Finally, someone has succeeded in getting Stella Lefty a snack.
“I gave her a Fig Newton!” one of her team members proclaims as if they’d just handed off the baton to win Olympic gold. Lefty, rushing so quickly between the three appearances she is making
at CMA Fest in under two hours, barely notices that something is even in her hand. “Oh!” Lefty says, taking a bite and smiling big, as she almost always does. “I love these!”
It’s June in Nashville, and the 23-year-old Lefty, clad in a white tank top and jeans, just made her official CMA Fest debut. Back when her team first booked her for the event, most of Lefty’s songs weren’t even out. Now her viral sensation “Boston” has about 88 million streams on Spotify alone. Her showcase at the Good Molecules stage, an outdoor stage set up in front of Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, ended up being so packed that festival organizers had to issue a push alert that it reached capacity. Across the street at the Palm Steakhouse, servers were leaving their tables to get a glimpse, meals-in-waiting be damned. As we rush to a van that will take us to the nearby Riverfront Stage, where she will join boyfriend Vincent Mason for their duet, “Something to Lose,” she stops to sign a guitar and pose for a few selfies. Fans, wearing camo “LEFTY” caps, tell her they love her, and she scribbles her name on the bill and tells them she loves them, too. Everyone seems a little panicked that we won’t make it where we need to go in time, except for Lefty herself.
But we do, and Lefty runs almost directly from the van to the stage, doing a few little hops to warm up and joining Mason as the crowd cheers (and raises many, many phones). Then it’s back on the move to Eric Church’s club Chief’s, where she digs a black lace dress out of the bottom of her bag to change into before a four-song set that includes an acoustic version of “Boston” and some schmoozing.
“I’m tired, but it’s a fun tired,” Lefty says, after we settle in the green room after her set. Suddenly, for the first time in a few hours that felt packed enough for a week, we are completely alone, in complete quiet. “I’m a little worried about my voice. I keep singing, and I’m like, ‘oh no!’ I’m always raspy, but this is maybe a little too much rasp.” She’ll sing one more time today, however, appearing for yet another “Something to Lose” with Mason at Nissan Stadium. The train just keeps running.
Lefty doesn’t mind repeating herself. It’s what she’s done for the past four years on TikTok, posting covers of songs like Tyler Childers’ “All Your’n,” snippets of unreleased originals, and her 2024 debut single, “Kiss Me.” And it’s where most of the tracks on her recent EP, Is This Heaven?, were teased and grown, sometimes even before they were finished. A clip of her and best friend/creative parter Grace Enger working through the viral hit “Thinkin’ Bout You” has been played almost 12 million times, with one of her singing the chorus to “Boston” in a hoodie, straight to the camera and bare faced, not far behind. If you missed that one, don’t fret: There are plenty of other videos to choose from.
Back when she was a student at Tulane University in New Orleans, her friends used to give her a hard time about posting so much. “I love to post,” she laughs, plenty self-aware. “I could do it 700 times a day. People were like, ‘chill.” At first, it was mostly goofy college stuff. Dance trends, singing along to Wheeler Walker Jr.’s “Drop ‘Em Out” (sample lyrics: “let me see them titties”), or eating a bowl of pasta in a Grateful Dead t-shirt. But in 2022, she got the nerve to start recording for public consumption what she’d always done in private: sing.
Sometimes, it was those covers, of Childers, the Band Perry, and Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season,” a song that she interpolates in “Boston.” There were a lot of originals, too. At one point, she even posted a clip of a tune she mused should be recorded by Miranda Lambert, with the caption, “country singers, this [is] for you!” She took requests. She played some real, in person gigs, often as a duo called Stella + Huck. Likes and shares started piling up. Her first original, “Kiss Me,” went viral, and she was eventually signed to Atlantic Outpost. If it feels like Lefty has come out of nowhere, it’s probably because you’re not chronically online.
But you can’t discount that her rise is still a thoroughly modern story. Artists like Billie Eilish and many more have surpassed the indie grind in favor of reaching fans directly and urgently through social media at the dawn of their careers. It annoys some purists, but it doesn’t make the talent any less viable. “It’s just a melting pot of anything and everyone,” Lefty says. “It’s just crazy. You don’t need any of the things you used to need. It’s a totally different world.”
That world, of making a career out of music, was the kind of thing that Lefty never considered, even though she dreamed about it (she equates fantasizing about becoming an artist to “how little boys say they want to be a superhero when they grow up”). Born Stella Lefkofsky and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, Lefty played instruments and sang before she even hit double digits, but mostly kept it confined to her bedroom. Her mom, tagging along to CMA festivities, remembers often having to tell her daughter to keep it down because it was so much, all of the time. Country music was popular at home, and she loved Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, and Carrie Underwood. Her dad was a serious fan of the genre. “He’s the biggest country fan there is,” Lefty says.
When she was 13, Lefty’s mother was diagnosed with cancer. It rocked the household completely: Her father, Groupon founder Eric Lefkofsky, pivoted to biotech. “He realized how standardized medicine is so fucked up,” she says, “and there are so many holes. He became obsessed with trying to make her better, and it better, and to understand what was happening. Obviously, it was pretty inspiring to me.”
A few years later, her best friend from high school was also diagnosed with cancer. She didn’t survive. Lefty took to writing to help process the loss, in a song that she eventually posted on TikTok. “It just became this thing where I was like, why do people have to deal with this? I wanted to understand it better,” she says. Lefty started to pursue a degree in public health, to chart the environmental factors that might contribute to the disease. “I became fascinated by places like New Orleans, and the way they are set up to experience natural disasters. It’s nuts. They can’t even drink water out of the sink.”
Writing songs — and posting them online — was a good distraction from her studies, until it all became bigger than whatever she was doing at school. After graduation, she had plans to move to Nashville and become a songwriter, but that fell through when she didn’t see eye-to-eye with the team, of men. “They said to me, ‘You seem more like an artist,’ which really pissed me off at the time because I was like, a bunch of dudes don’t get to tell me what to do,” she says. Those dudes were sort of right however: Lefty did, ultimately, decide to pursue becoming an artist.
Not long after she turned a Nashville publishing deal down, a DM appeared in her inbox. It was from producer Jacob Hindlin, who goes by “J Kash,” known for his work with Lady Gaga, Maroon 5, Morgan Wallen, and many more. Could she come back down to Tennessee and meet up? Her parents were freaked out. “They were like, ‘You cannot do that. Who the fuck is this person? Are you going to get abducted?’” Lefty recalls. In the end, no crimes were committed, and she and J Kash hit it off.
Both J Kash and her new management team at Disruptor Records urged her to move to Los Angeles, where she still lives, and do some co-writes there, but what she came up with for the first few years — more pop and indie leaning, no trace of banjo or twang to speak of — didn’t really feel like her. When “Thinkin’ Bout You” was finished, she knew she’d found what she was looking for: a relaxed, uncomplicated melody that’s easy to sing along to, with an undercurrent of country instrumentation, delivered earnestly in a sea of sad dudes with guitars.
“Stella came to us and said, ‘I’ve unlocked something I’ve been looking for, and I know what to do. I can feel it,’” her manager, Adam Alpert of Disruptor Records, tells Rolling Stone. “Almost in a way to say, ‘I don’t even want feedback.’ That’s the best thing a manager can hear.”
The seeds of “Boston” came together a few minutes before Lefty, in Nashville for a writing trip, was supposed to be picked up by Mason for a date in the early stages of their courtship. “I thought, ‘I’ll just sit at the piano and see what happens,’” Lefty says. She made a video and posted it, as she always does, but didn’t think much of it. “It did so well that I was honestly confused, because I didn’t really love the song yet. Then I was like, ‘I guess I need to finish it!’” Which she did, but not without multiple TikToks leading up to the release, featuring that same smile and that same hoodie. For as many people that seemed to be annoyed by the repetition, far more couldn’t get enough, including country radio — multiple stations put “Boston” into rotation. It was the validation she needed, as a self-described “Midwest Chicago girl” who worried she wouldn’t fit in on Music Row.
“I love country music more than anything,” Lefty says. “It’s just what I love with my fucking heart and soul. But I’m not Southern. I always worried, ‘Do I have to be?’”
Country fans didn’t seem to mind. And while she wasn’t even officially on the lineup, Lefty became one of the most talked about performers at Stagecoach this past spring, appearing with Wyatt Flores to sing “Boston,” showing up during Diplo’s set, and covering Childers with Cameron Whitcomb. Coming into the genre sideways has allowed her to circumvent all of the usual trappings of Nashville. She’s never been warned about being “Chicked” — or even heard the phrase — though she does love exchanging favorite Chicks songs (hers, “without a doubt,” is “There’s Your Trouble”).
“Stella’s one of the most talented songwriters and performers I’ve been around, but what’s impressed me most is that none of the success has changed who she is,” Flores tells Rolling Stone, for whom Lefty has opened a few shows. “I’m always happy to see good people get their moment, and I really believe Stella’s just getting started. She’s got all the talent in the world, but even more importantly, she’s the kind of person you want to root for.”
Dan Smyers, of Dan + Shay, agrees (they all sang the duo’s hit “Tequila” together during yet another one of Lefty’s CMA Fest performances). “The first time I heard Stella’s music, I was blown away,” Smyers says. “I’ve had the songs on repeat ever since. She’s the kind of artist you want to see win.”
Of course, the internet being the internet, there is a loud contingent that doubts Lefty’s legitimacy. Because of her father’s wealth, she’s been lobbed with accusations of being an “industry plant” and having a career bankrolled by her dad; her looks, down to the details of her mouth and teeth, have been scrutinized.
“It’s just so unnatural to see so many people having opinions about me,” Lefty says. “Even my smile is a controversial thing on TikTok. People are constantly like, ‘What’s happening with your gums?’ There’s always going to be people who don’t like me or my music, or something about me. At the end of the day, I just focus on the people that do. This is what I decided to do. Double-edged sword.”
“Industry plant” is a funny, generally meaningless term that now-superstars like Lana Del Rey, Eilish, and Gracie Abrams have all been accused of over the years, usually when there is what appears to be rapid success. It’s more intense if your parents are rich (see: Abrams, Taylor Swift) or even worse if you are a young woman (see, Del Rey, Eilish, Abrams, most women since time immemorial). Of course, there’s no denying that Lefty won’t have to endure the artist’s struggle the same way others do. Money makes it all easier, cushier on the road and on the rise. She doesn’t hide where she came from either. Mom and dad are here with her on tour, dancing in the audience. But two things can be true: You can come from privilege, and you can also write really, really great songs. At the end of the day, you can’t pay someone to like you.
“Industry plants don’t exist, no matter what anybody says or thinks from the outside of the music business,” Alpert says. “You have to make great songs that people like, and all these artists that people call ‘industry plants’ are having success because they’ve done just that.”
That success includes a completely sold-out tour across the U.S. When she played a gig in New York, Kelsea Ballerini was in the audience, posting on her social media like a proper fangirl. And she’s heading abroad, too, hitting Hyde Park with Mumford & Sons on July 4th and heading to Australia not long after. Many of Lefty’s European dates sold out in minutes, and she’s planning an album release for fall. Though she’s found a warm reception in country music, she’s not particularly worried about where any new music will land, something she heavily credits Ella Langley (and Swift) for. Nor is she concerned that her country side will bump up against her pop one. A hoodie, after all, is genre neutral.
“It’s so cool that the world is becoming less rigid with genre,” Lefty says. “Whatever people are loving, they are loving. It’s cool to see Ella transcend any sort of boundary that existed. She just made music she loves.”
Someone from Lefty’s team pokes their head in. It’s time to clear the room for the next performer, and there’s a window to grab a meal with Mason and her folks before they head to the stadium later. “We can get dinner!” Lefty exclaims excitedly. On the way to the elevator, another team member brings up the capacity crowd from earlier. “It’s so crazy,” Lefty says, following the flow of people down the hall, smiling. “Unfathomable, honestly. It’s hard to wrap your head around. But I’m really like, ‘I just need to go home and write more songs!’”
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