Langhorne Slim, singer/songwriter and blues folk artist, who claims “everything is punk to me,” is putting together the artist's much-anticipated 4th album with his band in a small upstate New York studio. I caught up with Langhorne (“You can call me Sean”) Slim while he was trying to parallel park his car. He discussed his recent experiences in the studio, on the road, and how he is trying to hold it all together, with a little bit of women and money on the side.
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REBECCA CHANCE: Your last album was in 2009, and it's about time for an update from Langhorne Slim. I’ve heard you’re laying down some new tracks. Any clues about the new album?
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LANGHORNE SLIM: We've been in Catskill, NY . . . at Old Souls Studios for the last week, and we're going to be out here for about another week and a half, recording the new record. We just found out it will come out May 22nd—that's really exciting. We've just been busy with that. My band tours about 8 to 9 months out of the year, so it's been kind of an interesting change of pace. The last album came out about two years ago, we toured constantly, and we had written even more songs that I realized we had. So it's been just pent up and ready to happen for a while. I feel very inspired. My favorite experience working in a studio so far, to be sure.
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RC: And in that experience in the studio, do you feel you have the creative control you need? Some bands come out of the studio with regrets about how things ended up mixed. Did you have to worry about protecting your original music when recording this album?
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LS: No, with me it's rarely happened. I mean, it's happened in ways, like there may be too many cooks in the kitchen. Sometimes it gets so that you look back on it, and maybe you would have liked it to have been done different. But insofar as having outside pressures pushing us one way or another, we don't really have that. There are people that I trust creatively, and so they contribute a lot of ideas. In terms of developing a sound that wasn't very much my own, well, I wouldn't know how to do that. Nobody has ever tried to make me do that.
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RC: There is something very quaint and personal about your music. It always sounds like you're listening to one of your talented close friends play guitar around the bonfire. It has that sort of authenticity to it, that sometimes, when we think of why bands become mainstream, it's due to being convenient.
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LS: I don't believe that. I'm not really a mainstream musician, but I'm not opposed to it. My stream has always been to create music and great art, as greatly and truly as I can do it. Something that makes me feel good, that is sort of my relief. Without it, I would be—well, I'm already kind of a mental case, but I would be truly a mental case without it. Hopefully, it connects with people . . . Since I was a little kid, I wanted to write amazing music, play amazing shows, and have lots and lots of people know about it. I've never bought into that idea that if lots of people know your stuff, then you must be doing it incorrectly. That's not necessarily true in certain ways—there's a lot of music on the radio that makes me want to puke a little bit. But I think, you work really hard, and if you can achieve that, making music on a really high level, that's a beautiful thing to have a whole bunch of people give a shit about it. That, to me, is kind of the dream.
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RC: When you talk about your influences, the range of styles and decades is wide. It’s hard to really nail down your sound—which is becoming the popular lack of definition in music these days. But when I hear one of your songs, I just know that you could talk to me about Robert Johnson or Kurt Cobain or Neil Young. Are you aware of the familiar sound you create, or is this something that just happened naturally? Did you just pick up the guitar and start finger picking the blues?
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LS: Yeah, I kind of played blues like that from the beginning. But from the beginning beginning, I tried to play like Kurt Cobain, because those were the first songs that I learned, like “Polly.” I had two older cousins I really looked up to, and they turned me on to a lot of music and art and stuff. One of them taught me some of the chords, and once I learned the chords, I could just play the rest of the song, and I could play my own chords that I picked up from that song. As you get older, you just go over more things and gather more life experiences.
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RC: Did you begin to work your way backward through music history as you got older, through jazz and blues and country?
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LS: Yes and no. That's what really turned me on to begin with. When I was about 17 or 18, I always bought music, but I went further back into classic rock n' roll on the radio. Or my grandparents turned my brother and I onto swing jazz. My mom was a great singer, could have potentially been a professional singer. There was always all kinds of music around us. I'm most attracted to the origins of, for lack of a better word, the genres. So early rock n' roll, I love. Early punk music, I love. Early country. And all kinds of jazz. I feel like it's when it's being in its most primitive and raw form, it's at its best.
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RC: So is the new music revolution happening or not happening? Some people will say that they think we're experiencing a pivotal point in music, and other people think that there's nothing new worth listening to anymore. I guess there are all sorts of opinions in between. But are we possibly experiencing another change of raw form in music history? Would we even be aware of it if we were?
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LS: I think that the people who say they won't listen to anything new are closed-minded. Why? I mean, on a more broader scale—for instance, there used to be these smoky jazz bars in New York. I met this guy in upstate New York, he used to live near Carnegie Hall, and he saw live acts like Davis and Monk. That's a mind-blowing thing. And I asked him, “Did you realize then that these guys were so incredible?” And he was like, “Yeah, we all knew we were in the presence of greatness.” For me, I think there are—and I'm only the age that I am [31]--I think there are ton of people out there creating amazing art. I know it for a fact, because I happen to know a handful of them. In terms of a music revolution, I just don't buy into it. I think there are people that are like-minded that are frat brothers, soul sisters, that came up maybe in their late 20s, maybe early 30s, that listen to all this stuff. Nirvana was their first favorite band, and then they got into early blues or bluegrass, punk rock—because all of this stuff is punk rock. I mean, really, it's just all raw music, it's all punk to me.
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RC: A scene seems to be developing among young musicians inspired by bluegrass and roots influences. The old string instruments are being used in NYC bars by very young, new, vibrant musicians.
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LS: I predicted it would happen! I predicted it years and years ago. Yep. Not surprising. I mean, the music, when it's done real, people crave that. I think that something people want in politics now, in art, in music, in their lives, is to be beaten over the head with something that feels real. Something that hits you in your heart. I'd love to think that we are on the cusp of some kind of musical, artistic, political revolution. I don't really know if that's the case, but I think a lot of people my age—maybe younger or older—are bored and tired and beaten down by vanilla the-same-old crap. There is some need for some kind of rough, passionate stuff, whether that be in music or elsewhere. It's just a little bubble I exist in, though.
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RC: I was just going to ask you if you existed in a bubble.
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LS: I do exist in a bubble. Of course.
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RC: There's a category of artists that are made by the rough path that they walked to get to where they are today. Some artists are plagued, maybe even driven, by self-doubt. And your lyrics make you feel like the sort of artist who has led a neurotic journey. Despite your success.
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LS: Despite my success? Yeah, well, success if a very relative term. Success comes from within. I've definitely experienced great highs and great lows as part of my personality. But I think in fear and in doubt, if you are driven in what you do and passionate in what you do, it's kind of at war with that. One side is gonna win. I made a decision a long time ago that—and fear and doubt get the best of me some days, don't get me wrong—I am definitely attempting to kick the shit out of my fear and doubt. I try not to feed it too much, even though sometimes I don't do a good job at that. Doubt definitely exists. I don't know if it exists within every human being, but it definitely exists within my head. It's there, for sure.
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RC: Are you hard on yourself as a musician? Does everything have to be perfect?
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LS: I most definitely think that I am. I'm certainly my harshest critic, that would be fair to say.
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RC: But it does appear that you got a lot of support from your family early on, and that must have been really important.
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LS: Yeah, well, I was really lucky. I got nothing but support. I think that was because I was really tight with [my family] and they just knew that a conventional lifestyle was not going to be—I think they probably thought I would get myself into a lot of trouble.
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RC: Were you just too weird?
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LS: I was too weird to fit in. Later on, I went to a school that was great, more of an artistic environment. So the stuff I would get into trouble for at the other school, they'd be like, “Okay, Sean, maybe just chill out a little bit, but you're artistic! So you get a B+.” Yeah, [my family] was supportive, but they also saw that this was what made me happy. Also, when I moved to New York and started to get different opportunities, they could see I was driven. It had to be obvious. Like, what else is this guy going to do? This is it. It wasn't like, “I'm going to be a guitar player when I grow up.” This was it, this happened, and I didn't really have a say in it, you know?
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RC: Are you at that point in your career yet when you get all the free women and money?
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LS: I'm at the point in my career where I get a little bit of women and a little bit of money. In my music career, I've had several, but very long, relationships. So there haven't been many women in between.
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RC: Your lyrics seem to suggest that you've had a lot of complicated relationships in your life?
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LS: Well, man, I don't know, what relationships are not complicated? Love is complicated. Usually when it's really easy, it doesn't—at least for me—it might not inspire a song, than if it were a bit more complicated. I'm not one of those guys who thinks you have to be depressed and shaking and sweating alone in a room in order to be a good artist. I don't want to believe that.
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RC: You're not a tortured soul. Note taken.
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LS: You might not say that, but I don't think you have to be one.
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RC: So you might be a tortured soul.
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LS: I'm trying to torture my soul as little as possible these days.
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RC: I ask this one question of the musicians I interview, and I always get really different, beautiful answers, but it's a very basic question. How are you?
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LS: I'm wonderful. Right now I'm going through a transition. I was talking to a friend about this just last night, who has also gone through some life issues that I have, and I just realized—and it's cheesy, but it's just the damn truth—you ask about money and women, and I'm a big fan of both. Money is fun to spend and a nice woman is very nice and fun to be around. But for me, the freedom that this life has brought to me, how do I even put it? I'm going through this break up now, and we've been going out for a super long time so it's really hard, right? So, the fact that I'm able to be in this studio in this environment creating with this great band of friends sort of put this emotion into lapse; that I have options of where I can go, people I can spend time with, it's a real beautiful thing. I think that in life, if you don't have that, I can just imagine it beating somebody down to the point of no return. I really like women, I really like to have some money in my pocket. But to me, the real fortune in any of this is that I love to travel, I love to be with and make music with these people who are committed to doing it with me. So yeah, I'm doing really good right now.
