Milk & Honey founder Lucas Keller kicks back at his home studio in the Racquet Club West neighborhood of Palm Springs.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVID FOUTS
When Lucas Keller built his vacation home in Palm Springs in 2020, it served in part as an escape from the frenetic pace of the Los Angeles music industry. The 39-year-old executive oversees the careers of more than 100 musicians and 40 athletes at his management company, Milk & Honey. Working with artists is more than Keller’s day job; it’s been his identity and lifeblood for two decades. His clients are family, so it wasn’t long before he began inviting them to join him in the desert.
“When he’s working with creative people, it’s not like he’s working from the top down and telling them, ‘This is what you have to do,’ ” says David Hodges, an award-winning songwriter, a former member of Evanescence, and Keller’s longest-running client of more than 15 years. “It’s more like realizing that creatives are tethered to some muse that they’re chasing down, and he’s helping to facilitate that.”
And where better to channel those muses than amid the awe-inspiring vistas of the Sonoran Desert? Soon after his house was completed, Keller began hosting weeklong songwriting camps there. He now holds around six camps a year at his place, a 4,000-square-foot modern oasis with panoramic views of the San Jacinto Mountains and a date palm growing through the roof.
“The 20 best studios in Los Angeles don’t have windows,” Keller says, laughing. “It’s like, ‘We need to be inspired to make great art in this room with black paint and no windows.’ ” But in Palm Springs, “there’s magic out there,” he enthuses. “You’re just getting better art.”
Keller holds a Gretsch 5191, one of about 20 Gretsch guitars in his collection.
Over Zoom from his office in L.A., Keller is affable and quick-witted, with a thick brown beard and tattoo sleeves that include the Milk & Honey logo. Behind him, a pair of red and white Milk & Honey boxing gloves dangle from a bookshelf. After he gets into particularly contentious business negotiations, he shares, he likes to mail the counterparty a pair. It’s a way of saying, “Sorry, the gloves came off,” he explains. “I won’t tell you how many offices in L.A. have Milk & Honey boxing gloves in them.”
Keller’s life has centered around figuring out what inspires people to make good art and how to draw that out of them. His love of music began back when he was a kid in Waukesha, Wisconsin, playing guitar in a post-hardcore band. Early on, he realized that he didn’t have patience for all the laborious diplomacy involved with being in a band. “I’m really pragmatic about decisions. If you’re attached to people that make bad decisions, you start thinking, Maybe I should just do this on my own,” he says. “I learned that my skill was helping other people. I had better taste in other artists than in my own music.”
In college, he began working as a concert promoter and band manager. That led to a stint working for Kid Rock’s manager in Chicago before he “willed” his way to Los Angeles. From the beginning, Keller recalls, “everything was DIY, blue collar, and I’ve brought that spirit through 20 years doing this.”
He spent five years working for a management firm in L.A. that handled major artists including Linkin Park, Kanye West, Peter Gabriel, and Scott Weiland from Stone Temple Pilots. But, increasingly, he found that he was more interested in the musicians whose names appeared on the inside of the album sleeve than those posing on the cover. For one, it didn’t require him to stand in as a therapist so often for high-strung rock stars. “Hit songs don’t talk back, and they don’t call your cellphone in the middle of the night,” he jokes.
Keller kicks back at his home studio in the Racquet Club West neighborhood of Palm Springs.
That, and (unless you’re Paul McCartney or Madonna) being a performing artist tends to be a young person’s game — and a fickle one at that. By helping artists convert their talent into songwriting, Keller realized he could extend their careers and advance their music on a much larger scale. “For some people, part of aging gracefully is staying in the studio and not going on a tour bus,” he says. “Sometimes I’ll meet an artist, and I’ll say, ‘You really need to sleep in your own bed every night.’ ”
Songwriters found a tireless advocate in Keller. “I had never had a business partner that allowed me to be so free from business and able to focus on just creative stuff,” says Hodges, who has written and produced songs for Celine Dion, Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, and other hitmakers. “He really is a lover of music. I don’t think you could do this job well if you just thought of songs as widgets you’re selling.”
In 2014, Keller launched Milk & Honey, mainly as a vehicle to manage songwriters and producers — the unsung heroes of the music industry who often don’t get the credit they’re due. “I understood that if I scaled that business, I could be taking a lot of chances and having a lot of writers in with different artists,” Keller says. “By virtue of doing that, I’d have more hits than being an artist manager.”
His bet paid off. Over the past decade, Milk & Honey has presided over some of the industry’s biggest tracks, including Dua Lipa’s “Levitating,” Demi Lovato’s “Sorry Not Sorry,” Selena Gomez and ASAP Rocky’s “Good for You,” and “Butter” by BTS. The company has 25 songs to its name with over a billion streams on Spotify and has sold more than a billion albums across its roster. This year, Milk & Honey clients received 10 Grammy nods and last year churned out hit songs with Morgan Wallen, Travis Scott, and Charlie XCX. In 2021, Keller expanded into sports and now represents top athletes in the NFL and MLB.
Keller designed and built his 4,000- square-foot vacation home in 2020 and now hosts about six immersive songwriting camps here annually for notable clients.
The manager’s success reflects his ability to weather the changes that have roiled the music industry in the past decade as streaming giants like Spotify and Apple Music have changed the way the masses consume songs. “At every turn, the tech companies tried to slash rates for the songwriters,” Keller says, though he acknowledges an improvement in recent years. He has been an outspoken advocate for improving artist royalty rates, and in 2019, he organized an open letter signed by more than 100 artists advocating for fair pay for songwriters.
“He’s really adept at pivoting to the new moments and maximizing the music that his clients make in a way that some of the older, more legacy managers aren’t able to do as well,” Hodges says.
Keller plans to scale Milk & Honey Sports to around 100 athletes. The music side of the company is evolving too. Many of his producer clients are also DJs, including Benny Benassi and Oliver Heldens, and Milk & Honey artists will probably have around 2,000 EDM shows this year. “I feel weird about it because I am an alternative rock guy. But I like it more,” Keller admits. “It’s a higher-octane version of the music business.”
And of course, he’ll bring the team back to Palm Springs for songwriting camps. “I tell all my writers that I need to have a hit that was made in that studio,” he says. Given Keller’s track record, that seems less a matter of “if” than “when.”
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