The Show On The Road – Langhorne Slim

This week on The Show On The Road, a wide-ranging conversation with the peripatetic, Pennsylvania-born, confessional folk songwriter Sean Scolnick, who for the last fifteen years has become a troubadour truth-teller of the Americana circuit, amassing a devoted following performing as his many-hatted, impish alter-ego: Langhorne Slim.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • SPOTIFY • STITCHERHost Z. Lupetin caught up with Slim to discuss his much awaited new LP, Strawberry Mansion (just released last week via Dualtone), which is named after the neighborhood in Philadelphia where both of his grandfathers grew up. Coming out of a deep creative funk, Slim produced a record of many entwined reckonings. A flurry of twenty-two diaristic sonic sketches, incantations, and emotive story-songs follow his struggle with mental illness, sometimes in real time, his pandemic isolation, and sobriety. It’s an overall hopeful collection that shows Langhorne may finally be finding his true calling on the other side of the darkness.

Sean Scolnick is never shy about revealing how his mental health and creativity are ever-evolving. Without playing the hundreds of international shows and festivals a year he normally does, Scolnick had to create at home in a new way. A note his therapist gave him still holds true, as he releases his newest record without being able to take his guitar and his trademark worn hat in public to support it: “When you’re freaking out, just play.”

Make sure you stick around ’til the end of the episode when Slim plays an acoustic rendition of “Morning Prayer,” joined briefly by his cat, Mr. Beautiful.

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Photo credit: Harvey Robinson