Langhorne Slim on Getting Sober and Taming His Inner "Wild Freak"

Photo courtesy of All Eyes Media

“Take, take my hand/ And let’s go where we need to be/ And when we get there/ Release me and set me free” sings Langhorne Slim as he opens his latest album Spirit Moves with the song of the same name. This is an album about recovering, about getting your life back together and figuring out how to live after giving something up. But it’s never sad; it’s never depressing. You won’t find yourself crying at 3 a.m. to any of these songs. Instead, you’ll find yourself dancing around, bopping your head to his crooning ‘oooohs’ as he sings that things won’t be easy.

But that’s always been the beauty of Langhorne Slim, hasn’t it? No matter how dark things are, you’re still alive, and that’s what counts. His music celebrates the energy of being alive, the adventure of grabbing someone’s hand and running head-first into life.

Check out our interview with him below.

Noisey: If you don’t mind I’m going to start asking questions and I’m obviously going to record this so I don’t get anything wrong. So, how are things going?
Langhorne Slim: I don’t mind. That’s a real thing, like you have to tell someone you’re recording them, right?

Yeah.
Yeah, people tell me that all the time, and then I talk about the record, and some people don’t record it— I’m like, how are they going to understand all my ramblings? The tour was really good, we were out for like two months, and we just finished with two shows in Nashville, where I live. So it was awesome, super busy, and I feel good to have a little break and be back with my family.

I know that you recently moved to Nashville, and you recorded there instead of New York,—was your move the reason why you've started recording there now?
Well, the reason why I recorded here was because of the particular studio and person who runs the studio, Andrea. I didn't move to Nashville for my musical career, or music at all really, other than I’d been on the road for many years, for about 11 years and I moved around the country in that time; the last place I was paying rent was Portland, Oregon, and I had left there and I was on tour with the band and just kind of travelling, I was in a transitional point in my life for different reasons, and I left the Pacific Northwest and I was staying on friends’ couches and stuff like that. I was out in New York, and I came to visit somebody in Nashville and didn’t know it was what I needed or was looking for. I didn’t feel like I needed to be a resident of a community or city, I felt sort of okay doing what I was doing, but then I got here, and felt a very strong pull to stay, an embracing energy here, and I wound up staying.

I had recorded in New York before, but there’s this studio in Nashville that a lot of my favorite music and my favorite bands have recorded at—and some of those folks are people I’m friends with, thankfully and they offered some direction—and that was The Bomb Shelter, and the proof was in the pudding for me. I asked a buddy from this band The Dead Lungs, I was interested in maybe recording in New Orleans, and he said “Yeah, there’s some great studios in New Orleans, there’s also a great studio where we record down the street from your house." And anyway, that’s how I wound up there. It just made sense.

Do you think that being there and recording in Nashville had a specific influence on this new record?
Well sonically, that studio with Andrea [engineer/owner of The Bomb Shelter] and the way that he recorded there and his offerings of sonic wizardry had to do with it, but I don’t know as far as my own personal songwriting. I’ve been a travelling person most of my life and I don’t know how a place affects my music—I just don’t know how my record would be different or my songs would be different if I lived in New Jersey than if I lives in Tennessee, you know what I mean? It’s an expression of what you’re going through, and how you’re feeling in a place, and trying to be with it enough for when the music is dancing around your head to be there to hear it sing. For me, Nashville was a great place of strength and warmth and love, and it’s something I guess we all need and we all want. But for me, and the shit that I was going through, I’m grateful to talk about it—when you put out a record you talk about that stuff a lot, it starts to feel manufactured in a way, but I mean it’s not, it’s real stuff. I got sober in Nashville, which is something I needed for a long time. My environment and the city and the people around me supported that in a direct and indirect way. I felt strong here, enough to battle some of my demons, and that has affected my life, my energy, my spirit, and therefore that affects the music, it affects the way I’m talking to you now, it affects everything. It’s given me a more exciting playing field and more energy to play.

Do you feel better on stage now?
I do. I can’t believe it, but I do. Part of the fear, obviously, when you use things to sort of help you or mask fear, it’s a huge fear to see who you are without those things. The amazing thing is that, when you're trying to reach your inner wild self or your inner animal, your inner freak, once you discover that it’s easier to tap into, you can do it more consistently without other things. I had to relearn how to do it, and I was scared shitless that it wasn’t going to be good; I just got two years sober, but when I was doing my first festivals before I got completely sober, it didn’t matter if it was 10 people or 10,000 people, I just needed to see how that would feel, and immediately I was reassured by the fact that that inner self was taking over and I was strong in that. So that gave me a great sense of strength and pride in the spirit that it was intact and even stronger without any aides from anything. I didn’t know that would be the case.

And then, of course, in writing the record, that was terrifying at times in not knowing what would come out. If I couldn’t finish something, I was reminded of how I used to do it and I’d wonder, “Hmm, if I had a bottle of red wine by my side right now, wouldn’t that make this easier?” I mean, that did help me write a few songs, but I wrote this record without it, and it was a great turning point in my life to just feel life without any help from booze or from drugs, to see what that would be like. To talk to people and look them in the eye, to sit with myself and then to see who I am right now. Things change and you go through the journey of life, but I need the shit to feel raw and real, or else I can’t hang out with myself. So I had a lot to prove to myself, and I hope to prove something to the people that I love around me that I can be a better man and a better version of myself than who I’d been. And some days are better than others, my friend, but I will say musically and just as an all around dude I’m more proud today than I was a few years ago. And that ain’t a bad thing.

I feel like I can definitely hear it on this record—it sounds happier and more joyous and celebratory. It feels like it’s coming from a really good place. Would you say that sobriety really affected your writing?
It improved my belief in the power of energy. This is some hippie shit, but it’s way older than hippies, it’s ancient; I think that the energy that we put out into the universe and the energy that’s around us, it affects everything that we do, it affects our relationships, the way we feel inside, the way we really feel. That has everything to do with everything we’re involved with, and therefore I had been battling a weight on my soul, you know? Basically pissing on the fire, because I’ve always been a boy, a determined, stubborn, musical boy. I’d been getting far enough, I had a career, I had relationships, I had a band that was staying together, but it became clear to me that I didn’t just want to get by. Perhaps I’m lucky to be musically-inclined or something, and I can make money to get by and I can travel around, these are beautiful things, dreams of mine since I was a child, to travel around playing music for a living like my dad. But I felt like there was a lot more to it. There’s a lot more to life, there’s a lot more to my life. In a career sense, a relationship sense, the way I put it is in an all-around love sense, the love of everything, the love of life, the love of friends, the love of music, everything was given an opportunity to shine brighter when I stopped pissing on the flame. I just had to piss on the flame for a while, 15 years almost, and thank goodness I stayed passionate somehow and stubborn enough that the flame never completely went out, though I’m sure there were times it got close.

I talk a lot about sobriety because it’s a big part of my life and a big part of what I was going through, what I continue to go through, how it’s changed my life and writing this record, but in no way did I pick to write any songs about that topic or feel like I have anything great to say overall. The same as I was writing about love, it’s real shit that’s happening in my life that makes me feel a certain way. I wear my heart on my sleeve; it’s just who I am, and I need to be open, that makes me feel strong to wear it there but to get the song right, to get that emotion right in the song, to tell it in a story that makes sense to me, in my soul. For me personally, I stand by the record, and I stand by the songs and all of my guys that contributed so much to it. I don’t need to compare the record to other records, because they’re all individual things, it doesn’t need to be better than the other records but I feel like it’s a damn good record. I’m proud of it, you know? That’s what I set out for. I set out to not be full of shit.

I think you managed that, that’s for sure.
Well, that’s important to me.

Your music it seems to bridge the gap between rock and country, and it finds this beautiful, comfortable space between the two. At a time when country music is more popular than indie rock, do you ever feel pressure to be one or the other?
No, no. I’ve never been in a situation or popular enough to have any of those sorts of pressures put on to me by a manager or a record label or anything like that. We’ve been a band for 11 years and there was never any big break that happened very quickly ,it’s just been slow, show after show and record after record. I’ve been making records since I was 20 or something, homemade ones before that, and the important thing is making them right for myself. In my opinion, the truth in art and music isn’t exterior, it really is within. So if somebody else is telling me how to do it because they know how to sell records, that’s not going to fly for me, because I will get sick and die if I try to exist in that way. It’s melodramatic, but it’s the truth. It has to ring true for myself. I have found that my career and the band’s career has gotten bigger and better based on putting more value on our own truths and following my own soul’s need to communicate. Sometimes I wonder why didn’t anyone ever come along and try to shape me and mold me and make me into something. Nobody has ever even tried to. Maybe they know it’d be a waste of time.

Probably because they know you’d say no immediately and tell them to fuck off.
I would be really bad at being something else. It just wouldn’t work for me. So I don’t think anybody was interested or saw potential in that. And I feel really grateful and lucky in that trying to get more clear with who I am as a songwriter and performer, that that has brought more people around to listen. It’s a beautiful thing.

I wanted to talk to you a little about the song “Changes” on the new record because it’s my favorite song on your record. Can you talk a little about what inspired it and what went into writing the song?
Of course the easy thing to say would be it’s a sober anthem of sorts, but it wouldn’t be the whole truth. On my birthday two years ago, I became a sober person, and the energy around me changed, the energy within me changed. There are things that I don’t know how to describe that I call spirits that I felt and feel around me, and my life changed because of all of that energy shift. So for me it wasn’t a conscious thing like “I’m going to write a song about these changes I’m going to go through and I’m going to call it "Changes" and then when people want to talk to me about being sober I’ll have a song to talk about.” It sure as shit seems to be serving that purpose, though. At the time, I had just bought this little amazing pink magical house, and I went back to the house I was renting a room in one night and I slept in the room there, and I heard a melody for that tune in my head. I woke up and recorded it on my phone, and then the song followed me around. A lot of the time when I write songs they don’t hit me in one fell swoop—I have to chase them, or they chase me ,and so we come together and get it right—and that was one that didn’t leave my head. It took six months or more to put all the pieces together, and it just created a lot of very deep spiritual and energetic differences that I was feeling and that I was uplifted by, and I feel like I was getting a better version of life. Of course a lot of that has to do with me not drinking all of the time and me not taking shit all the time, but there are things around that that I feel like, “Well, okay if I can live through all this shit and hop over here there is an energy I can step into that is going to be a propelling, better version of things.”

That’s very very cool, I love that. Tell me about your amazing hat endorsement.
I have been wearing Stetson hats since I was a kid stealing them out of my grandfather’s closet. River City Extension introduced us to some folks from Stetson, the legendary classic American hat company, and they started giving me some hats. They do a thing called Stetson Center Stage where you play a couple songs and they film it and they give you a couple hats to wear on your journeys. The relationship kept building with them. I had talked about wanted to design a hat— I had this perfect hat that before I lived in Nashville, and I had left the hat among other things as I was traveling around and I lost it, I never saw this hat again. So I had a dream I could design a version of this magical hat, and then I went and met with Stetson and expressed that I was interested in designing a hat, and to my surprise they were down. It was just another lesson kind of like, shit, sometimes you just have to put it out there, sometimes you just have to ask and crazy shit happens. So that’s been amazing, and they actually made it happen—I got to go to Texas and work with their head hatmaker, and I think in a couple of months the hat is supposed to come out. It’s supposed to be a limited run called Langhorn by Stetson, which is crazy.

That’s pretty big. That’s awesome.
It’s a wild honor, and a crazy wild adventure, trying to put wild stuff out there and see what comes back around, and that was certainly a little unexpected. I didn't think that that would happen but it did and I’m super excited about it.

Catch Langhorne Slim on tour:

Sep 26 Trans-Pecos Festival of Music + Love Marfa, TX
Sep 28 The Loft w/ The Wild Reeds Dallas, TX
Oct 16 Club Downunder Tallahassee, FL
Oct 17 The Social Orlando, FL
Oct 18 Clearwater Jazz Holiday Clearwater, FL
Oct 20 THE POUR HOUSE Charleston, SC
Oct 21 The Orange Peel Asheville, NC
Oct 22 Skully's Music Diner Columbus, OH
Oct 24 Blind Pig Ann Arbor, MI
Oct 27 Turner Hall Ballroom Milwaukee, WI
Oct 28 Triple Rock Social Club Minneapolis, MN
Oct 30 The Ready Room St Louis, MO
Oct 31 Deluxe at Old National Centre Indianapolis, IN
Nov 01 Mountain Stage Charleston, WV
Nov 03 New Brookland Tavern West Columbia, SC
Nov 04 Variety Playhouse Atlanta, GA

Annalise Domenighini is keeping it real freaky on Twitter.