LANY on turning “XXL” into a new expression for an old saying

LANY is about to kick off a tour February 13 in Raleigh, North Carolina. Meanwhile, their song “XXL” from their 2023 album, A Beautiful Blur, is climbing the charts. LANY’s Paul Klein says the song was partially inspired by the band’s wardrobe.

“I keep, like, a list of song titles that I want to write in my phone, and sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t,” Paul told ABC Audio. “This time I think it maybe did.”

“We wear, like, double XL tops,” he said. “And we say ‘I love you a lot’ or ‘I miss you a lot.’ And I thought, ‘Double XL’s like a big, it’s a big size: I love you big. I miss you big.’ And so I thought it was, like, a cool, new expression [for] an old saying.”

The first line of “XXL” is “all my favorite songs are from 2018.” But Paul said when he wrote that line, he wasn’t thinking of super-popular hits that came out in 2018 — he was thinking of LANY’s own music.

“We put out an album in 2018 called Malibu Nights, and it was a little bit of a reference to that,” he said. “We have a really cool fan base that kind of cares about the little details.”

“And it’s cool, once you start making a few albums, you can start to really build, like, a world and a universe for those songs to live in,” he added. “So it was just a multilayered nod to kind of the past and then also where we’re going.”