Love Life or Love Live! An Interview with Lane Moore

by nathan hilyard

An expert at making lemonade from love’s lemons, Lane Moore arrives this upcoming Thursday at the Armory with her hit show Tinder Live! As a writer, comedian, actor, and musician, Lane Moore sure knows how to navigate the sticky minefield of modern love and turn it into something hilarious. We had the chance to sit down with Lane and talk about all things love, comedy, and of course, music.

How did you get into comedy?

I always knew I wanted to do comedy and make music, since I was a kid. I spent all my time growing up watching comedy and listening to music, in a way where I really was studying for what I wanted to do.

How would you describe Tinder Live?

Tinder Live is a comedy show where I project my dating app profile on screen, we swipe through local profiles in real time, and we only swipe right on all the profiles you'd usually think looked too insane to be real, or super weird, and we message with them live. It's totally improvised, and it's like watching a totally improvised stand up set that the audience can interact with. In a lot of ways, it's also a sketch show because there are so many characters we're meeting in the app, and the characters I'm improvising based on how crazy the profiles are. In comedy nerd terms, I'm a huge Mystery Science Theater fan and the best description I've ever heard is from Frank Conniff from MST3K, who said "It's like Mystery Science Theater, if the movie could talk back."

We love music here at Milk Crate. How does your work with It Was Romance inform your current work?

My It Was Romance songs explore so many of the same themes that Tinder Live explores, and that my books explore, which is trying to find connection and struggling, or finding it and being thrilled. I always say I write happy songs for sad people. I love writing a song about something complicated and sticky, or really painful, but it's a song you can dance to in your room at midnight. I also love to write a song that you can play and instantly feel a million times better than you did before, which is what the first single off this new record Final Girl, Playing Records is exactly that. It's the song you put on when you need happy brain chemicals and you need them now. And when my band plays live, I get to tell jokes in between the songs, and engage with people through songs and jokes and interaction with the audience, which is very similar to Tinder Live but it goes even deeper in some ways, because music is so visceral.

Have you ever seen true love or heartbreak on that stage?

Absolutely, people have found love on Tinder Live a lot. So many guys have these really cringey profiles, but when we actually talk to them, they're really cool and get the joke. So much I've had audience members ask me if they can date the guys we're talking to, and I've set people up in the audience with them and they've fallen in love. It's really a show about how we all try to connect and don't always know how we're coming off to other people. By swiping right on people you'd usually skip, sometimes you get a real gem there and there's someone in the audience who's looking for that exact person. It's really cool. I also have a lot of audience members say they met their partner on dating apps and they love to come to the show to reminisce about how they beat the odds, because most of what's on there is so unhinged.

Sometimes a first date gets crazier than any improv scene. Do you think the skills used for comedy help forge connections? And do you find the spontaneous skills of a live comedy show helps you connect with people in your day to day life?

For sure, and I hear that all the time from the audience at Tinder Live shows. It's so easy to feel like you're the only one seeing these awful or just insane profiles, but Tinder Live shows people they're not alone. And on stage, I'm empowered in every situation, no matter how bad or weird it gets. So I hear from so many people, "Thank god for this show, now I know I'm not alone, and I don't have to take all this so seriously and I can speak up when something crazy is happening ! It's so nice to laugh at how hard all this can be!" It's really cathartic for people to be able to be in a room with other people bonding over how exhausting and frustrating it can be to find connection, and getting actual tips on how to be better at it, and laughing more than you have in months while doing it is just the best thing.

As a college publication, many of our readers are just now becoming adults. What are some valuable lessons you wish you knew as a young adult?

So much of what I wish I knew as a young adult, I put directly into my books How To Be Alone and You Will Find Your People. I hear from people all the time who say they wish they'd had those books so much earlier, because it would've saved them so much time and painful lessons, and honestly I feel that way too, and I wrote them. I can't imagine how huge it would've been to have books like that, and know I wasn't alone with things I was struggling with.

You write a lot about friendships and connection and your show Tinder Live pokes fun at digital connections. How do you feel social media affects modern relationships?

Obviously, it's a huge challenge, but I've met so many cool people on social media. There's so many people who follow me on Instagram and we've chatted, or I really love their comments, or they send me hilariously weird profiles to the Tinder Live Instagram and I'll post them. Or they listen to my podcast or read my Substack and tell me they didn't know anyone else felt like that too, and then we get to talk more about those things. And I wouldn't have met them without social media, so there's a lot of good there.

As you tour Tinder Live, you see the dating pool from each city. What cities seem to have the best dating pools? How does Boston size up?

It's funny because I'm based in NYC and when I created Tinder Live, I worried other city’s dating apps might be really great and normal and kind and cool, and so it'd be hard to take Tinder Live on the road. I immediately realized "Nope, it's bad everywhere," because audiences all over the country will tell me, "Girl our city is the worst dating app profiles! It's so insane here!" So it's universal as hell, which is great for me because that means Boston needs it, everywhere needs this show. It's universal.

What do you hope people take from Tinder Live? Or any of your work?

I love hearing people after the show say "I haven't laughed that much all year, my body physically hurts from laughing so much." I hear it every show and it's my favorite thing. My goal with every Tinder Live show, every song I write, every book I write, [is] that it brings people joy, makes them laugh, makes them feel seen and understood in a way they don't usually, and it gives them a break from whatever struggles they’re facing. That's my favorite thing to do as an artist.

You can catch Lane Moore this Thursday at the Armory in Somerville for Tinder Live! You can also catch her on social media @hellolanemoore, with her band It Was Romance, and grab tickets for the show here: https://the-center-for-arts-at-the-armory.ticketleap.com/tinder-live-lane-moore/