Love Spells Makes Magic Without Witchcraft

Love Spells is ready for a change. Originally from Houston, the 21-year-old dream-pop artist (born Sir Taegen Harris) has been living in Los Angeles since 2023. Now, he has his eye on New York City. “I need to go somewhere new for a bit,” Love Spells tells NYLON. “I’m low-key going crazy [in L.A.] right now.”

Over a plate of french fries and ice-cold water at Dolly’s in Midtown Manhattan, he fills me in on his upcoming move — a logistical feat he’ll sort out remotely while he’s on tour this fall. Today, he’s here on far more exciting business: promoting his debut album, Love Is the Law, which dropped July 24. At 12 tracks long, the intimately crafted album takes you on a journey of yearning, infatuation, heartbreak, and acceptance — par for the course for a guy named Love Spells. Most of the lyrics are delivered no louder than a whisper, almost as if Love Spells were repeating sweet nothings into your ears for 42 minutes straight.

It’s a confident debut from the young performer, even if it was written from a place of confusion, specifically when it came to delivering on the mission statement of the album’s title without getting too personal. “I [have] much more of a worldly listening view,” says Love Spells. “I feel like a lot of music nowadays is too personal. I want it to be less personal. People are going to do what they want with it anyways.”

Though Harris has only been releasing music under the Love Spells moniker since 2021, his work has already caught the attention of artists like Erykah Badu, Justin Bieber, Lorde, The Marías, and Suki Waterhouse, to name a few. How does he react when another stamp of approval comes in? “I say it’s awesome, and then I move on,” he says. “What else can you do? As if they’d respond if I tried to say thank you. They won’t. If I could, I’d say thank you. I appreciate the moment, and I use it as fuel.”

If that “fuel” has played a part in getting him where he is today, then so has manifestation. Sure, he’s got a rigorous work ethic and a formidable amount of talent, but Love Spells believes there’s more to it than that. “I’m too lucky for it to just be hard work,” he says. It’s no wonder he feels that way: Three years ago he was battling homelessness; today, he has nearly 1.3 million monthly listeners on Spotify, and he counts Kevin Abstract, Dominic Fike, and Deb Never among his collaborators. “I’m very, very, very lucky,” says the artist.

When you’ve mastered the art of manifestation, you don’t need to subscribe to other woo-woo practices like witchcraft — even if your name implies otherwise. “I’m so scared of that stuff, man,” Love Spells says. Part of his concerns can be attributed to his religious upbringing, but most of his fears stem from his brushes with the supernatural when he was a child. Convinced that the apartments he grew up in were haunted, he claims to have myriad ghost stories in his arsenal, though to this day he’s still not sure if his scariest encounter was real or not.

“I was sleeping on the couch with my mom as a kid, and I saw a light turn on in my mom’s bathroom and a little tiny figure walk out into the bedroom,” he recalls. “I don’t know if it was a dream, but I still remember it so vividly. It always felt so real to me, though.”

You won’t find him performing spiritual rituals of any kind, but you can find him performing on a stage near you real soon. After that, Love Spells will get straight to work on album No. 2 — and his apartment search. As someone who has experienced firsthand the horrors of moving in New York, I admit the thought of building out a new sonic world while living in boxes fills me with panic, but Love Spells doesn’t seem to mind. “You have to live life to make art,” he says matter-of-factly. “If you want to be worldly, you need to be around. You need to be involved in people, in things. You can’t be desensitized and closed off.”

Photographs by Jillian Giandurco