His real name is Stephen Feigenbaum, but it would be a bit much, even in today’s relatively tolerant music industry, to walk into a recording session in Los Angeles or Atlanta and introduce yourself as Stephen Feigenbaum. So, in his life as a solo artist and a classical-cum-hip-hop producer, he goes by Johan Lenox. “Johan” is for Bach (perhaps you’ve heard of him). “Lenox” is for the town in Western Massachusetts where he went to a classical-music summer camp that was run by Tanglewood. “I was the kid who would come home from high school and throw on a Bartók quartet,” he said recently. Pop music, to him, was the Boston Pops doing a tribute to John Williams. “Other kids would be, like, ‘Pharrell this, Arcade Fire that,’ and I’d be, like, ‘Cool, I have no idea what that is.’ ”
He studied music theory and composition at Yale, where he won a Charles Ives scholarship and a Morton Gould Young Composer Award. A neighbor, Greg Berman, went to Brown. During a Thanksgiving break, in 2010, Berman threw a party. He put on “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” the sprawling, instant-classic album by Kanye West. It had been out for less than a week, but everyone at the party had already heard it—everyone except Lenox, who was in a headspace that was conducive to close listening. “I don’t remember whether the acid hit first or the Kanye hit first,” he recalled. “All I know is I felt something click, like, Damn, there is way more going on here, musically, than I ever realized.” The next day, after the acid wore off, the album still held up. In addition to his homework—twelve-tone compositions and the like—he started tinkering with Kanye West covers on the side. “There was this idea in the classical world, which I had totally bought into without realizing it, that you could make sophisticated music, or you could be culturally relevant, but the days when ‘serious music’ could be a part of mass culture were in the past,” he said. “Suddenly it was: But what if you can do both?”
A few years later, first in collaboration with the Young Musicians Foundation, in L.A., and then at Lincoln Center, he and a friend put on a concert called “Yeethoven.” A seventy-piece orchestra played snippets of Beethoven interspersed with Lenox’s symphonic arrangements of Kanye West beats (the “Egmont” Overture juxtaposed with “New Slaves”; “Blood on the Leaves” leading into Symphony No. 5). Mr Hudson, a songwriter and a frequent Kanye collaborator, was in the audience in L.A.; he introduced himself after the show, one thing led to another, and Lenox began dropping by the studio. Kanye works with a rotating stable of writers and producers. Lenox started edging his way into the outer circle. “They’ll be making something, and in the moment, depending on what the song needs, they’ll decide who to bring in,” he said. “ ‘This dude’s got the best drums.’ ‘She’s crazy with the lyrics.’ Or, when they needed an instrumental outro or an interlude—something with strings or woodwinds or whatever—they started calling me.”
These days, Lenox lives in Los Feliz. His first solo album, “WDYWTBWYGU,” was released last month; on its cover is a blond kid playing on a suburban lawn while, over his shoulder, the world burns. Shortly before it came out, Lenox passed through town for a night, and Berman, who lives in Brooklyn Heights, offered up his couch. Berman connected his phone to a Bluetooth stereo and played selections from “johan lenox: songs I helped make,” a Spotify playlist that is more than ten hours long.
“A lot of times, the assignment is unnervingly open-ended,” Lenox said. “They’ll send a beat and go, ‘Fill in the little gap at the end,’ or ‘This needs to go somewhere new’—that’s it. You just try shit, and they either like it or they don’t.” In 2018, when Kanye was in Wyoming, producing an album for the singer Teyana Taylor, one of his studio engineers texted a few rough tracks to Lenox, more or less out of the blue. “I just messed around for a while and sent them back a bunch of stuff,” he said—contrapuntal strings, and stacks of backing vocals. (It wasn’t his first time experimenting with vocal harmony; at Yale, he’d sung a cappella with the Whiffenpoofs.) “Ye ended up going, ‘Honestly, the strings are cool, but the vocals are crazy.’ ” In Berman’s living room, Lenox played those tracks from Taylor’s album: a swaggering autobiographical manifesto called “Rose in Harlem,” a spare sex ballad called “3Way.”
“You’re on this one?” Berman asked.
“You can hear the vocals if you listen close,” Lenox said. ♦