Meet Cooper B. Handy, Better Known As LUCY, the Experimental Singer-Songwriter Who's Charmed New York and Baffled TikTok

Photo by Guy Kozak

In early September of this year, when Cooper B. Handy, who goes by the stage name LUCY, opened for King Krule in Atlanta, Georgia, a concertgoer who uses the TikTok handle @macmandyy filmed six seconds of his performance and posted it with the text overlay: “when the opener so bad u have to pull up slime videos to zone out.” The video went semi-viral, racking up over 360,000 likes and nearly two and a half thousand comments, which offer a fairly robust summary of the pop musician’s current status.

Those comments could be divided into three gradient categories. The first is those who agree with @macmandyy, and found LUCY’s set to be confusing and disjointed, and couldn’t comprehend why he continuously intoned “Georgia… Georgia…I’ve got a few more for you,” into the microphone between songs. The second category of commenters meekly admit that they actually kind of liked his set, and relished both his uncannily earnest cover of “Beauty and the Beast” and the strange theatrics that accompanied it. The third and smallest tier consisted of real heads: “He’s your favorite artist’s favorite artist,“ wrote one commenter. “IF YOU DON’T GET LUCY, DON’T GO.” wrote another.

“I think I make pop music, but people who really listen to pop music say it’s not that,” Handy admitted. “I guess it’s more experimental.”

I met up with the man behind the LUCY moniker on a crisp afternoon at The Met Cloisters, and found him sitting on a terrace overlooking the Hudson (“Oh, yeah,” the info desk told me. “He’s down past the big crucifix and to the right.”) Handy, 29, is almost startlingly soft-spoken, dressed head-to-toe in primary colors, and is charmingly prone to blushing, especially when he’s asked to talk about himself. We walked through chapels filled with medieval ephemera, pausing for an extra-long time in front of the unicorn tapestries, which tell the tale of a hunted magical beast.

Handy started performing as LUCY in 2014, while working as a dishwasher at Amherst College—"lunch lady-style," as Handy puts it. It was a passion project he developed at the college town’s multitude of DIY spaces. Sonically, the project is of a piece with the Soundcloud rap that emerged around that the time—Handy created simplistic beats in GarageBand that sublimated the basic musical tools the Internet provides into something that feels homespun and handmade. He found a niche within that universe by hitching his wagon to the art and music collective Dark World, releasing music videos that fit into the collective’s farm boy-meets-acid-rap aesthetic and put his name on the map for a very specific corner of the Internet and the thriving local scene in Western Massachusetts.

“He's always singing. He's got the pipes for it, that's what sets him apart from other electronic musicians for me. He doesn't really rap, he just always has a strong melody,” said Sal McNamara, Handy’s bandmate from his other project, The Taxidermists. “He has a strong counterpoint with vocal melody and musical melody. He has this innate sense for counterpoint.”

Around this time, a Harvard student named Joe Kerwin stumbled into a basement and found himself at a Cooper B. Handy show. Kerwin was there with his brother and his girlfriend; they were the only audience in attendance. “He played his show doing the full theatrics just for us,” Kerwin said. He was gobsmacked by Handy’s performance: “He was fully dropping to the floor and putting his heart into it. It was a package I’d never seen before.”

Today, Kerwin is the go-to booker for scenester New York artists like The Dare, Porches, and Frost Children. Handy’s work is almost emphatically unlike the music those bands make, but Kerwin said that ever since the performance he saw in college, “I’ll put LUCY on any bill, no matter what.” Thus far, that’s amounted to around thirty shows. “At every show, there’s one core group of nerds who are obsessed with [his performance], and another group that feels alienated by it,” said Kerwin.

When LUCY played Baby’s All Right in New York City with RKX Nephew, they are gutting a body of water, and OLTH at the end of October, his set was met with mostly members of that third tier of TikTok commenters, who went wild when Handy chanted “New York… New York… I’ve got a few more for you.” into the microphone between songs. Backstage, New York’s resident party-girl-of-the-hour Meg Superstar Princess told me that she loves LUCY. “It’s really like a pop feeling for sure,” she said. “It’s fun and it’s endearing. He’s almost a little too wholesome which I think is what makes it appealing to New Yorkers. He doesn’t do the whole scenester thing. His reclusivity is real and chosen and authentic.”

While reporting this story, most people close to Handy described him as “monk-like” in his work ethic. One friend told me – either hyperbolically or not, I couldn’t tell – that Handy will walk ten miles to get to his studio. Another said that Handy was thought of as a Good Will Hunting-style behind-the-scenes-genius character when he was washing dishes at Amherst. Handy described the work in monastic fashion: “You go into robot mode. I like dishwashing. It’s cool.”

These days, though, Handy’s musical exploits are gaining enough traction that he’s able to support himself solely through that. He owes his mounting success to a consistently sustained effort towards one sound over nearly a decade. “I don’t change anything, and then people caught on to it,” he explained. “It had to do with just doing the same thing over and over again. I think that with most people who make art— if they have a really consistent practice with their output, then it works out. A lot of people think that’s kind of sad, but I’d be really happy to keep doing the same thing I’m doing now forever. If you make art that you like, it shouldn’t be a problem to keep making it.”

While it may not have worked for everyone on the King Krule tour, that consistent sound has recently caught the attention of well-known pop acts like Clairo and Charli XCX, both of whom have reached out to Handy about potential collaborations. “I’m down to work with anyone, unless they’re like, you know, bad people, I guess,” he laughed, dodging the question of whether he had anything concrete coming down the pike with either artist. He does have a collaborative single dropping later this month; on “Airplane Mode,” LUCY yawps the opening lyrics of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” over a saccharine pop beat by True Blue. Handy’s next album is coming out before the end of the year; he’s working with I.V., a producer who started working with Handy after cold-emailing him some beats that Handy describes as “harpsichord trap music.”

McNamara summarized Handy’s approach to the future of LUCY succinctly. “His main ethos is leaving people wanting more,” he said. “That’s why he chants ‘I've got a few more for you’ between every song in a 25 minute set.”

Originally Appeared on GQ