The Love Language’s Ruby Red (Merge) was supposed to be finished more than a year ago. “I can definitely overthink stuff,” says Stuart McLamb, the band’s singer, songwriter, guitarist, bassist and only full-time member. Over the next year, McLamb wound up throwing away some old songs, writing some new ones and recording the whole album all over again, bouncing between 21 musicians and four cities before he and co-producer B.J. Burton decided they were done. It was one of those times when recording was harder than writing, but now that it’s all in the past, McLamb describes himself as “genuinely happy.” McLamb will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand-new feature on the band.
McLamb: This book is absolutely fascinating. Tom Simpson, who plays drums for the band, gave it to me about a year ago. It’s about an anthropologist (Narby) who takes a trip to the Peruvian Amazon. While there, he spends time with an indigenous tribe, the Ashaninka. They turn him on to ayahuasca, a psychoactive tea that basically sends him into a very strange but real alternate dimension. Through these repeated experiences he sees many parallels between Western understanding of molecular biology and the shamans own understanding of the same knowledge, only from a different angle. It’s about how Western science tends to look at things from the outside-in, while the Ashaninka and other shamanistic cultures look from the inside-out, often achieving a greater understanding. It was definitely a brain stretcher.
Video after the jump.
