Interview: Sasha Spielberg loving love, turning it into musical inspiration as Buzzy Lee

Buzzy Lee, Sasha Spielberg

Buzzy Lee (Sasha Spielberg), courtesy Phil Chester and Sara Byrne.

A lot has changed for singer-songwriter Sasha Spielberg since she released her debut solo album as Buzzy Lee, 2021’s Spoiled Love, a collection of acerbic breakup songs about a doomed relationship. Most notably, Spielberg, the daughter of director Steven Spielberg, found the love of her life and got married in 2022.

Internal Affairs
Buzzy Lee

Future Classic, March 31
Get the album on Amazon Music.

But if you listen to her sophomore album, Internal Affairs, out this month, you’d be hard-pressed to find the sort of love songs that reflect her current place in life. Instead, the album focuses on the same relationship as before—some of the songs date back as far as five years—as well as a flirtation with a man for whom Spielberg briefly moved to Paris, and a third relationship that sunk her deeper into a hole.

Explaining the story behind “Can I Have Your Autograph,” which opens Internal Affairs, Spielberg, speaking in a recent video call from her home in Los Angeles, laid out a chronology.



“Right after the—I’m just gonna call it the Spoiled Love relationship … two partners ago, after the Spoiled Love relationship, I was touring in Europe, and I was in Paris, and I met this person who I started seeing,” she explained. “I love love.”

More on that in a bit. But first, here’s how Buzzy Lee got from Spoiled Love to Internal Affairs.

Some of the songs from the new album started as leftovers from the last one, which Spielberg had recorded with only one collaborator, Nicolas Jaar, but she wasn’t ready to let go of them. She kept about seven of them and introduced them to producer Gabe Wax (Spoon, Soccer Mommy, The War On Drugs).

“We brought them to life as though they had been written that year, which was a process and definitely hard to do because I have demo-itis,” she said. “I get very attached to the demo versions of these songs. I brought them to Gabe, and they were in a very different form, and we just instilled life back into them from a vantage point of having had space from the time that these songs took place.”

By the time Sasha began working on Internal Affairs with Wax, she had two more ended relationships (well, maybe one and a half) to process. The third one, after Mr. Paris and before Mr. Right (her husband, Harry McNally), was a lot like Mr. Spoiled Love.



“There were similarities, and I was so hard on myself. I was like, ‘Really, we’re back here?’” she said. “And so I went into the studio, and with the same form of the previous relationship, basically. I broke up with that person and met the love of my life. That’s when Gabe and I recorded the rest of the record. … I was falling in love while recording this record, but the songs were about these other relationships that didn’t work out.”

Buzzy Lee, Sasha Spielberg, Buzzy Lee Cinderblock

Buzzy Lee (Sasha Spielberg), courtesy.

In a way, making Internal Affairs was a bit like building a time capsule. Spielberg explained how she collects perfumes and assigns different scents to periods of her life, three to six months at a time. That way, when she’s 90, she can time travel back to any point in her life with the help of a specific scent, she said, laughing.

She conjured up her past emotions while making the album.

“Going back into the studio, it was almost like method acting,” said Spielberg, who’s acted in films like “Licorice Pizza” and “The Kids Are All Right.” “It was like I was going to set, and I was reliving these kind of painful memories, but there was so much distance from them that it wasn’t too heavy. I was able to leave the studio and able to leave all the songs behind me and go be present with the person I was getting to know.”

Spielberg takes a moment to consider how much of her Parisian romance she wants to discuss. She hasn’t been asked about the album opener up until this point. The man is a French artist but not necessarily someone Americans might know. She said he had a larger-than-life personality, and she was drawn to him instantly. They remain friends now.



Mr. Spoiled Love didn’t appreciate some of her qualities, such as her goofiness and humor.

“I sort of dimmed myself … and lost myself,” she said.

So when, a few weeks later, she saw that Mr. Paris not only accepted but seemed to love those parts of her, she thought he loved her. And she moved to Paris. But the two were not on the same page. He was not planning to settle down and started pulling back as soon as she moved to his city.

“I actually ended up losing myself even more,” she said. “I just started counting down the minutes ‘til I could see him again, and I lost myself completely. I spent a month doing absolutely nothing, just walking around chain smoking.”

One thing that did come out of the relationship was the album opener. With time to kill, Spielberg bought a child-sized guitar from a tiny shop and started writing.

“In my mind I was like, ‘It’s light. It’ll be perfect for when I’m going between his apartment and my living situation,’” she said. “He was this larger-than-life figure. I felt like I was a fan following him around. It was embarrassing, and I wrote this song about that. That was it, and I never saw that guitar again.”



Looking back now, Sasha Spielberg believes that she simply wasn’t over Mr. Spoiled Love and was putting all her baggage onto this new man. She believed at the time she was coming into her own, but the opposite was happening.

The distance from the relationships while working on the songs with Wax made the writing and recording process pretty straightforward, without additional baggage. They would work from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., after which she would go home to be with McNally, whom she was getting to know at the time.

Sasha Spielberg on “The Fablemans”
as a music album

Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical film shined a new light on his—and his daughter’s—history.
“I found that because the movie is so autobiographical; it’s almost like my dad’s releasing an album of personal songs. We’ve discussed it. It feels like people really can understand my lineage, like my grandparents. Having friends see it; they’re getting to know my history, and they’re getting to know my grandparents and my great-grandparents, and my dad as a teen or as a child, and that feels really special. This has been just a more personal release for him and so, therefore, for my family.”

“Gabe and I really laughed a lot while making this record, and I really told him everything,” she said. “He knows all of my secrets, but then it wasn’t so heavy recording them. There was an air of goofiness in the studio.”

The two recorded with friends like Spoon’s Alex Fischel on keys, Georgia Lill (cello), Sam Kaufman-Skloff (who records as Sam KS, on drums), Patrick Kelly (bass) and guitarist Adam Gunther. The sound on the album is much fuller than on its predecessor, which Spielberg and Jaar worked on without other contributions.

“I was in a band with my brother for 10 years, and we had a full band,” she said. “With Spoiled Love …I wanted to try, as Buzzy Lee, having a full band.”

So, what’s next?

It turns out Buzzy Lee fans won’t have to wait too long for her third album—and LP3 will be different in that it’ll have actual love songs on it. McNally helped her write it over the past two and a half years.



After she moved in with him in New York (she’s currently splitting time between there and L.A.), he would set up Pro Tools sessions for her and have all the instruments plugged in for when she was ready to work, usually between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. They wrote together, and McNally often helped her see things she hadn’t considered before, such as finding a chorus in a chord progression.

“He almost was like the architect of the music,” she said.

Up to this point, she believed she wasn’t able to write good songs unless she was going through a breakup, but now she has a full album written and ready to be recorded in late summer or early fall. She said she doesn’t want to sit on the songs after recording.

“They’re really beautiful love songs,” she said, before adding a caveat: “There are moments where ghosts of my past will seep into my lyrics. I think that’ll come up forever for the rest of my life because these relationships were very impactful. But this one is my most impactful relationship yet.”

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.

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