Hooves on the Turf

Remember Luke Winslow-King and his friends, who played a song for us on a rooftop back in January when it was freaking cold and the tuba froze?! His full-length Old/New Baby, inspired by the streets of New Orleans,  is coming out this month on Fox on a Hill Records. Above everything, it feels like a work of romance: when he sings “Where there’s two mocking birds”, and takes his voice up to say “mocking high”, and back down to “mocking low”, you want to leave the dishes half done, drop all your kitchen things, and go find yourself a new love story. It’s only disappointing that you can’t actually smell the flowers you know are blossoming somewhere between those notes and that your face isn’t physically warmed by the dash of sun tumbling down the fabric of horns.

Download “Shoeshine“

Speaking of which, the instrumentation is quite sparse throughout–at any given time, it’s probably a combination of a guitar, a few layers of horns, and a pairing of some form of drums with a washboard–but the effect is rich and wholesome, owing to a fantastic arrangement that never feels overworked or lacking; a lot of amazing bands I love seeing live struggle in the studio when it comes capturing a full sound on record, but Luke has no such problem, and perhaps this is thanks to studious ears that have endured thorough classical training.

Download “As April Is to May“

The songs are all short, with most of them under three minutes, but the record more than makes up for it by featuring a total of fifteen. The overall impression is very cinematic; you could easily dream up a number of stories and weave them within. Owing to Luke’s heartthrob of a voice and the numerous twists and turns that leap in and out of the horns and the rhythm (the washboard is gorgeous!), I can’t help imagining that a bulk of the record is a soundtrack to boyish wonders of new beginnings; of falling in love and giving yourself to the world, putting yourself at risk. In the cheerful “Airplane”, for example, the narrator sings, “I love you airplane ’cause you take me so high”, but worries, “I don’t think I should go flyin’ up in the air / ‘Cause I might not come back down”; in “St Andrew’s Fairy”, “I’m gonna take you on a ferry / Sailin’ across the deep and rollin’ sea”; and in the somewhat humorous “Below”, “You are splashing water over tub when you are showering / The water is coming through my ceiling and light fixture / This is screaming ‘dangerous’ / It could short out and cause a fire / Or electrocute one of us”.

Though not in chronological order, it’s almost as if you can hear the same boy in different ages. In “Never Tired”, he’s probably slightly older but nevertheless an emblem of youth. He lists all of the things he is as tired as (a retiree, a worn down traveling shoe, a cowboy as of stew, a poet to his rhyme, etc), but the song is eventually about how he’s never tired of his lover. Not only does the positive negate the string of negatives, but you’re persuaded to think that what’s been identified as tiredness is only an indication of a life that’s bustling. In “Bird Dog Blues”, which is distinctly electric, he’s probably middle-aged, drunk, alone and past heartbreaks. As a closure to all of the rhythmic strides of the album, the last track “Your Eyes, Your Eyes” is particularly stark. We’re left with none of the bubbling percussion, none of the New Orleans rag, only some unhurried singing that meets a slow and rising crescendo from the string section and a lonesome trumpet. It’s really quite devastating and promising at the same time: “Baby it’s alright / You can stay with me tonight / The river flows to my side / Your eyes, your eyes / Don’t worry, don’t you cry / The night stays soft inside”. In the story I’ve imagined, this would be the ultimate love song our hero would sing in his deathbed at old age, though it’s equally fit for a birth.

The guitar Luke is holding in the top picture is a National Reso-Phonic. Isn’t it a beauty? You can see it in action, and hear several more songs from this album, in the Secret Garden show I shot with him earlier this year: WATCH IT.

Find out more about this album.