After a decade in music, Langhorne Slim turned a personal corner with his endearing album Spirit Moves. It’s a record he entered with a clean slate and a clear head.
“I’d written and recorded for the first time in my over 10 years of making records as a sober man, and that presented a different reality,” he says.
“A very beautiful, positive reality and a very terrifying one. It might be like if you had a certain job and you created this identity and then you change that,” he says. “You’re left with this immense excitement and strength, and you’re also like who the f**k am I? Can I do this?”
It appears Langhorne Slim — and his band, the Law, playing with the Lumineers on July 28 at the Molson Amphitheatre — can do this, judging by the rollicking foot-stomping title track, “Wolves.”
The new album is Mr. Slim and Co.’s follow-up to the band’s critically acclaimed breakout, The Way We Move. The title track proved to be the Nashvillian’s first bona fide international hit. Rolling Stone dubbed the song “damn near perfect.”
The timbre of his voice has been compared to the legendary Neil Young.
Langhorne Slim first started making noise as a member of the decidedly kooky Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. He released his first full-length album in 2005.
Spirit Moves, recorded in Nashville, saw Slim work on the songs in different settings.
“I had worked for the first time with my friend Kenny [Siegal] to help finish some songs,” he says.
“We’d go out to Catskills, New York, and have these chunks of songs, and he’d help put them together. I either had a finished tune or, when they were unfinished, I went to Kenny. By the time I took them to the band, they put on their beautiful stuff.”
As for his personal favorites off the record, Langhorne Slim mentions “Wolves,” which he says was inspired by the James Kavanaugh poetry collection There Are Men Too Gentle To Live Among Wolves.
“It’s a really dear one to me,” he says. “I felt that one got out what I was saying without too much BS interfering.”
Yet when it comes to the band’s current show, it seems “Changes” truly soars.
“It’s has really opened up to me since the record came out,” he says.
“It’s fun playing that live. It’s an interesting thing. When you’re making a record and you tour, you can go out and tour the next day and nobody knows the songs. But you’re so aware of the tunes the record almost seems old. That tune seemed to get there faster, to connect with our audience.”
Langhorne Slim hopes to play additional Canadian dates in the near future and is “getting an itch to record some more music” in the winter. He also knows it’s a feather in his cap whether he’s playing in a small room or before 20,000 people
And given that Slim has his own Stetson hat line, this fella knows from caps.
“I was surprised when they said yes,” he says, about Stetson agreeing to allow him to design his own signature line. “That was sort of a crazy dream. I told an old friend of mine I had to design an old-fashioned hat someday. I presented them [Stetson] the idea, and they ran with it. I’m not planning on quitting my day job.”
