Biography
Lauren Fay Levy is a TV, film, and advertising music supervisor.
Lauren’s love of music traces back as early as age 7 - breaking her family’s VHS player from over-rewinding Spice World to transcribe every lyric on a comically large drawing pad. Her music palate has since expanded, but her freakish devotion to music remains the same. Lauren has practiced de facto music supervision since her early teens, holed up in the spooky basement of her old Brooklyn home on Windows Movie Maker, meticulously sculpting scrappy visuals to every beat and emotion of a song.
A third-generation New Yorker, Lauren sacrificed her love of pizza, bagels, and pizza bagels, for her love of music, and moved to California at age 17, alone save for her trusty blue iPod to keep her charged. Amid years of day job hustles whitening Hollywood elite’s teeth, feeding a film director’s pet pigeon, and laying in The Standard Hotel’s human fish tank, Lauren pursued music from every angle: playing in indie bands, hosting the UCLA radio show Lost and Sound, DJing at vinyl clubs, curating playlists for hot spots like The Ace Hotel, interning at a posthumous management company for dead rock stars, obtaining a degree in Ethnomusicology, and finally, beginning her prophetic calling in music supervision.
Under the tutelage of veteran music supervisor Nora Felder, Lauren cut her teeth on Season One of Stranger Things (nominated for the first Emmy ‘music supervision’ category - two consecutive years). Lauren was the Music Coordinator of the Stranger Things Grammy-nominated compilation soundtrack. During her tenure at Picture Music Company, Lauren also placed music in Ray Donovan, Better Things (Hollywood Music & Media Awards music supervision nominee), What We Do in the Shadows, and The OA among others. Following this chapter, Lauren went on to assist esteemed music supervisor Bruce Gilbert on a range of hit shows (Kidding, Orange is the New Black, GLOW, et al).
Now an independent full-service music supervisor, Lauren has a penchant for bold television, artistic feature films, and avant-garde advertising - with a special place in her heart for LGBTQ+ storytelling. She has been a go-to music supervisor for Apple ads since 2018, and when she’s not music supervising she’s nerding out leading music history lectures and deep listening sessions for the international series Classic Album Sundays and audiophile collective In Sheep’s Clothing. She takes pride in making some of the most unlistenable archival playlists, cataloging things nobody asked for, such as every song ever made with the sound of a ringing telephone or siren. Occasionally she makes listenable playlists as well, and weirdly those seem to be the hit ones on Spotify, like her playlist dedicated to plants.
Lauren’s obsession with music leans both forwards and backwards. She has her finger on the pulse of fresh new music, but gets her finger dusty digging for vintage gems with the mindset of ‘retroactive A&R,’ a term she dubbed for Billboard. Her fascination with music is grounded in her fascination with human beings. Ethnomusicology - the study of music both in culture and as culture - trained her beyond traditional music theory, to analyze music through the lenses of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and history. Her music business proficiency is grounded in her coursework in Music Supervision, Music Law, Music Business & Industry, Music Theory, Music Technology & Science, and Music Research & Literacy. Lauren also studied and played a variety of traditional music in academic ensembles: Balinese Gamelan, West African music and dance, classical North Indian, Chinese, Middle Eastern, Latin percussion, Flamenco Dance, and Appalachian and Bluegrass.
