singer between ages 23 and 28 (when he wrote and finished the song respectively), yet those tangled feelings on young adulthood remained loud as ever. “The song spoke to me and was like, You need to put this on the EP. This is a valid song. You’re still going through this,’” LeTrainiump says.
The studio sessions with LeTrainiump and Allenback thankfully weren’t that tangled, even though their degree of musical collaboration was a first for the songwriter. Fortunately, friendliness and openness were at the heart of the sessions. "When we'd come in the studio, we'd actually check in first," Allenback says. "You would think you would lose time. You'd think, Well you guys are just talking, but I think it actually makes stuff far more productive and peaceful."
The two artists’ exchange of ideas had just enough tension to pull the track into territory Richard didn’t foresee, while keeping things in range of his vision. "The process of this song is what really taught me the true collaborative experience," LeTrainiump says. "Working with Al was a push and pull at first, but the more the push and pull happened, the better the ideas got, and the better the song became."
Allenback’s fingerprints are all over “Lost?” as the song boasts a semi-swung, boom bap-inspired groove underneath LeTrainiump’s signature ‘80s synth tones, indicative of the producer’s fondness for mix-and-match alt-hip-hop stylings. Banks’ contribution is capped at eight laidback bars, a smooth and charismatic touch of flavor there to seep into the song’s vibe.
“I didn’t wanna take away from the record,” says Banks. “Quick joint, but I feel like it brought that oomph to it.”
Although “Lost?” and the material he has recorded for an upcoming EP employs elements from hip-hop, LeTrainiump resists those who tend to collect all Black artists under the R&B umbrella. “If you listen to the music, it's not R&B," he says. He takes that stand not in resistance to marketing efforts but out of a sense of artistic democracy. “The indie kids, the kids who love indie pop, the kids who love alt pop, the Black kids, get to feel something that’s authentically them,” he says.
Those in LeTrainiump’s circle found the finished track so standout that they thought it demanded entry into NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest. The competition has been viewed by New Orleans musicians as a potential gateway into nationwide exposure since Tank and the Bangas’ Tiny Desk victory blasted them out of the underground in 2017. For LeTrainiump, entering the contest represents a chance to better define his musical space.
Richard, his manager/wife Dominique, Banks, Allenback, and company shot the entry at Sea Cave Arcade. Though technical troubles relentlessly piled onto shooting day, the crew thankfully didn’t have to worry about an aesthetic mismatch as Sea Cave utterly screams LeTrainiump with its color-explosion vintage vibe. “Within the last like 20 minutes of us being able to be there, we literally took three takes of the song,” recalls LeTrainiump. “We didn’t know how it would sound. It was a shot in the dark.” That shot in the dark hit center as the video earned the crew “Desk of the Day” as one of the more noteworthy submissions.
The performers’ interplay towards the end of the video is a good representation of their dynamic: not a one-sided request for support, but a positive feedback loop, with their artistic and personal growth feeding into each other. Banks says the other two "inspire me to be a better version of myself,” and that if they “wanted to do 'Lost?: Part 4,’ I'm with it."
LeTrainiump, by Victoria Conway
