The Song Is Hers. The Feeling Is Yours.

Lydia Stephen was standing over a laundry basket holding a pair of jeans.

There was a small mustard stain on them from a hot dog she'd eaten with her boyfriend.

Except he wasn't her boyfriend anymore.

She knew that if she put the jeans in the wash, the stain would disappear.

Normally, that's the point.

This time, Lydia hesitated.

That little stain was attached to a memory of someone she still loved. Washing it away felt like letting another small piece of their time together disappear.

What made the moment even stranger was that Lydia had already written a song about this feeling.
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She just hadn't written it about herself.

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The Song Came First

Years earlier, one of Lydia's sisters had gone through what she describes as an “earth-shattering breakup.”

“I carried her devastation in my chest for months like it was my own and I had no idea what to do.”

So Lydia wrote.

One of those songs became “What Not To Do.”

It starts with a very ordinary moment: “I washed my duvet / For the first time since you left me.”

Changing the sheets. Washing a cup. Moving the couch.

Things you've done hundreds of times suddenly feel different because you're doing them for the first time without someone.

The song began with her sister's experience.

Then, years later, Lydia went through a devastating breakup of her own.

Suddenly she was standing over those mustard-stained jeans, hesitating to wash away something most of us wouldn't have thought twice about.

The song belonged to her now, too.

What Not To Do hasn't been released yet. Lydia is currently working on the mix.
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But people are already finding themselves in it.

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When the Song Becomes Yours

Lydia has played What Not To Do live enough times to notice what happens.
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A sniffle somewhere in the room. Someone wiping away a tear. Someone approaching her afterwards, or sending a message later, because the song put words around something they hadn't been able to express themselves.

“The song was mine, and it was my sister's, and hopefully soon it can take its own shape for everyone else too.”

That might be the best way to understand Lydia Stephen as a songwriter.

Her songs begin somewhere personal — heartbreak, loneliness, uncertainty, things that aren't always easy to say out loud.

Then somebody else hears them.

And something changes.

The song is hers.
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The feeling doesn't have to be.

For Lydia Stephen, a song can begin with one person's experience and eventually become somebody else's.

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​Finding a Way to Say It

Based in Hamilton, Ontario, Lydia Stephen is a singer-songwriter, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist who has been writing music since her teens.

She's still figuring out exactly where music might take her.

What she isn't questioning is whether it will remain part of her life.

As Lydia puts it, “To walk away from music would be to walk away from so much of who I am, what I value, and how I express myself.”

Another unreleased song, It's Not What We Do, grew from feelings and experiences Lydia had spent years trying to understand.

That's a recurring idea in her writing: taking something difficult to explain and finding a way to say it in a song.

Where that eventually takes her — further into performing, songwriting for herself or writing for others — she doesn't know yet.

For now, she keeps writing.
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And she keeps showing up.

For Lydia Stephen, songwriting has become a way of making sense of things that aren't always easy to put into words.

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Two People or 150

Lydia has played her share of nearly empty rooms.

She doesn't romanticize it. It's discouraging.

You write the songs. You rehearse. You show up ready to play.

And sometimes almost nobody else does.

Some of the best advice she received was simple: use those shows as reps.

Two people in the room don't deserve a lesser performance simply because another 148 didn't show up.

“Whether 2 people are listening or 150 people are listening, I am still doing something I love, and it does not mean I should stop,” Lydia says.

There's something about that which captures what remains so compelling about independent music.

Before the streams, followers, algorithms and career milestones, someone still has to make the music.
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And someone else has to listen.

Whether the room holds two people or 150, Lydia says the reason for playing doesn't change.

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Then I Heard “Longer”

I'd heard enough of Lydia's music to know there was talent there. But after reading the answers she'd written for this Up Next profile, I wanted to go a little deeper.

So I spent some time with a handful of her songs — nothing exhaustive, just listening to a few that came up and seeing where they took me.

“Until July” caught me.

Then I heard “Longer.”

And I stopped.

It's sweet and simple, and it doesn't seem determined to force an emotion out of you. It invites you in, and somewhere along the way I started finding pieces of my own experiences inside Lydia's words.

That's when something she'd written about What Not To Do really clicked.

A song can begin with Lydia, but what you find inside it can be entirely your own.

There's something about that which gets to the heart of what Vinyl Vibes means when we talk about listening to music on vinyl.

It's not really about the format.

It's the idea behind it: putting something on and giving it your attention. Letting a song finish before deciding what you think. Going back and hearing something you missed the first time.

Lydia's music rewards that kind of listening.

It doesn't demand your attention or insist that you feel something immediately. It simply leaves the door open.

You can keep scrolling.

Or you can stop for a few minutes and listen.

That's what happened to me with Longer.
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Lydia provided the song, but the memories it brought back were mine.

LISTEN TO “LONGER” BY LYDIA STEPHEN →

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How Much Music Are We Missing?

It's a question I've found myself returning to.

I wrote about it after discovering Swedish artist They Owe Us and the album Katzengold: how much music are we missing simply because we stay inside the artists and records we already know?

Lydia brought me back to the same question from a completely different direction.

There is an extraordinary amount of music being made by independent artists. Finding it isn't necessarily the difficult part anymore.

Giving someone you've never heard of enough of your attention to actually hear what they're doing might be.
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Sometimes all it takes is one song.

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What Makes It Worth It?

I asked Lydia to forget streams, followers and career milestones for a moment.

What had happened because of music that made all of this worthwhile?

She didn't mention a number.

She mentioned people.

Opening for Kingston band Kasador in April 2025 introduced her to Cameron Wyatt, who became one of her closest friends. Hamilton's Shaky Knees Songwriting Club brought Liam Kamerman of Floating Mansions into her life.
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Those relationships would still matter if the music stopped tomorrow.

For Lydia, some of music's biggest rewards have happened away from streams, followers and numbers.

Maybe that's where all of this eventually leads.

A sister goes through a breakup.

Lydia feels it deeply enough to write a song.

Years later, that song becomes part of Lydia's own story. She plays it in a room and someone wipes away a tear. Somewhere else, somebody hears another Lydia Stephen song and finds something completely different inside it.

The song keeps moving from one person to another.

The song is hers.
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The feeling is yours.
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Or, as Lydia puts it:

“Music is worth it because it fosters human connection in a way that nothing else really can.”

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KEEP DISCOVERING

Lydia Stephen is one of the artists we're discovering. See who else we're listening to.
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