All the clean and sober Langhorne Slim needs is love
Langhorne Slim learned how to play guitar after his cousin taught him the chords to Nirvana’s “Polly.” “I’d always loved music, but my cousin and his band blew me away with the raw teenage energy they were expressing,” he says. “I was only 11 or 12, but I was transfixed by it. I played those chords over and over, until my own songs started to emerge. I think I was always a performer, always trying to get people to listen to me, but when you’re in school, that’s called being a troublemaker. I was constantly being sent to the principal’s o ffice, but when you have a guitar in your hands, suddenly you’re not a troublemaker—you’re a singer.”
At first, Slim wanted to be a rocker. “I was looking around for guys to start a band with, when I heard Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music,” he says. “I heard one man, or one woman, with an acoustic guitar making a bigger noise than any rock band I’d ever listened to. I never thought a solo performer could have that much fi re and be that deadly. I knew that’s what I wanted to do.”
Slim hit the road with his guitar. As his musical vision expanded, he found like-minded players interested in exploring the confl uence of styles that make up American music—blues, folk, R&B, bluegrass and acoustic rock. He was also experimenting with drugs and alcohol.
“I had a healthy appetite for self-destruction,” he says. “Two years ago, I decided to grow up. I’d always written songs and performed high, and part of me wondered if I’d be able to continue being creative if I was sober. I’m fi nding out that I can do it just as good, if not better, without being a bitch to a pill or a bottle. I also discovered getting sober isn’t the end of the story; it’s the beginning. You still have to face your life in all its beauty and terror, but there’s a new level of energy when you embrace your true, naked self.”
The songs on The Spirit Moves, Slim’s new album with his band the Law, deal with love, but in an oblique way, delving into the spiritual and emotional aspects that inform our relationships with lovers and friends. The music is energetic and upbeat, driven by David Moore’s rhythmic banjo and the solid backbeat of bassist Je Ratner and drummer Malachi DeLorenzo. There’s a lot of heartache in the songs, but Slim doesn’t sound like he’s exactly unhappy about it.
“They’re not songs about falling in love, or getting sober, or breaking up,” says Slim. “It’s just a snapshot of the places I’ve been in the last few years, a record of my own transformational journey through this strange and beautiful world, and the experiences that continue to frighten me and fill me with joy. This band has been playing together for 10 years, and this album shines with the same energy we get when we play live.”
—j. poet
