Logan Lynn

Logan Lynn, a Portland, Oregon–based producer and songwriter, moves fluidly across alternative dance, synth pop, dance-pop, melodic techno hybrids, theatrical piano pieces, and additional styles. He first surfaced in the late 1990s and issued his debut official album, GLEE, in 2000. Across the remainder of that decade he explored lo-fi synth pop, club-oriented dance-pop, and rougher indie-electronic experiments on a run of albums, EPs, and singles that encompassed the 2006 self-titled Logan Lynn and the more adventurous 2009 release From Pillar to Post, whose textures occasionally recalled Animal Collective and Dirty Projectors. The dance-centric I Killed Tomorrow Yesterday arrived in 2010, followed in 2018 by the piano-driven autobiographical double album My Movie Star, co-produced and co-released with comedian, actor, and podcaster Jay Mohr. Returning to songwriter-focused alternative dance, Lynn made his initial appearances on the Kill Rock Stars roster via 2021 singles that preceded the 2022 album New Money; his tenth album, SOFTCORE, appeared on the same label in 2024. Beyond his recordings, Lynn has also worked as a television personality while championing mental-health awareness and LGBTQ rights.

Born Logan Dennis Lynn to a Christian minister and his wife, he grew up in rural Nebraska before the family relocated to suburban Kansas City, Missouri. During the mid-1990s he attended Olathe South High School, where he befriended Ryan Pope, Rob Pope, and Jim Suptic, then forming the Get Up Kids. At the same time he began DJing and, after moving to Portland in 1996, started composing songs.

Early support came from Elliott Smith and the Dandy Warhols, both then ascending toward wider recognition; less than ten years later the Dandy Warhols would sign him to their imprint, Beat the World Records. In March 1998 Lynn put out the 14-track mixtape Pull the Plug, recorded between late 1996 and early 1998 and reflecting his still-teenage perspective. Several tracks originated on the earlier, scarce cassette This Is Folk Techno and were reworked with co-producer PFog for the self-released October 2000 debut GLEE, which fused confessional songwriting with a lo-fi aesthetic and buoyant beats. Some of that material resurfaced again on the otherwise self-produced 19-track Logan Lynn, issued in September 2006.

In 2007 he delivered the EPs Clean & Stupid and Feed Me to the Wolves, attracting notice from MTV’s new Logo network after performing at that year’s New York City Gay Pride event. The following year he began hosting the music-video countdown NewNowNext. Both his music and television work paused in 2008 when he entered rehab after an overdose and accompanying transient ischemic attack. He nevertheless completed From Pillar to Post, released on Beat the World Records in September 2009, where he pursued a playful experimental-pop direction while staying rooted in alternative dance. Early 2010 brought the non-album track “The Last High.”

September 2010 saw the more dancefloor-oriented yet introspective I Killed Tomorrow Yesterday, followed mid-2011 by the remix collection Blood in the Water. Collaborating with indie singer-songwriter Noah Daniel Wood, Lynn wrote the material for the December 2011 acoustic EP Everything You Touch Turns to Gold. His sixth album, Tramp Stamps and Birthmarks, issued in late 2012, blended fully arranged electro-pop and alternative dance in a whimsical, sex-themed vein; produced by Gino Mari, it featured contributions from Wood, Father Tiger, and the Gentry. The record charted on several streaming platforms, and a public remix contest for “Hologram” yielded the May 2013 Dance Alone EP. That June he headlined the Queer Music Summer Tour, benefiting LGBTQ mental-health services and suicide prevention, and in September his Mari-produced cover of Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop” prompted Cyrus herself to perform Lynn and Mari’s arrangement on Saturday Night Live the next month.

September 2016’s Adieu, colored by emo pop, stood as the nearest thing to a conventional indie-rock album Lynn had made; surprisingly, Mari again co-produced. Actor and comedian Jay Mohr became a fan, inviting Lynn onto his Mohr Stories podcast in March 2017 to discuss childhood trauma, recovery from addiction, and mental health alongside music. Mohr subsequently co-produced the next project, a shift into theatrical piano-based songs. The resulting self-released double LP My Movie Star appeared in October 2018, its second disc comprising covers and remixes. Lynn toured with Portugal. The Man to promote mental-health awareness, appeared in the six-episode web series Last Meal, then co-created and starred in the 2020 series DotGay Presents: The Library; that same year he released the live EP Unpeeled.

His Kill Rock Stars debut arrived in August 2021 with the single “Rich and Beautiful,” which received a Xiu Xiu remix the following month. The label’s first full-length, the cheekily titled synth-pop New Money, followed in January 2022 and included a cover of Elliott Smith’s “Baby Britain.” June brought the remix EP Other People’s Money, featuring versions by MAN ON MAN and J.D. Samson (of Le Tigre and MEN), among others. Mid-2023 saw the collaborative EP Distracted with Yellow Trash Can, after which Kill Rock Stars released Lynn’s tenth album, SOFTCORE, in June 2024; it begins with an electronic reinterpretation of Smog’s “To Be of Use.”