Love doesn’t have to hurt and take a toll on your mental health.
Lydia Caesar stands firm in that belief and said her upcoming EP, “Legendary Love” promotes the narrative everyone deserves to have a love that’s monumental.
“I feel like if you’re genuinely giving of yourself, your heart and working on your relationship, then you deserve a love that will go down in history from the legacy you’ve built,” she said.
She said often in the music industry, listeners hear a lot of negativity in songs surrounding infidelity and not being loyal to your partner. She said she wants her music to depict love differently from what’s being portrayed in the current climate.
“There are examples of love out here that fight through the hard times and are trying to build something,” she said.
She said when listeners hear the EP’s tracklist, they’ll notice it isn’t perfect love songs, but its attention grabbing songs that highlight being loved the right way.
According to her,some of the inspiration behind the songs come from a legendary love of her own, her relationship with her husband. They’ve been married for almost eight years and met when they were living in New York around the same time.
She said after their first encounter, they fell in love quickly and were inseparable. They relocated from New York after he received a job offer at Nelly’s former Ex’treme Institute musical school.
Having lived in New York her whole life, Caesar said she was nervous about the initial move, but she became more comfortable as the pair became more involved in the local scene.
“We came here and said we’re gonna take St. Louis by storm doing everything possible to make a mark here,” she said. “We started a company, Sauce Records, producing shows and recording songs with different artists. Our love was the fuel to everything we have going on because it’s a great example of two is better than one.”
One of her latest singles from the project, “The Ones We Love,” currently airs on BET Soul’s #SubSoul playlist, which plays three times a day, four days a week.
She said the opportunity came about after she phoned a friend who has connections with the network, asking if he could help her get her video played.
“I said to myself I really want more for this video than just putting it out on YouTube. I would love for it to get a stamp of approval from some of the machines that move these videos,” she said. “Thank God they loved it and didn’t have a hard fight with him using their connections to air it.”
She said the meaning behind the song comes from her driving her sister’s car one day in New York [her hometown] brainstorming trying to think of a concept. She said thought of the song’s chorus on the spot, “Why are we the way we are, the way we are with the ones we love?’”
Once she got home, she said she recorded the lyrics and the melody for the song. Then she sent it to her guitar player to listen to, and they finished putting the song together the next day.
“I wanted to talk about the middle part in relationships when we fall in love and become complacent,” she said. “We start to take our partners for granted. The people closest to us sometimes get the worst of us because we stop putting in the work we did in the beginning.”
Caesar’s “Legendary Love” EP releases Dec. 9 in addition to the “Legendary Love Concert Experience” where she will perform songs from it at House of Soul. Tickets are currently on sale for the show at https://www.everythinglydia.com/.
“I’m looking forward to taking the stage and singing to everybody in St. Louis,” she said.
Caesar is a Queens, New York native who grew up singing and ministering at her father’s church. She has opened for Patti LaBelle, Ciara, Ashanti, and more. She’s been featured on BET’s “106 & Park” twice.
