If you’re still looking for something to fill that Tom Petty-sized hole in your heart, may I suggest Langhorne Slim?
Langhorne — who was born Sean Scolnick and plays the High Noon Saloon on Saturday night with The Lost at Last Band — has spent much of his multi-decade career creating music with a kind of timeless, cross-generational appeal that approximately 40,000 stomp-and-clap folk outfits have tried for in recent years. Many of his songs sound like they could have been written by anyone from Bob Dylan to Petty to Jason Isbell, which is a testament to Scolnick’s talent.
And it’s the Petty comparison that’s most apt for Scolnick, who recently participated in this year’s Bonnaroo SuperJam, a tribute to Petty called “Into the Great Wide Open.”
Put together by by My Morning Jacket’s Patrick Hallahan, the SuperJam featured a host of artists paying their respects to the late rocker. Some seemed like a given, like Scolnick or Sheryl Crow or Rayland Baxter. But some felt kind of out-there, like dream-pop upstarts Japanese Breakfast or Sameer Gadhia, who fronts the shimmering alt-pop act Young the Giant.
But as Scolnick put it recently to cleveland.com, that’s just part of Petty’s almost automatic appeal.
“He’s like the Beatles. It’s music that we’ve known our entire lives. It’s seeped into our DNA, almost. This girl used to pick me up and drive me 40 minutes to New Hope, Pennsylvania, kind of out in the country where I went to this little artsy school. It was right when Wildflowers came out. We would listen to that nonstop and chain smoke Camel Light cigarettes. His music’s been with me my whole life, and I’ve been, like most everybody, an enormous fan.”
With his latest album, Lost at Last: Vol. 1, Langhorne Slim has created an album that he describes as “a little bit dirty” that someone like Petty could vibe with. Many of the Heartbreakers’ albums were recorded live at Sound City, and Scolnick went for that same aesthetic by taking a group of musician friends, putting them all in the same room, and simply having them play.
“This is in the records that I love and listen to the most. It’s often the rawness and the dirt that I connect to the most and probably rarely the ultra-clarity or perfection. Of course, you still want that feeling to emanate out of the speakers that moves people. But I think that the dirt moves people.”
So if you’re still looking for something to fill that Tom Petty-sized hole in your heart, may I suggest Langhorne Slim?
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