Through Lakes and Oceans: The Secret to Natalya Swan is Love

8.5 million people live in New York City and nearly 60,500 of those people go to NYU. In 2021, one of them flew 9,400 miles from Kuala Lumpur to get there. Another flew 4,970 miles from Honolulu. Together they traveled more than 14,000 miles to end up in the same library, at the same table, pretending to study. They never really studied.

“We would end up just listening to music or scrolling through Spotify together,” Natalya recalls, laughing a little at the memory. The textbooks stayed closed. The Michael Jackson albums kept playing. Two people who had crossed two different oceans sitting in a library in downtown Manhattan, getting distracted by the same songs. A study session that simply became something neither of them had a word for yet.

Natalya Swan grew up in Malaysia where academics were valued above everything else. Music was omnipresent in her bedroom through playing her guitar and posting homemade covers and music videos on YouTube, but it felt like everything lived solely in that space. It was a feeling she didn’t believe was a direction, a dream that existed only in the margins of a life pointed somewhere else. Beyond those four walls, it didn’t exist, like the world outside hadn’t made room for it. She knew she loved it, she just didn’t know you were allowed to follow it.

Leion Van Osdol grew up between two worlds whether that was being born in Hawaii and raised partly in Tokyo or being shaped by musical theater and film school. What stayed with him was the texture of everything around him – J-Pop and Shibuya-kei aesthetics absorbed early enough to feel less like influence and more like instinct, before he had a language for the sounds he was hearing. He played in bands that were just for fun but it never felt representative of who he was, like playing a character he hadn’t written.

Their first date wasn’t dinner or a walk through the city. Leion challenged Natalya to play Super Smash Bros against him. The victor of the date? “I actually defeated him just like that,” Natalya says as Leion chuckles with a little embarrassment. “He was talking a big game.” She hasn’t let him forget about that moment to this day.

Since then, the relationship has always come first. For most of the four years they’ve been together, music was something they talked about more than they actually put in practice. They went to concerts, sent each other songs the way some people send love letters, and ultimately built a shared language out of emotions and time. “One of the first things we ever connected on was music,” Leion says. “And through that, combining our tastes over such a long time – I think that’s what led us to this point.”

Creating music came much later and more slowly, only when the trust between them was deep enough to hold the weight of it. “The intention was always there,” Natalya says. “We just didn’t know how to start. We were both a little timid and scared.” When they finally sat down to make something, it clicked in a way that surprised them both. Not because it was easy, because it felt inevitable.

The room where it happens isn’t a studio: it’s Leion’s bedroom. The walls are lined with blankets doing their best impression of soundproofing including a casino felt hanging in the corner. On the screen, an FL Studio session glows orange and red and two people sit with their shoulders almost touching, facing forward, completely absorbed in something that has nothing to do with anyone else.

Natalya comes over and Leion opens his laptop where he builds out a few ideas. If she looks up and something in her shifts, they follow it. Melody comes first for her always, the tone of the beat guiding what the song needs to be before a single word is written. Then they spend months with it. Weeks of zooming in on details so small nobody else would notice. “I can’t regret that,” Natalya says of the perfectionism. “That’s part of why it sounds the way it does.”

When Leion makes a beat he thinks about her the entire time. Her personality. Her vibe. The specific softness she carries. Even the memory of their first date – Natalya never lets him forget and in his own way he never lets her forget it either, sampling Kirby sound effects into the production. “My sound design choices when it comes to the song are all based on how I think about her,” Leion says. He means it the way you mean something when you’ve been carrying it for a while and finally say it out loud. Natalya knows this. She wrote it into the song before he ever said it. “nobody else knows the way i sound.”

Musicflirte, their newest single, took four months to make. The making of the track started last December and finished a week before it dropped on April 8th. At 150 BPM it’s their fastest song yet; more outward-facing, a little breathless, and categorized as dance on every platform. It so happens to also be their most intimate song to date. Natalya didn’t decide it would be a love song. Leion’s beat opened a door and she walked through it. “The vibe of the beat and how I was feeling at the time,” she says, “led me to write my first ever one." Leion smiles. “The beat by itself is just a collection of feelings and moods,” he says. “But when she puts her lyrics on it it just totally transforms into something else and then from there we make sure it becomes as true and real as possible.”

In verse two she wrote “promised i'll write you the perfect line.” She was talking to him. She always is. But it’s the bridge that says everything. Four months of work, a bedroom with blankets on the walls, two people who crossed oceans – the bridge over it was always meant to be where they met: “think about it one more time now the imprint on my arm says that i should stay, tonight i’ll write down the notes the melody in my head that’s on replay, if we sit down by the piano maybe we’ll find a reason to not slip away, i’ll miss the only train out if we can drive outside and deliberate.”

A song about choosing to stay, missing a train on purpose, sitting down at the piano with someone you love, and finding – in the music – a reason not to leave. It could’ve only been written by someone who has already made that choice, who crossed 9,400 miles, sat down in a library, let the textbooks stay closed, and never looked back.

There is a myth in creative spaces that the work has to be protected from personal lives. That love contaminates the art. That the closer someone gets to what you’re making, the less it belongs to you. Natalya and Leion don’t argue against it. They just make it impossible to believe. “If you have a shared dream,” Leion says, “you have each other as support to pursue it together.” Natalya nods. “Making music in our relationship was the best thing that could have ever happened to us. It brought us even closer.”

When they started, they weren’t expecting anyone to hear their music. “We weren’t expecting to have an audience at all beyond our family and friends,” Natalya says. They made it for the people already in the room. Somehow the whole world walked in anyway. “Everything that we make feels very genuine to us and who we are as people and our relationship that we’ve built over the past few years,” Leion says. “And yet so many people in the world have managed to find it and connect with it.”

Their debut crossed 80,000 streams. Swan Lake hit 263,465. Musicflirte crossed 50,000. When they hit their first thousand on their debut, they went out for a full celebratory dinner. Not 10,000. Not 100,000. A thousand. That’s just the kind of people they are.

They were at konban NYC, a katsu spot in the city they return to every time there’s something worth making. They sat across from each other for hours. They talked about everything it took to get there. They told each other how grateful they were. 

In 2021 they sat across from each other in a library and forgot to study. Four years and three songs later, they sat across from each other at a restaurant and forgot to stop talking. Time passes. The setting changes. The melody between them never does.