Peach Luffe Wants To See How Far This Can Go

His unique blend of folk, alternative and pop music has singled him out as an artist to watch. But Peach Luffe is just grateful to be here.

“My English got so bad since I got back from Korea,” Jong Lee, who records under the stage name Peach Luffe, told me with a groan.

 It was Saturday morning and the singer was up at a highly responsible 10 am for a Zoom interview with me. We were already in the weeds discussing his music and career, which has begun to ascend since the release of tracks like “Sunflower” and “Fallen”. Peach had just returned home from a trip to Korea to visit family and friends, but the bilingual parts of his brain were tripping him up.

Peach has settled into Toronto, Canada, a city with a vibrant music scene and a diverse population, all of which appeals to the singer. “This is my home base and I plan on staying here. I love it,” he said. “I think I’ve planted my roots.” 

Peach’s musical journey began in this city. Though he started playing classical music long before he turned to indie pop, Peach didn’t begin to flex his musical muscles until he was in his 20s, living on his own in Toronto. This city made him the artist he is today and he is, by all accounts, a fascinating musician. Throughout one album, six EPs and a handful of singles, Peach has established himself as a fledgling independent musician whose music veers between folk, Americana, pop and even psychedelic rock. 

As a musician, Peach Luffe is almost un-categorizable. His rangy debut album “Everything is Peachy” is cinematic and dreamy in scope. Guided by Peach’s recognizable twangy voice and dreamy lyrics, the album takes listeners on a nostalgic kick. On “Fish Bowl”, the music shifts to something weirder and wilier. “After All”, a single from the EP, found it’s way onto several psychedelic playlists on Spotify, Peach told me as if he was flabbergasted, In his latest single “Honeybee”, the singer longs for affirmation over an alt-rock soundscape. 

Peach’s music is just as exploratory in the deep feelings it brings out of listeners. His piercing, vulnerable lyrics give the music a real heartbeat, something that Peach’s collaborator Michael Friedman observed. “We’ve worked together for a long time, and there’s a level of authenticity from him that comes from a genuine place,” Friedman, who produces and engineers many of Peach’s tracks, told me. “Jong’s also good at reflecting my feelings so if I’m feeling a certain way and we’re in a co-write sometimes my feelings come into the writing.”

His music is timeless and visionary, often driven forward with the sumptuous artwork created for each release by his friend Daniel Shpuntov.  The artwork is often a key component in the mood-making of Peach Luffe’s music. 

“My friend Daniel has created a little world for me to exist,” he told me. “I wanted to live in an alternative reality. Having a dream world where I can live and my music can live feels really right for me. So, we created a little world of fantasy, trippy, psychedelic elements.” 

The fantastical work, I found, isn’t too far off from who Peach Luffe is. 

Peach’s family is from South Korea, but he spent the majority of his childhood around Buffalo, New York. His family’s home backed up to land of woods, which Peach would spend hours exploring. But what Peach really loved was video games, specifically Runescape. “I spent too many hours on that, something like six to seven thousand hours.” Peach then asked rhetorically, “Imagine if I put that towards music?”

Peach started playing music young, beginning with the violin, an instrument that he still uses now in recordings. “I was really into classical music and I had a love-hate relationship with it,” he said. Having to practice as often as he did could be tiring but the compositions were inspiring and touched a part of Peach’s brain that would eventually begin to hammer out his own music. “I loved listening to classical music and pretty music,” he explained. “It’s what I grew up listening to.”

In high school, Peach began playing guitar, but singing didn’t come until Peach was in his early ‘20s. This is something, he feels, that sets him apart from a lot of musicians. “You know how many singers start when they’re young? I started later,” he said. “I wasn’t good at singing at first. I tried  But because of the violin it helped me be in tune and I could hold a tune better than many people starting out.”

The music didn’t start out great. “The first song I made was so bad,” he said with a quick laugh. “It’s called ‘Strangers Lovers’ and it’s probably still out there somewhere. At the time I thought it was good but listening now, I get so cringed out.”

But eventually Peach found the whimsical qualities that have become embedded with the Peach Luffe sound. “Orchestral classical music really influenced me. There’s a lot of orchestral elements in these new songs. The classical music that’s in ballads influenced me,” he said. 

He found creative partnership with Friedman and Henry Stein. When the trio recorded “Everything is Peachy”, an album that really nailed down what makes Peach Luffe such a special artist, Friedman told me that the experience was almost like being in a reality of just the three of them. “I have to give Michael and Henry a lot of credit for working on ‘It’s All Peachy’ together,” Peach told me. “Michael would come over every day and we’d jam out to stuff. I live in a condo in Toronto and he brought parts of his drum kit so he could record on the spot. So we’d play and jam on the spot. We made it in a month.” 

When I asked what he values most about the first album, he paused. “I just love that I committed to making an album. The reason I made an album is that I felt like I was having writer’s block. I had a large writer’s block so this album was me getting every idea and putting it on the album. The whole month of June I committed to finishing something. I didn’t even see friends or hang out with anyone that month. It was just me, Henry and Michael.” 

Committing to finishing anything is challenging, but the fact that Peach finished, and had a solid body of work to show for their time together was an accomplishment. “There’s so many options and I was committed to focusing,” he said.  

When Peach released the single “Honeymoon” in January he noted how Korean ballads were so influential and omnipresent growing up. “Honeymoon” is not a direct result of those ballads’ sound, but instead their melodrama. “The ballads in Korean are so good because they’re so dramatic,” he told me. “The bridge is really big and the chorus goes back down. A lot of them that I love are like OSTs. They are always intense, heart-grabbing music.”

Peach is lucky because right now, the music is hitting well enough that this can be his day job. He’s not interested in being world famous or selling out arenas. That would be fun, sure. But Peach is too deep of a thinker; too artistically focused to be a manufactured celebrity. He can’t be molded into anything that he hasn’t already created. But for another, he’s too authentic to be that kind of famous.

“Success is in the eye of the beholder. But my definition of success is doing music full-time and where I don’t have to get random jobs,” he said. “This is my full-time job and that’s my definition of success. Of course more money would be nice, but,” he then says almost sarcastically, “what can I do at the moment?”

If he wasn’t doing music he thinks he’d be working with animals. Peach has a cat named Mango, who you might have seen on the cover of the “Sunflower” single, and he’s fascinated by marine wildlife. “Anytime I go to a new city I go to aquariums,” he said. “The fact that they exist beneath us in the ocean, in a different world, is crazy.”

Animals help Peach see the world around him a little differently, and that in turn, flings itself into his music. “People view me as whimsical, very smiley but I can be very serious about things,” he said. In conversation, he’s more interested in learning about me than he is in talking about himself. I realize halfway through the interview that I’ve told him more than I usually tell a lot of the people I write about and maybe that’s because Peach actually cares about people’s stories. 

Friedman told me that Peach has this quality but experiencing it is disarming. He’s easy to talk to because he is so curious. In short, he is a generous listener. “There’s a lot to be said about the space you hold,” Friedman said about the open, safe space they’ve created working together. “Like if someone’s talking, the way the other person holds space for those feelings without judgment allows you to feel like you can fully express yourself in the moment. We do that for each other.”

Maybe you hear this, too, in his music. Peach’s music creates space for you to feel sadness or grief. If you’re feeling overwhelmed or tired, put on a Peach Luffe EP and you might find yourself unraveling the stress. “I don’t care about fame. I don’t care about all those things. I’m too old for that. I’d rather just live a quiet, chill life. I’d rather people just listen to the music and feel calm,” Peach said. “I want people to relax listening to my music.”

A lot of people have messaged Peach that they listen to his music before bed or as they’re studying. He reads those comments as if they’re meditating while listening to his music, and that feels really nice, fulfilling even, to be that kind of solace for listeners. 

“I want them to feel like it can unwind their day,” he added.

Peach has plans to release more music this year, including another EP. “Honeybee”, his latest single, released this weekend has already connected in a large way with listeners, but Peach knows that success can be unexpected. But even if the success isn’t immediate, Peach has never really lost out. “Sunflower” and “Fallen” didn’t do great right off the bat. He kept pushing. How else would he get here if he hadn’t kept believing that at some point this music would find its way to the listeners who need it?

“I’m always,” he said, “living on the verge of hope.”