Ski Team

After years of writing and recording alongside a full-time career, Lozinski decided to give her music as Ski Team the same focus and seriousness she’d given everything else in her working life. Raised in a musical household and long attentive to craft, she stepped into songwriting full-time not with a master plan, but with a willingness to see what would happen if she truly leaned into the work.

We recently caught up with Lozinski to hear more about her brand new album, Burnout/Boys, produced by Philip Weinrobe (Adrianne Lenker), and the scale of that leap forward into the great creative unknown.

Analogue: I’d love to get a sense of the background. It sounds like you grew up singing, like this was always very natural for you, going back to early childhood.

Lucie Lozinski: Yeah. It’s the thing I don’t really ever remember not having in my life. I have zero memories without music. They’re all mixed up. It’s like breathing or something.

My parents are both musicians, so I don’t really see it as something I necessarily chose to do. It’s kind of like when people’s parents ski, and you just grow up skiing, and you don’t feel cool anymore. It’s just something your family does. I kind of assumed everybody’s family was doing that. I didn’t know how unusual that was.

We went to church every Sunday. My parents had a lot of musician friends, and my dad operated a recording studio. There were just a lot of musicians around, and a lot of singing in church, a lot of improvising, because church music is kind of loose and you do it every week. You’re trying to connect with God and connect with the community.

I think all of that got kind of baked in. Hearing people harmonize felt really cool and really hard for me as a four-year-old, but it also felt like a key part of adulthood or life. Sort of like watching people write in cursive, where you’re like, 'I can’t wait to understand how to do that.'

I started writing songs when I was maybe six or something. They were pretty crappy. There’s one recording that my dad made with me. The rest were like diary entries, and I’d be really humiliated if they came to light.

Analogue: It’s one thing to write your own songs, but it’s another to decide you’re really going to pursue it. Do you remember when that became a focus?

Lozinski: Honestly, I always wanted to give it a proper go. Most of my time as a kid was spent in my room with the door shut, really quietly singing or recording on a four-track or eight-track, just trying to put songs together.

I was obsessed with Britney Spears. I just wanted to be a pop star. Or Jewel. She was popular too. It didn’t have to be pop, but that was the dream. But I was good at school, and I loved learning, so I didn’t pursue music as a job. I sang in a lot of choirs, even through college. I did a cathedral tour once, with gloves and gowns—that kind of thing. But I didn’t think music could be a job for me.

It felt like if it was going to be a job, it had to be through a side door. I couldn’t see a ladder. If you want to go to med school, there’s a ladder. If you want to be a pop star, all the ladders I could identify weren’t going to happen for me. That’s not the world I lived in. So I found something that was lucrative—writing—and I poured every dollar I made into music. Working with producers I liked, getting studio time at places I wanted to record, so I didn’t have to buy all my own gear.

I started releasing songs online around 2020. But the real “proper go” came when I quit my job after ten years and decided to make a record and focus on it the way I would any other job.

Analogue: Do you remember that moment?

Lozinski: Yeah, very clearly. It was really scary, but also one of those things where you’re like, 'What’s the worst that could happen? Worst case, I have to make a different plan.' That was already my reality a couple of years ago.

I was also just so burned out. I had been pouring myself into work for so long, and it used to be really fun because I loved my job. But once I fell deeply in love with the music I wanted to make, continuing to show up to something that no longer felt engaging was really hard.

When I quit, it felt freeing and necessary. That’s kind of how the record came about. I was writing from a place of burnout and exhaustion, but also from this fired-up place. I felt very Bruce Springsteen about it, like, I’m an American worker.

I’m not a nepo baby. My parents are musicians, but they struggled. I had to work. I still have to work. That’s hard, and it’s hard for so many people. Even if you’re doing something you love. So part of the record is about work and burnout. The rest is about similar feelings, but through marriage and relationships.

Analogue: Did quitting your job change your songwriting?

Lozinski: A lot of the songs were already written. The way I write is that songs get stuck in my head. I don’t sit down at a desk and write. But there’s a desk phase later where I go back in and figure out what the song actually is, what it’s about, and clean up the language. That part is work.

Quitting gave me time to treat the record as my main creative project. It wasn’t a hobby or a side project anymore. I could go to the studio and work out harmonies and really try to make the record as honest as possible.

I’d heard the argument that free time is bad for artists, that you need to be grinding to make anything worthwhile. That wasn’t true for me. If you’re someone who likes to work, it’s amazing to be able to treat the thing like a craft.

Analogue: I was enamored with the new single, “Gilroy". I read where you said you left it more open to mood and it wasn't this declarative thing with the lyrics. I loved this idea that you felt some creative permission to do that. Do you wrestle with that?

Lozinski: I studied writing in school, and one of the things we were graded on was compositional risk. I loved that because it was the one category where the answer wasn’t obvious. You had to take everything you knew and do something that served the message without being novel just for novelty’s sake.

With that song, I tried really hard to write a pithy chorus. I got feedback after recording it that it would be a hit if it had a chorus. I tried again. I recorded a sloppy version and listened back to both. And I realized that where I was when I wrote it, I didn’t have anything to say. I didn’t want to contribute to the dialogue. Forcing a chorus felt wrong. So in the end, it wasn’t about trusting myself so much as realizing there was only one option that made sense.

Analogue: Was it hard to protect that instinct?

Lozinski: I entertained it. I really tried. But when I listened back, it was obvious that it didn’t serve the song or the people it was about.

Analogue: You’ve got release shows coming up. How are you feeling now?

Lozinski: Good. If you’d asked me last week, my palms would’ve been sweaty just hearing about them. But the details are coming together now. I’m starting to understand what these nights are going to look like.

For the audience, it’s just a show. But for me, it feels big. It feels like the album’s birthday. Like a wedding day. There were so many unknowns: a new band, people I hadn’t met, not knowing if the vinyl would arrive on time. But I did the best I could. Now it feels fun. I’m really excited.

Analogue: What comes next?

Lozinski: Release day feels like day one. The project is complete, but I know that’s not really how it works. Now the thing exists, and you have to figure out what to do with it. There’s more music I was working on that had to be put on hold while this record moved forward. I want to keep making things and play more shows. For now, I just want to get to the end of this sprint, make some space, and see what’s supposed to happen next.

VISIT: Ski Team