"I'm stoked, man. Back at work after so long."
This is Stuart McLamb of the Love Language, standing on an L.A. sidewalk having just emerged from a barber shop. It's a relatively new surrounding for the North Carolina native who took Huck Finn's advice about a year ago and lit out for the territories. The impetus for our phone call is the first new Love Language record in five years. Baby Grand will see the light of day August 3rd on Merge Records, and it marks a sizeable change in McLamb's surroundings.
AD spoke with McLamb about what he's been up to since 2013's Ruby Red, writing and composing inside a defacto hammock factory, the way album ingestion can affect your own art, and how the new album's title has its own cheeky fit in the universe of the Love Language. Check out the video for the first single, "Southern Doldrums," down below.
Aquarium Drunkard: This is the longest time that has elapsed between Love Language records. What's been going on and what lead to that long of a break?
Stuart McLamb: Well, it's always kind of been me writing and doing it. I think maybe I just got a little -- maybe not burnt out, but you shouldn't just churn things out to just do it. It needs to come from a spot. So it took a while for me to rediscover my passion and have songs pile up that I thought were good. I spent hours and hours making demos, and there was a lot of stuff I just didn't feel was honest or real and ended up just scrapping them.
That was the deal with the Love Language, but I did stay busy with several other things. Right after the tour for Ruby Red, I mixed a record by a Chapel Hill band called Last Year's Men. It was a great record and they put it out, but they'd started a punk band right after that and it never went that far. So I spent a long time working on that and then I had a band called Soon. That was a band I did that was a bit more of a heavy thing. Put that album out. I did a record with a project called Pretty Ponies. Maybe it didn't seem like it in the public eye, but I definitely felt pretty busy. It probably does appear that way to people who just know me from the Love Language.
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