Tag: sobriety

While Making ‘Strawberry Mansion,’ Langhorne Slim Learns to Be Still

Posted on by Editor

Langhorne Slim didn’t intend to make his new record, Strawberry Mansion, but he found a musical path through a crooked piece of time. He isn’t escaping the chaos of the era. Instead, we find him traversing it, soaking it in, and sharing a real-time creative reaction.

In “Sing My Song” he writes, “I’ll sing my song when my song appears.” By facing his own addiction and the many hardships the world has been dealt this past year, he cleared the path for the 22-song record to appear. With the support and musical collaboration of friends like Paul DeFiglia and Mat Davidson — as well as his family, label, and management — Strawberry Mansion stands as a fruitful monument to Slim’s hard work as a person and as an artist.

BGS: Will you talk a little bit about what you were experiencing leading into making this record?

LS: Well, I wasn’t writing music to write a record. I had been working for a long time trying to finish another project (the unreleased Lost at Last Vol. 2). I quit drinking and drugs about seven and half years ago and I relapsed with prescription medication that was prescribed to me and one thing led fairly quickly to the other, where I became dependent on that medication. That led me to about a year out West and a decision to come back to Nashville where I’ve lived for almost a decade. It is where I got sober the first time.

So the conversation in my head was, I’m going to go back home and get healthy. Right now, I’m actually in the apartment of my friend who came and drove me from Los Angeles back to Nashville and it was a brutal trip. And he’s a brother to me. He didn’t know that I was in bad shape and weaning myself off of these prescription pills. Prescription medication is a motherf***er and I have all kinds of thoughts and feelings about that. He found me in a place that he had not ever seen me in. I could see through his eyes that he did not recognize me and I don’t mean that poetically or metaphorically. My boy was clearly disturbed, frightened, annoyed, sad, and confused. When I dropped him off, he looked at me and I looked at him and I knew it was bad. He was just a mirror and I could see where I was at.

I called around some places and people and found some help. Shortly after I got home, the tornado hit. And then of course the pandemic. So energetically and physically, it was such a crazy wild time for everybody. On a deeply personal level, I think in retrospect, the slowing down and forced confrontation of things that needed immediate dealing with, there’s just so much that has been revealed in this. For me, who am I when I’m not a touring musician? Who am I when I’m facing my anxiety, my fear, whatever it might be? Some might say life on life’s terms.

For this record, I read that you had a friend that suggested that you write every day, which you had not done prior to that. Is that right?

It is right that you read that but it’s not the entire story… One of my friends, who I’ve known for many, many years sort of jokingly said, “If you just write a song every day, come over and we’ll record it.” As soon as the quarantine started, some songs started to come and at that point, it almost seemed like they were quarantine jingles. They were kind of on the nose for the situation but it felt good to have these new little songs. I would finish a song. I would not overthink the song. I would take it to my friend’s house in its rawest form. We would record it and I would post it and then I wouldn’t think about the song again. It was a cathartic thing. Catch, release, and on to the next one. And that wound up going on for a couple of months.

Were you interacting with fans over social media about the songs? And if so, did it wind up affecting the output?

Let me put it this way, I think what it was allowing me to do was to scratch an itch. I don’t know what would have happened if I wasn’t having some interaction, some connection in that way without being on tour. In this raw and intimate way, I was writing the song that day, making a little video, and putting it out to people who care or like what I do. It means a lot to me that other people not only relate but are feeling uplifted if only for the two minutes that they are listening to it. I’m sure that was a fuel and energetic force that allowed me to continue to do it.

When did you know that Strawberry Mansion was a record?

I’m superstitious and one time I told my good friend Jonny Fritz that there had been a black cat that was stalking my lawn and he laughed and rolled his eyes and said, “You know what is bad luck? Being so superstitious.” He’s a smart boy. When these songs were flowing, I didn’t want to call my manager or the record label because I thought it was taking it out of the spirit world and putting it into the more tangible physical one. After about 20-25 songs I had the idea for it to be a record, but wanted to keep writing and they finally called me and said, “We think that you should just record a stripped-down record,” which is what I wanted. A stripped-down, raw, immediate, and true to how the songs came about kind of record.

One of my favorite lines from the record is from “Panic Attack,” when you say, “I’m feeling things exponentially.” And that line can be for the good and the bad. What are you feeling exponentially right now in this moment?

I’m excited about the record. I’m proud of the record. I am looking forward to continuing to write songs and getting busy with whatever comes next. The feeling feelings exponentially can be positive. It can be negative. That was in terms of, obviously, a panic attack. I have been a sensitive boy my whole life so what I’m trying to do is to not let every feeling take me over or guide my next step, because if I’m not looking out for it, a certain kind of thought can manifest into an intense feeling very quickly.

There is going to be a lot of talk on this record about sobriety. This isn’t the first time I’ve gotten sober and I’m not trying to market or promote my sobriety. I’m trying to take that very seriously. It is part of the real shit that is in my life and it had to stop before more songs came. It seems dishonest for me not to discuss it. I still feel feelings very exponentially and would be lying to say that by getting sober or by writing a record that that cures any of it. It is a daily practice.

What are you most looking forward to musically after the pandemic has passed, and what are some things that you might do differently from having had this quiet time?

I think I am going to realize how much I miss the live experience. I think because I have been so fortunate to be able to write a bunch of music during this time, it has really fed that need. If I hadn’t been able to do it, I think I’d probably be really missing touring and being on the road. It feels weird to say but I don’t have that craving to be back out on the road. I miss performing for people.

For me personally, I could absolutely see touring a lot less and continuing to practice some semblance of stillness, whatever that means for me. More home time, I think would be healthy for me. Perhaps because I haven’t been under the delusion that touring is coming back any time soon since the beginning of this, I haven’t been constantly disappointed. I’m just trying to keep my shit together and have a healthy attitude about it and not have any expectations for what might be waiting for me down the street.

Photo credit: Harvey Washington

From Sad Bastard to Groove Master: A Conversation with Sam Morrow

Posted on by Editor

Apart from going all TSwift-style pop crossover, the easiest way to distance oneself from modern commercial country is to make loud and clear references to an old older era of the genre — or to just play it straight throwback style. But at a time when honoring the past has become so fashionable that it may elicit a blasé response from the more cynical of listeners, Sam Morrow remains grounded in the present through a commitment to his own ears and a desire to grow and try new things. He intentionally breaks up and flips sonic variables, but only to a degree that the studied listener will still recognize the presence of bygone innovators such as Gram Parsons, Little Feat, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Waylon Jennings, while guessing at the precise methods used to achieve those sounds. If the progression of his works to date means anything, and as Morrow continues to put forth new recordings, expect evolution and growth. It wouldn’t be surprising to see both deeper dives into and further departures from his current country funk/Southern rock sound.

Morrow is an artist committed to finding and refining his true voice, but on his newest album, Concrete and Mud, he doesn’t weigh that pursuit down with an agenda or a need to sound too profound. He laughs at his foibles and winks at his vices. Like so many artists before him, when the Los Angeles-based Morrow got clean from an opiate addiction, he had strange emotions to process, so he turned to songwriting in an effort to root out a bevy of conflicting feelings and past wreckage.

2014’s Ephemeral was his first artistic exorcism, expressed in the emotional, sincere style of a Damian Rice or a Justin Vernon. However sincere, Ephemeral doesn’t sound like someone who has quite discovered his authentic voice yet. Despite its title’s indication to the contrary, Morrow’s second album, There Is No Map (2015), sounds more like someone who knows where he’s come from and where he’s going. But his newest work, Concrete and Mud, displays the confidence, mastery, and winsomeness of an artist who knows exactly who he is, what he wants to say, and what he is doing. The set marks the moment Morrow rightfully claims his place among the very best that country and Americana have to offer.

You’re from Texas, which has a pretty rich musical heritage. What Texas musicians were you into growing up?

I’ve had a really weird musical journey. I started out playing in church, kind of a natural path for any musician from the South. I’m super grateful to have all of that because it got me practiced playing with a band. It got me a lot of experiential stuff that I wouldn’t have learned, if I wasn’t playing every Sunday with a band or had to learn new songs all the time. No matter how good the songs were, they were still songs. So I did that, and once I was maybe 15, I got into rap a little bit — like Screwed Up Click, Houston rap … Paul Wall, Lil Flip, all of those kind of dudes. I don’t real listen to them anymore, but that’s just kinda how it went.

So your Texas influence is not necessarily a Texas country influence?

No, I was very like — I didn’t listen to punk rock, but I had a punk rock attitude when I was a kid. So, being from Texas, I didn’t want to like country music because that was like … everyone in Texas likes country music, so I wanted to go against the grain, you know? So I liked rap. I liked ZZ Top, or emo/screamo, or whatever it was. I didn’t start really listening to country music until I got sober almost seven years ago.

I mean I’d always kinda heard it. I knew a bunch of Garth Brooks songs. I knew a bunch of George Strait songs. You know, all those Texas country musicians — Robert Earl Keen, Jerry Jeff Walker. I knew those songs, but I had an aversion to the whole thing because of my punk rock sort of attitude. Then I kinda saw the light, I guess, and realized that it’s just what I related to the most.

Country, traditionally, has that whole thing about the primacy of the song, and you seem to be quite the songwriter type of guy.

I mean, whenever you get sober, you’re super raw and vulnerable and everything feels weird. So, really, through the three years that I was just a gnarly junky, I used being a musician as a reason to not have a job. Or I would get out my guitar every once in a while during an acid trip, and we would all freak out about it or something like that. I wasn’t really into it. Even in that phase, I was listening to electronic stuff. I got really into dubstep and Skrillex, so it just blows my mind thinking about it now, but in any case that’s where I was. When I got sober, I wanted to start writing songs, and I had all these weird feelings and vulnerabilities.

Did you feel like it was a way to get out all the weird emotional turmoil that comes with getting sober?

Yeah, exactly. And naturally I kind of gravitated toward more folk and singer/songwriter stuff because that’s where that kind of songwriting lies. And it wasn’t something that was necessarily foreign to me. It was just something that I kind of pushed away for a long time. But yeah, my first record was just like sad bastard, super depressing shit.

I can definitely hear the progression from Ephemeral through There Is No Map. And even that one is not quite as straight-ahead country as Concrete and Mud.

Yeah, I don’t know. Concrete and Mud definitely has it’s country tracks and what not, but I didn’t want to make a country record. Everyone and their mom is making a country record right now, so I wanted it to be … like, obviously that’s kinda the music I play — Americana, whatever you want to call it — but I wanted to have a uniqueness to it. I didn’t want it to just have pedal steel and some violins here and there. Though there’s nothing wrong with that.

You definitely have some weird sonic stuff going on that’s out of the box.

Right. I wanted it to get a little weird in some spots. Four years ago, I got super into Little Feat and started listening to a lot of deep Skynyrd stuff.

Is Little Feat kinda where the funk element came from?

Yeah, and I’m very groove-oriented when writing songs. If I’m sitting at a desk or something, I’m always banging on it. I don’t know. It’s just kinda there. I’ve just kinda always had that funky element. One of my favorite things to see is people actually dancing to the music I play live. And a lot of the country covers I was doing, like Don Williams, I consider him like country disco. Even Willie Nelson’s Shotgun Willie, it’s pretty funky that record.

Going back to what you said about the dance thing, you never get people dancing to sad bastard music. So what was the turn for you? Did you suddenly discover your love for groove? What happened there? Because it’s a pretty hard turn.

Going on the road and playing more bar gigs, like, “Here, we’ll give you this much money to play three 45-minute sets,” or something like that … I don’t have that many original songs. And also just seeing how people would respond to my sad bastard stuff in a weird bar where people are trying to eat their pizza and shit. So I learned covers that had a good groove or were a little funky, or I could put my own twist on and make it groovy and funky. And a lot of the songs on this record are just grooves that I took from covers that I’ve been playing for the last two years. And to answer your question: I don’t know if I really did. I just kinda hit that point where I was playing songs that people were dancing to and I was like, “Oh, this is what I like to do.”

So it was a response to the joy that you witnessed?

Yeah, just people having fun. I’m not really a dancer, but I can dance with my guitar in my hand. That’s about it.

There are some serious themes on this record, but you have a lighter approach to those themes. Was that a conscious move? Do you think about being sincere without being too sentimental?

Right, yeah that was, of course, intentional. I was definitely conscious to make this record lighter and sort of more sarcastic. I almost didn’t even understand that you could do that — that songs could mean a lot but be light or sarcastic or whatever. I could have never written “Quick Fix” six years ago, just poking fun at all my vices, noticing all my vices in everyday life. That’s not something I would want to point out — my flaws — even now, and make fun of. Maybe “make fun of” is not the right word, but make light of them or talk about them in a naïve sort of light.

You’re sober, which to me says that you take care of yourself, but then you sing a song like “Quick Fix,” and it makes me think that you’re not heavy-handed about the way that you take care of yourself, or prescriptive or preachy in some kind of way. Right?

Right. I mean, I still do a lot of shit. Like I play poker all the time. I’m super impulsive. I still have these addictive behaviors, but I’m in control and I recognize them. I keep them somewhat healthy. And that’s just a sign of maturity, I guess.

Kind of like, if you can wink at them, you’re giving them less power?

Yeah, exactly.

You nod to some funky and psychedelic country sounds, but then, at times, you take them a bit further. What made you decide to push the sonic envelope, so to speak?

I think we tried to do that on a couple tracks on the last record, but just didn’t quite get there or didn’t think it out enough. For instance, on “Paid by the Mile,” we initially had my phaser pedal on my guitar, and I was like, “This sounds cool, but how many people have put a phaser pedal on a guitar? Everyone fucking does it. Why don’t we try to put the phaser pedal on the Wurly?” So that’s what we did. We put the phaser pedal on the Wurlitzer, and it sounded fucking killer. And it still gives the whole mix that phasey, wobbly thing, but it’s just coming from a different place than where you normally hear it in a guitar.

So me and Eric [producer Eric Corne] both were willing to take more chances, I guess, this record. And the guy that plays keys — his name is Sasha Smith — what I really love about the way he plays keys is, he’s so percussive and rhythmic that it couldn’t have been a better person to play on this record. He fills in all the spots and uses whatever he’s playing like a rhythm instrument.

Yeah, even the organ on “Weight of a Stone” is so precise and punchy that it works like a rhythm instrument.

Right, exactly. And yeah, we took influence from … have you ever seen Peaky Blinders? So the Nick Cave song that’s the show credits opener…

“Red Right Hand”?

Yeah, so we wrote the song, and it’s sort of a murder ballad sort of song, but we wanted it to be sort of droney and have a keyboard theme in it. It’s pretty close to it. I don’t know how many people I should tell that we took it from that, but it’s far enough apart.

You do have a way of nodding to influences without aping them. There are some nods to Gram Parsons, for example, like the amphetamine queen line in “Coming Home.” Is that an homage to “Return of the Grievous Angel”?

That’s kinda where it came from. I don’t remember if I exactly took it from that. I think I just wanted to use “amphetamine” in a song. Like Jason Isbell uses “benzodiazepine” …

Yeah! How does he do that?!

I know! Dude! And it’s so perfect, too, the way he phrases it and everything is so perfect. So I wanted to have an elongated, full drug name in one of the songs and it just kinda fit. But yeah, Gram Parsons … “Skinny Elvis,” we referenced pretty closely “Ooh Las Vegas.”

Right, but Concrete and Mud doesn’t sound like a Gram record at all.

And that’s what we wanted. I was a little bit worried about “Quick Fix.” At first, I was resistant to the Clavinet because I didn’t want it to sound too much like “Cripple Creek” [by the Band], but then we started playing it, and it just didn’t sound as good without the Clav, so we were just like, “Aw, fuck it.”

To quote our mutual friend Jaime Wyatt, “Texans like to sing the shit out of a song.” What happened to your vocal performance? You’re earlier stuff is good, but you sound like a completely different vocalist on this record. You’ve got a level of control that I’d say is as good and as professional as it gets.

Thanks! I really appreciate that. Yeah, I think just playing out a lot. I’d never really taken a guitar lesson or a voice lesson, and I took a few voice lessons in the past couple years just to kind of understand my voice a little bit. And since my first record, I was playing with a friend doing a show four or five years ago, and we were playing this song and he said, “Why don’t you add some growl to this part? You can do that.” And I was like, “I don’t really have a growl to my voice, man.” And he was 100 percent right. My voice is like 98 percent growl, just like howling and seeing what comes out, and I just didn’t realize that until he said that to me.

So that’s kinda shaped my tone a little bit, too. And then I sorta started growling and yelling too much, so it was a matter of honing that in a little bit, and I think I’ve found a balance. Once you figure out you can do a new trick, you just do it all the time.

You do that really well at the top of the chorus on “Weight of a Stone.” There’s a lot of power in the attack. It’s really cool, one of my favorite moments on the record.

That one, we were a little bit worried when we first started. That was the hardest one to sing in the studio, for some reason. I think it was just a weird key or something for me. Initially we wanted to keep that song kinda soft. I even toyed a little bit with doing it falsetto, but once we got that kind of cool growl in there, it sounded a lot more epic, I guess.

One more thing: I’ve seen a term thrown around a lot lately, and it’s been used of you, and I wondered if you have any thoughts about it — “left-of-center country.” Does that mean anything to you?

Honestly, it doesn’t mean anything to me. Cool, you can call it whatever you want. You know, when people ask me what kind of music I play, I say country music just because it’s easy. You don’t have to sit there and explain it to them. Although these days you kinda have to explain to most people that it’s not the kind of shit you hear on the radio. A lot of lay people don’t know what Americana music is. When you say “Southern rock,” they don’t know what you’re talking about. You can call it whatever you want. We just made the record that we wanted to make, and we’re happy with the way it turned out.

Nicole Atkins and the Last-Call Lullabye

Posted on by Editor

She knew the session would be worth documenting, but at the time, Nicole Atkins didn’t realize that the cover of Goodnight, Rhonda Lee would be a shot of her soaking up one of the most difficult songs she’s ever written.

On the night they recorded the string parts for “Colors,” Atkins invited Griffin Lotz — a longtime friend of the Jersey native and a Rolling Stone photographer — to hang around the studio and take a few pictures of her and the guys in action. At one point, Lotz trained his lens on Atkins listening back to the somber strings that accompany her dusky voice and Robert Ellis on the piano. Atkins’s eyes recall the Atlantic waves that wash upon the shore that shaped her, a stunning aquamarine of mirthful reflection that turns tempestuous when the climate calls for it. In Lotz’s photo, the tide is calm: Captivated, and with eyes as big as her headphones, Atkins considers the parts she sang for the string players on the sad ballad that states, in simple, certain terms, that drinking had consumed her life.

“I can see exactly where I was when I wrote that song,” she says of “Colors,” which she and Ellis had recorded in one take in the fitting gloom of a lightless studio. Atkins had just left New Jersey for Nashville with her tour manager husband, Ryan; she had been struggling with sobriety and had gone through a rough relapse when she found herself lonely in their new city and he told her he was heading out to work a two-month jaunt. On top of that, she’d hit a wall on the creative front, and the combination of unlucky breaks had her steeping in despondence. “I was writing tons of songs,” she says. “We were shopping around demos, because we had no money to make a record, and I just had no idea what we were gonna do, you know? It was just months and months of not getting any phone calls, at all, about songs that I thought were good, and a record I thought was, you know, cohesive.”

She decided to go to New York for a few days, as her old friends from college and frequent tour buddies, the Avett Brothers, invited her to their gig at Madison Square Garden, and Margo Price had encouraged her to come along for her Saturday Night Live performance that same weekend. “I just thought, ‘Dude, everybody has stuff to do except for me,’” she recalls. “I was like, ‘I’M QUITTING MUSIC.’ And then I drank a bottle of dark rum and called everyone I knew, and I was like, ‘I’m just gonna write a musical. Fuck this.’”

One of those calls was to Jim Sclavunos, drummer of the Bad Seeds, who stepped out from a photo shoot with Nick Cave to answer the phone and assure her that quitting simply wasn’t something she was “allowed” to do. Another was to Ryan. “I obviously had to tell my husband the next day that we couldn’t have booze in the house, and it was just freaking me out,” she says. The melody for “Colors” came later, when she was sad, tired, and singing lines of the song into her phone on a train platform on her way to the airport in Newark: “Everywhere I go, the only things I see are glowing brown and green. The bottle’s gonna kill me.” That’s when she set the backbone for Goodnight, Rhonda Lee, an album named for Atkins’s drunk alter-ego: This is her sober record, one that thrives off hard-won clarity throughout, but “Colors” is a breakthrough so simple, painful, and pure that it serves as the album’s anchor. It’s a reminder that the toughest trouble can teach us things, though its lessons — to pour out the poison; to wean off a person or substance you can’t quit — are difficult to learn or even discuss.

“I think there’s a lot of shame that comes with being a woman, and being a musician, and being an alcoholic,” she says. “There’s a lot of embarrassment to feel; it’s not pretty or cute to talk about. There are a lot of sober women in music, but I don’t know if a lot talk of them about it — the only one I can think of is Bonnie Raitt. I write about my life on every record. This was just what was going on, and I couldn’t really write about anything else. Being in and out of sobriety for two years was just totally taking over my life. It was all I could think about. It’s weird: You know when they’re like, ‘It gets better, it gets easier, and you’ll have a day when you don’t even think about booze.’ I couldn’t imagine that because, even in long stretches of sobriety, it was like, ‘I’ll just have one.’” She did get there — at Bonnaroo, where she didn’t even think about the open bar, of all places — and reaching that internal summit was illuminating. “I thought, ‘Now, I have all this room in my brain just to think of music and my husband when he comes home.’ It was such a good feeling, that I wasn’t constantly like, ‘I’m so fucked. How am I going to be unfucked?’”

Those “other things” flooding her grey matter include intricate arrangements and some of the most challenging compositions she’s written yet, as Goodnight, Rhonda Lee is as much an instrumental triumph as it is a lyrical one. In addition to Ellis and Sclavuno, Atkins sat down with a number of esteemed pals — including Chris Isaak and Binky Griptite of the Dap-Kings — to hone in on exactly what she wanted to sing and how she wanted to sing it. Thanks to these collaborations and the brassy guidance of Nile City Sound, the Fort Worth-based production team behind the timeless quality of Leon Bridges’s Coming Home, the result capitalizes on the wry grit of her New York-honed chops; her unadulterated adoration of Lee Hazelwood, Roy Orbison, and classic soul; and the alt-country framework that informed her first forays into songwriting. Though her marriage is wonderful and she’s open to compulsively unpacking her relationship with alcohol in songs like “Colors” and the album’s title track, Atkins found inspiration in painful memories of broken romance, the kind of stuff most people are eager to leave in the haze of a blackout-peppered past. One instance took the shape of “A Little Crazy,” the grand, lonely cowgirl call Atkins and Isaak wrote in an hour after he suggested that she revisit a relationship that went wrong instead of the one going right.

“He was like, ‘You’re happily married — but remember the guy you dated when we toured? Let’s write about that,’” she says. “A lot of [Goodnight, Rhonda Lee] was written about a past relationship. I wanted to own a lot of things instead of saying, ‘This is terrible and I’m a victim.’ After that one particular breakup, I was fucking nuts. I had no control of my emotions whatsoever. I was willing to degrade everything I believed in just to have that comfort back.”

And thus we have Goodnight, Rhonda Lee instead of Goodbye. By dusting off the conversations, opening heartwounds of the past, and keeping those tidal eyes of hers open, Atkins is able to mine the hurt, humiliation, and disappointment they caused for musical gold, just as she does while working through her sobriety with the tape rolling.

“There are aspects of Rhonda Lee that are still kind of there that I’m kind of grateful for. I didn’t get sober and become a giant square,” she laughs. “It’s more so being in a place where you feel confident and better about yourself, that you’re able to hold certain situations that were painful and have some empathy for the people involved in those situations — including yourself.”

LISTEN: Fairbanks & the Lonesome Light, ‘Pieces’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Fairbanks & the Lonesome Light
Hometown: Austin, TX
Song: “Pieces”
Album: Nothing to Escape
Release Date: August 25, 2017

In Their Words: “‘Pieces’ is one of those songs that kind of wrote itself in a very short amount of time. I was just at the beginning of my decision to try and steer away from drinking and was wrestling with the two versions of my drinking reality: The romanticized freedom and beautiful chaos that was undoubtedly real, on one hand, and the terrifying ugliness and fairly un-poetic destruction that was becoming undeniable, on the other.

This little place that I describe in the song seems to still have both elements floating around in it — an identifiable romantic notion of throwing caution to the wind and embracing the visceral gamble and a sort of self-awareness that the dream is starting to show frayed edges and is coming apart at the seams, letting the light of a painful reality peek through. At the end of the song is a declaration that, in both worlds, at my best, and at my very worst, the single unwavering thing was my love for everyone — even the ones I hurt along the way — and the unlikely hope that maybe they saw that love, despite all my behavior to the contrary. It’s a dangerously vulnerable song and I considered not recording it, but Amelia gave me the assurance I needed to put it out there.” — Erik Flores

Photo credit: Barbara Frigiere

Coming Home to Myself: A Conversation With Langhorne Slim

Posted on by Editor

For the past 10 years, Sean Scolnick (a.k.a Langhorne Slim) has been winning loyal fans by playing and recording songs that blend the sensitivity of modern folk with the energy of modern punk. With the release of his new album, The Spirit Moves, the 35-year old Pennsylvania-born songwriter and his band The Law are poised for a breakout year. Below, BGS contributor Michael Verity and Scolnick talk the pitfalls of drug use, the artistic edge of sobriety and how to find yourself amidst the ruins of our modern malaise. Editor's note: This interview has quite a lot of adult language in it, so if you're uncomfortable with that, you should click on something else.

We share a few things in common. My brother-in-law lives in Langhorne, PA; my mother-in-law used to live in New Hope.

No way. I went to school in New Hope and did my first 18 years in Langhorne. Small world.

We’re almost like cousins.

Absolutely! Even distant brothers.

Do you get back there at all?

I do. My mother still lives in the same house where I was raised. My grandmother, Ruth, lives with her, for the last few years since my grandfather passed away. And my other grandmother is in Northeast Philly. Most of my family is still on the east coast — Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey — and I live in Nashville so I definitely get back whenever I can.

My mom still lives in the family house; my mother-in-law lives right in downtown Philly.

Are you from that area originally?

I grew up near Ithaca, New York.

I lived in New York, in different places, for about eight years. Then I decided to leave the east coast after the first 25 years of my life. I moved to California, fell in love in Northern California, which took me to the Napa Valley area, then to Portland for a couple of years. Then found myself in Nashville for the last three years.

Nashville’s a good place to be.

Great place to be. The way my life was changing at the time, it was the perfect environment, the perfect energy. Somehow it all came together as a great home. I even bought a house there. I’m rarely there but, when I’m off the road, I do feel at home there.

There’s a lot of great musical energy there.

Absolutely. It’s a lot of people doing similar things. In different ways, of course. But when you’re in a town full of touring musicians, you all stand on a common ground, understand one another, in a base kind of way. That’s comforting and you feel supported. That’s how I’ve found it.

You’ve placed quite a few songs on TV shows and in commercials. Did you actively think about that before people starting picking up your songs?

Good Lord, no.

I’ve been making music ever since I could, writing it in my head since I was a little kid. The inspiration and impetus was simply a need to be creative. There’s music rolling around in your head and, for some reason, you’re one of the people who can hear it and needs to sing it and needs to write it. If you had asked me then how I'd feel about even entertaining something like putting my songs in commercials, I would have been against it.

But at the time, I didn’t realize how the musical universe has changed and how technology has changed and what it’s actually like to make music my livelihood. Through these commercials and films and TV shows, we can afford the band the ability to continue doing what we’re doing and promote our music to a wider audience.

Though I come from a love of punk rock music and that kind of feeling and spirituality, I’ve always been honest with myself and anyone who would listen that I very much want to be a known musician, that I want my songs to be heard. I’ve always had that kind of sickness. I’d still play music if there were just three people there but I’d prefer if there were a lot more.

Mixed into that is the fact that music has always been my own therapy, my way of getting out what I need to. If I didn’t have it, I truly believe I would spontaneously combust or melt or something fucking dangerous and terrible and bloody.

Folk music is the original do-it-yourself genre and it’s really the original iteration of the punk rock ethos. As I was listening to the record, I thought: ‘He’s really caught the energy of a do-it-yourself brand of music.’ Tell me what your goals were heading into the studio.

My goal is always to be a real, raw motherfucker, if you don’t mind me saying so. It’s not to capture the universe's or the human animal's truth but to capture my own truth, at the time and to know that I am getting as deep with it as I can. Hopefully, not in an overly intellectual or heady way but, hopefully, in the opposite way of that. I try to shut down the intellectual, because I struggle with that, and just be open to my more energetic or spiritual center and be true to that.

There had been a couple of musical things that I let out in the past that I wasn’t 100% sure of. I found that very difficult to consider while in my more introspective or insecure moments. Then I realized that, if things don’t go the way you want them to but you’re living your truth, it’s a lot easier to deal with. For the most part, I’m super confident about what I was putting out. But there were a few little things here and there and it haunted me. So, with my last record (The Way We Move), I made a vow to myself to really open up and have no more fear of the scary things; to embrace the scary shit; to expose it for myself and find strength in that. It wasn’t like I said, "Well, today, I’m going to open up myself to my fears and write a song about it" — but, as an overall kind of ethos, that’s something I embraced and found great strength in.

With this record (The Spirit Moves), my life had changed dramatically. I had left Portland, was floating around on tour, crashing on couches for almost two years. Then I found myself a single man for the first time since I was a kid. I got to Nashville — and felt really good about that — and got sober. I had been high or drunk every day for 15 years. I knew from the time I was a kid that drugs and alcohol were going to take me down if I didn’t confront them. I knew if I could confront my addictions before they took me down, I was going to step into the next phase of my life. And that phase was going to be really special because of the strength that comes with facing that creature, which is a difficult fucking creature to face and take down. Thank God I was in a position in my life where I could do that and it changed everything.

When I started performing sober and living sober two years ago this past August 20, which is also my 35th birthday, there was just a whole different light that was shining. I don’t understand energy but I believe it has everything to do with what’s going on with us and around us. If you’re able to change your own energy and perceptions, things change around you. It’s not really hocus pocus or even a religious thing; it’s my experience with life.

With that change, there was fear of whether or not I could write the record, whether I was going to be able to be who I really was, without all that stuff, just being naked, just finding myself at 33 years old. Even though I’d lived a lot of lives in those 33 years and I’d been fortunate to travel so much and meet so many people and play professionally for a long time, it was a coming home to myself. I talked to my grandfather about it before he passed away and asked: ‘When do you figure this shit out?’ And he said: ‘You never do. And probably never should.’

I had a friend who used to say: ‘It all comes clear about 20 minutes after you reach room temperature.’

That’s cool. If I stop trying to figure it out, maybe things will be a little clearer.

This article isn’t about me but I share some of the same experiences as you with drugs and alcohol. My experience is that, for some people, drugs and alcohol are just heavy energy. Some people can’t live under the weight of that heavy energy. The lucky ones are those who learn to live with a lighter energy, even though the heavy vibes are sometimes very attractive.

That’s a very cool way of putting it. I relate and connect to that. The reason I got into drugs and drinking is that it provided what I thought was a lighter energy … and it did in ways.

Of course.

But when you start depending on it to dictate your moods and your creativity, it’s very very dangerous. And that heavy energy is dark. The way I put it is: for years and years and years, it was blocking my love. Not romantic love or sexual love. My love for being here. My love for music, my love for people.

It would allow me to reach a certain level; then my head hit the ceiling. I had a band that was together, we were playing shows, we were making records, I had friends, people started to know who we are, great girlfriends and all those sort of things but breaking through that ceiling of addiction provided an amazing opportunity to move on through my life.

It’s a beautiful and terrifying thing to keep digging, to continue getting real with yourself. To write sober, to record sober, to live sober were things that were brand fucking new to me at the time. And like I said, my fear was: 'can I write?' When I was writing a song and couldn’t get it finished my thought was: "Man, a bottle of red wine, the way I always did, would be great right now. A couple of pills, that I used to love, but would hurt me more than anything."

I have a great friend who goes by the name Cracker Farm He takes all the photographs for the Avett Brothers and he’s taken photographs for me over the years. We’ll meet at the YMCA like two old men and hang out in the steam room. We'll sit in there and catch each other up. Actually it ‘s more me complaining.

He‘s been sober for many, many years and has helped me immensely. I said: "Man, I'm fucking scared I won’t be able to write, I’m scared of what’s going to happen to my creativity." He’s like: "There are some people who are just born a little insane, a little strange, and you’re one of these people. Sobriety might change the lens of how you see things but it’s not going to stop you from being creative." He’s been around me when I’ve woken up with a song in my head. He’s like: "That’s not natural. Not everybody dreams songs." Having a friend who I love and respect and trust really validated that it wasn't gone. Drugs weren't creating anything. It was just a suit I put on a long time ago to go to that party and I just took that suit off. And I found I don’t want that suit anymore. I hope I find new suits to dance in.

I’ve been sober for almost 25 years. My experience is there will never be an artist in this realm who doesn’t have a conflict between the head and the heart. It’s the head that says "you’re this or you're that." The Buddhists say you have to inhale that fear into your heart and breath back compassion. When you’re capable of doing that, you’re one step closer to being free from the conflict of head and heart.

Wow. That’s so incredibly right on. Maybe that goes back to what we were talking about regarding the inspiration for the music. Maybe I’m trying a little too hard to quiet the head — telling the head to shut the fuck up and go away — as opposed to embracing it with compassion, knowing that’s part of being human. That’s a constant battle for most people, especially for artists. I feel like we are ultra-hyper and sensitive but we’re so lucky we have the release for it. If I didn’t have music, I’d be chained to a bed some place. And I’m trying to be more compassionate with my head.

I’ve heard it said that everyone is "buddha," whether they’re pissed off or enjoying pleasure. If you’re pissed off, you’re just pissed-off buddha.

Are you Buddhist?

Since I was 18, which is longer ago than I like to consider. So, getting back to the music: I think it was The New Yorker that equated you to Leadbelly and Dylan. How does it feel to carry that around in your head? Or don’t you?

Oh, I don’t. I mean that’s very nice. They’re two of my musical idols but I don’t buy into that. Going back to the "head and the heart" thing: what sticks with me more, and always has, is the guy that’s looking at his watch during the show, the girl that’s walking out. Me thinking they don’t like it when they’re just going to take a piss or get a beer or something like that. So, The New Yorker saying that beautiful thing is something I tuck away a little bit: like, that’s cool they said that. And if someone attacks my sincerity or my integrity, then I would be so hurt by that. But I learned a couple of records ago that I had no interest in reading any of these reviews, whether they’re praising me and the music or calling it bullshit. Because I don’t want to feel a greater sense of myself because of what someone is saying in a magazine and I don’t want to feel negatively about myself because somebody doesn’t get it. I’m on a path to have a sense of who I am without needing that.

I will say that this kind of conversation I’m having with you is very new in my career of 10 or 11 years. To have a really enjoyable, what I feel is a deep and real talk with somebody as opposed to it being something you have to do because it’s part of the deal and it almost hurts, which it did for years.

This has been a lot of fun for me, too. But just for kicks I do want to talk about some of the songs on the record. I’m going to go to the end of the record and talk about “Meet Again,” because I think that’s pretty fantastic.

I’m happily surprised you picked that as one to talk about. “Meet Again” is one of the oldest song on the record. It was written about this amazing woman I spent five years with. It was written around and for the Way We Move record.

I always feel like I don’t have enough material. [Laughing] That I didn’t write the right songs, that I don’t have enough shit. Then I get freaked out toward the end, like cramming for a test or something. I'll have all this material, bits and pieces, songs that are done. I guess I’m not good at counting them all up or something. So, as it gets closer to making the record, I start to write an awful lot.

In the case of The Spirit Moves, I was flipping through old journals and notebooks and finding old tapes and listening back. And I was reminded of that song, which we did record for the last record, in a different version that didn’t make the cut. It didn’t fit cohesively with the rest of the music but it was always a song I was very fond of. When I discovered it again, I started playing it around the house and it took on a different meaning for me. At one point, it was a sad song to me but then I started finding strength in it. And it became a happy song. I’m not one to reminisce but to feel those feelings that were once heavy and confused and be at peace with them and to have the song feel that way it does today is special to me. That time with that woman was a big part of my life.

There’s a nice balance on the record between what we might call modern folk and the edgier, punkier stuff. Now it’s your turn to choose a song.

A lot of the songs on this record I worked my ass off to "get it." Some of them came easy but a lot of them didn’t come that way. There’s a song on there called "Wolves" that effortlessly dropped upon me. I felt like I said what I wanted to say and understood what the fuck I was talking about. Which doesn’t always happen.

It was inspired by the poet James Cavanaugh’s book called The Men Too Gentle to Live Amongst Wolves. I read the preface to that book and it floored me. I think there are truths already in our bones; shit that is ancient. I'm attracted to music that awakens that, that validates that spark, and lights a room in your heart or soul that you didn’t even know was there, because when it opens, it’s familiar. That’s the shit that moves me so deeply. I read the preface to this book and I felt like I was part of something. There ‘s a certain sect of freak out there that have a certain kind of soul understanding. The way he was writing about it provides a lot of comfort. It was super powerful.

I’m going to pick one more: "Put It Together," because it so different from the rest of the songs on the record. A big sweeping production piece, one of those 12/8 ballads like Phil Spector used to produce.

It's one of the most difficult, heart-wrenching tunes I've ever written. It was through the great patience and help of my very good friend and musical soul brother, Kenny Siegal, that it wound up happening.

So the story of that song is: I had a 1977 Mercury Comet — a beautiful car — and I took it to my favorite Mexican restaurant in Nashville to get some tacos, down the street from my house. I left my keys in it, as I so often did. For two years, nothing bad ever happened to that car. Then I walked out of Mas Tacos and my car had been stolen. I felt pretty shitty about it. [Laughs] I like to think one doesn’t need pain and adversity in life to create music and art but it certainly provides some help, when you do feel the feelings. I was feeling frustrated and upset. So plugged into a little Fender Champ amplifier and started to play the riff of that song , which was a lot heavier on that day, in my bedroom, through that amplifier. It kind of turned into a soul '50s kind of tune.

A year or so later, I was going to Catskill, New York, to see Kenny. I always let ideas kind of percolate and then I go see him and we work the tunes out. So we just sat there and got weird until the right lines came out. It was painful getting there but it came out. I feel like it was hard work not done in vain.

Yours is a cool record. I have a 15-year old who’s into modern folk, who writes songs. He walked into my office one day while I was working and I said: ‘You gotta check this guy out; he knows how to write a tune.’

I appreciate that, man. That means a lot. More and more we see kids and parents and grandparents all coming to our shows together. That’s the greatest shit for me, man, because I was so close to my grandparents. It’s a beautiful thing; it makes me very happy.

Photos courtesy of All Eyes Media

The Singer Is Secondary: An Interview with Dylan LeBlanc

Posted on by Editor

Singer/songwriter Dylan LeBlanc grew up splitting his time between Louisiana and Alabama, shuffling from his mom's house to his dad's. On the one side was an oppressively religious upbringing; on the other was a music-filled refuge. But, once his teenage years hit, LeBlanc's demons started to outpace all else, and he began a booze- and drug-filled downward spiral — all while crafting two fairly wonderful albums, Paupers Field (2010) and Cast the Same Old Shadow (2012). To write his new Cautionary Tale, LeBlanc climbed out of that hole, stared down those demons, and churned out 10 exquisite songs. He then surrendered himself and his compositions to the mercy of producers John Paul White (The Civil Wars) and Ben Tanner (Alabama Shakes), and the result is nothing short of magnificent.

Paint me a picture of you as a kid … Loner? Book nerd? What was going on for you down in the Southern wilds?

I was kind of a bad kid, actually. [Laughs] I was a bit of a kleptomaniac. I remember, in class, I would be seated away from all the other kids. I had to sit up in the front of the class, facing the chalkboard, away from the classroom because I disrupted class a lot. I would also steal candy from the other kids and I also stole candy from my teacher's desk. I remember that was a real big thing.

Wow.

Yeah. There was one more kid that was also bad and, eventually, he was moved up to there, so it was me and him up there. [Laughs]

[Laughs] What was behind all of that, you little candy thief?

I don't know. I have no idea. I was a bit of a liar, as well. I liked to tell fibs — really crazy fibs that were totally tall tales. Just extravagant. That was when I was really little, like 5 until I was 7 or so. I got a spanking from everybody in my family for the last time I stole the candy. I got a really bad whipping from my mom, and I think my dad drove all the way out there to give me a whipping. My step-dad whipped me. It was crazy. That was the last time I ever stole anything.

Then you had the much-written and talked about late teen years. During that time, what sorts of people did you have around you — were they more protective of you or more enabling?

Well, I didn't have any friends up until I started smoking pot. We didn't come from a lot of money. The school that I went to was mostly wealthy children. And I always had something against people with money. I guess it was because they treated me and my sister kind of badly. We didn't wear expensive clothes. I always wanted to fit in, but I usually just withdrew from all that and played my guitar … in my early teens — we're talking 11, 12, 13, and all through middle school.

I remember, when I was about 15, I met this other kid who played guitar in high school. That was, like, my freshman year of high school. His name was Daniel Goodwill. He played guitar and liked Jimi Hendrix, and he liked Bob Dylan, and he liked the Byrds. He knew a whole lot more about music than I did, and a whole lot more about classic rock. I really liked him and we became best friends. He also smoked pot. I remember, when I started smoking pot, I started getting a whole lot of new friends. [Laughs]

[Laughs] Funny how that works, hey?

It is. It is. You kind of find that you go toward the like-minded people who are similar to you.

With all that in your rear view, where are you today? What are the things you cherish these days? What are the things you're striving to achieve, as a person and an artist?

All around, I'm striving for a balance, today, in every aspect of my life — in my artist's career and my personal life. I've always been extremely up or extremely down, in one aspect or the other. You could just call it extreme, one way or another. Personality-wise, I'm either extremely happy and ready to take over the world or extremely not happy. Some call it manic.

In this day and age, I'm trying to achieve some sort of balance — not get too high, not get too low. Stay somewhere in the middle. I don't drink anymore. Don't do drugs anymore. That helps a lot. [Laughs] And I'm starting to get back to normal, I think. I think.

There's a lot pouring out of you on this record, a lot of speaking truth — and surrendering — to various powers. Which of these songs are proving to be the most healing for you or the best way to get things out?

This record is really about somebody who's in the process of just waking up. I was so naïve or undeveloped or whatever the heck you want to call it … I don't know. But I was really gullible and I lived in a lot of fear for most of my life, up until a few years ago. I had all these people telling me … my mother's side is very religious. I grew up with that whole ideology just pounded on me, all of my life. I carried that religious guilt.

And that really started to weigh on me and, finally, I cracked. I couldn't carry it anymore. There was this big process of un-learning all that shit that people had been putting in my head all those years. It's not their fault, either. It's not like I'm angry at them. That's where they came from. They could not help it, either. They were scared, and they scared the hell out of me. So I had to let all of that go. But that didn't happen until … it was well after my first album had come out. It was like 2012. When my grandfather died, really, is when I started to understand some things. So I started to un-learn a bunch of things.

It's funny what witnessing death and grief and those various processes … it puts a lot of things in perspective. You figure out what's worth fighting for and what's not.

I started asking myself questions like, “Why am I the way that I am?” I just wanted some relief … from myself. I put myself through all this stuff. I keep repeating the same mistake over and over again. I feel bad about it, but I can't do anything about it. I'm not capable of doing anything about it. A lot of people don't understand that. They don't realize that they're not capable of doing anything different until they let go of all these old ideas and all of the shit that they've been dragging with them all their lives.

I completely unraveled, first. That's the first thing that happened. I completely lost my mind. It had been building up and building up and building up. I mean, I lost it. Big time. Like certifiably a nut job. With that, came a large amount of fear, like, “Oh my God. How am I going to get through this life with all this anxiety and all this fear?” I couldn't live with it anymore and I was ready to check out, but I knew I didn't have the courage it would take to check out. All of this crap going through my head. I just decided that I needed to go in another direction altogether. I couldn't live with that guilt anymore. I couldn't stop hurting people. I couldn't stop hurting myself. I don't think everybody's like that. I think it's the level of disturbance which is inside someone.

I think it's probably a matter of degrees, right? That is inside everybody.

Yeah. It is.

It's just how it manifests. And how controllable it is … what tools we have.

Exactly.

So you come out of that and go into these songs. To work with John and Ben on this thing … how important or imperative, maybe, was it for you to have the safe harbor that they were to dock these songs in and get them right?

It was important to me to let somebody else take the reins. It was good for my ego. It was good to humble me. It was good for me on more levels than one. I'm really bad about, especially when it comes to my songs … I want to hover over everything. I want things to sound a certain way. I want to cover them up with this and that. John is a musician who's been doing it for a long time. And Ben has also been doing it for a long time. I needed the objective ears.

I'd worked with Ben for both of my other two records that came out before this one, but it was something that I needed to do and try. It was, “Well, I've tried this and that didn't work.” Neither one of those albums were successful, no matter what the press says about it. I don't know what they're talking about with, “the success of the first two albums.” Paupers Field sold 5,000 copies and Cast the Same Old Shadow is at 1,200, as we're speaking right now. [Laughs] They just did not sell any records and nobody cared.

I knew I couldn't write other than for anybody but me. I'm not that kind of artist. I know that they know what to do with what I do. I liked John, as a songwriter. I liked him because he was very laid-back, but he's also very firm, when he needs to be. I needed that objective ear. And I needed the organization because my thoughts run like crazy, and I want to try this and I want to try that. I needed somebody to mediate the thoughts going through my head. Like, “Dude, we don't need four tracks of pedal steel guitar going on one song. You don't need to layer six guitars. We're not going to try 50 different string parts on one song. This is what we're going to record. And we're going to do it deliberately, and we're going to be very organized. And you're going to sing this where we can understand the words. It doesn't matter how many times you have to sing it. I want a vocal that I can understand every word you're saying.”

Sometimes, I was very resistant, like, “I hate this and I don't see where you're going.” And they'd say, “Look, you asked us to do this. Now you gotta trust us.” It was great. It was great for me. I humbled myself and said, “You're absolutely right. I need to step back and let you do your thing because that's what I asked for.”

Talk about surrendering yourself to a higher power …

Yeah, it's a lot like that. Just letting go. And I did. I totally let go. Everything you hear on that record, it's John Paul and Ben. That's them. They arranged a lot of the parts. I mean, we collectively did, but they had a lot to do with it. Ben's really great at achieving something you want, sonically. I really wanted to stick close to that late '60s/early '70s rhythm section feel and we knew that going in, so it was cool.

Your record and Andrew Combs' record last year … it's my favorite sound to hear. I grew up in the '70s. That's my childhood, my comfort zone. You're my musical mac 'n' cheese, Dylan. [Laughs]

[Laughs] Well, I'm glad to be!

Where do you think your songs originate — do you feel like they come from you …

Absolutely not. I don't know where they come from.

… or through you?

Yeah. Through me. I don't know where they come from. I think it's definitely a gift that you're given … I don't know from what, but there's definitely a creative intelligence out there that's greater than me. I don't know what that is. I don't think it's left up to me whether or not I'm able to create a piece of work that's worth anything. I think that comes from something else. And, if it touches people, it definitely isn't from me.

I heard Merle Haggard say something so cool one time and it was on a documentary. He said that what people don't realize is that the singer is secondary to the song. It's so true, man. The song is where it's at. He said he realized that when this Black child came up to him, touched his face, and started singing his song back to him. He said that was the moment he realized the singer is secondary to the song. That just gave the chills. I just thought that was so right on.

Photos courtesy of the artist