The outsider pop star: Jessy Lanza

This is where Greenspan comes in; Lanza has been the best friend of his Junior Boys partner Matt Didemus’ sister since their teenage years. Her session didn’t make it onto ‘It’s All True’, but their work with her synths was more fruitful. “We have different strengths,” says Greenspan a week later, on the phone from Zurich. “I know more about electronic instruments, but she’s a classically trained musician. We wrote in a way that drew on our own strengths, and very quickly we realised we had something good going.”

It took, says Lanza, a year of messing around to figure out how to work together, an album’s-worth of material scrapped on the way. They also became a couple, and have lived together for five years. The musical relationship is hard to explain, they both admit. Lanza usually starts off the lyric and the basic shape of the song, and then they bounce it back and forward between their studios, adding to it and calling each other out on the bits they don’t like. Her music is created equally by them as a duo, but it’s Lanza’s own project – Greenspan is more a sort of technical support.

“There isn’t one person in charge of any one thing,” he says. “Her musical education is way more in-depth than mine, so it’s ridiculous that some people think she’s my protégé. But people sometimes have a difficult time dealing with musical partnerships between men and women."

Aside from the jazz, Lanza’s schooldays were filled with the sound of Missy Elliott, Timbaland, Ginuwine and Aaliyah, and it’s these who most inform the nascent r’n’b grooves of her music. On this album there was also, she says, a big slice of Japanese synth-pop pioneers Yellow Magic Orchestra, particularly the 1981 solo album ‘Neuromantic’ by Yukihiro Takahashi. “I really identify with them because they made weird outsider pop music,” she says, sipping a glass of water. “They were borrowing and copying, but with their own undeniable presence.”

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