My Music Cabinet: Lord Huron · 12:17am Jun 16th, 2018

When I was in high school, my family moved to a little rural town in southern Virginia to be closer to my grandparents. This meant going from the center of a bed town where I could walk basically anywhere I wanted to a "town" that was more accurately described as a post office. The shock was pretty intense, since it meant not only was I miles away from most of my old friends, I was now basically shackled to our property until I could learn to drive and get some wheels.

Fortunately in the process of moving, we had to set up all of our furniture again, which meant that for the first time I got a look at my Mom and Dad's music collection in its entirety. And good lord, it was huge. Growing up I'd never grasped exactly how big a music lover either of my parents were, and the enforced hours on the property gave me a lot of time to play through their collection. Those old albums influenced me, and one of the ways they did was giving me this eternal association between music and the hugeass cabinet we stored the eight or nine longboxes worth of CDs in.

So starting today I'd like to take you all on a trip through my own music cabinet from time to time and see if I can't either introduce you to something you've never listened to before, or help you fall in love with an old favorite. I've been meaning to work on a project like this for some time (basically ever since Nash Bozard introduced me to Richard Shindell and Frank Turner on his takes-too-goddamn-long-to-update Musical Chair series), but I didn't have a good starting point. I mean I'd have loved to do The Mountain Goats, but Ross James already did that one for Wholesome Rage because he keeps writing better stuff than me, the bastard.¹

But hey, if you can't go for the cutting lyrical heavyweights, why not start off with the star-struck fools? Today's music cabinet spotlight is Lord Huron, a band with approximately three song subjects and nothing but heart.

Lord Huron is not a group I've been into very long in the grand scheme of things, so in some ways they're an odd choice to start off the Music Cabinet as a project. On the other hand I don't think I've fallen in love with a band this fast since my first time listening to The Police when I was a wee middle school Scarlet. Of course, they also had a bit of an unfair leg up: my girlfriend was the first person who recommended the band to me, which means I can't hear certain songs without thinking of her. I'd like to think that even without her intervention, though, I'd have fallen for them eventually.

Where You've Heard Them:

If you've heard one song by Lord Huron, it's probably this one:

"The Night We Met" broke through on the back of Netflix's adaptation of 13 Reasons Why and resulted in the band getting actual real big-boy radio play for the first time in my area. While I'm not crazy about the platform that launched it, "The Night We Met" is at least an excellent song, capturing a lot of Lord Huron's best features as a band: sad, soulful vocals; immaculate production work, and a haunting sense of melancholy tinged with hope. It's also probably their most normal song, and not representative of their full range of talent.

Let me explain. Lord Huron started as a solo project by guitarist and lead vocalist Ben Schneider, which helps explain why a four-man band sounds like it was named after one guy trying to claim Lake Huron as a fiefdom. Over time the band just picked up members for live performances, and eventually dropped their first full studio album Lonesome Dreams. At the time, their songs sounded a bit like this:

Throughout Lonesome Dreams, most of the subject matter Lord Huron tackles comes out a bit like this: dramatic, soaked in emotion, and just a little otherworldly. Their music tends to take a mundane, trite expression - "girl, I'm in love with you" - and imbue it with a sense of the epic. Their work is less meant for radio play and more for cinematic back-scoring, which explains why their songs are a popular choice for television or film insertions.

Why You Should Hear More:

I've got a favorite joke about Lord Huron: the band has three basic subjects for all of their songs post-Lonesome Dreams.

Subject #1: There is a girl I'm in love with. I'm sad. These things may or may not be related.
Subject #2: There is a girl I'm in love with. It has consumed literally every facet of me.
Subject #3: I am dying or about to die, which is only possibly a metaphor.

While there's some minor variations on each of these, the point remains: if you're coming to Lord Huron, you're not coming for novel song topics. This isn't an indie band you show off because of how real and authentic their music is, or how well their storytelling captures moments. No, you come to Lord Huron because more than almost any other band - well, any other male-lead band - they feel things. Lord Huron's biggest strength aside from the otherworldly edge of many of their songs is their heartfelt sincerity and gut-wrenching sappiness.

Maybe I should take a moment to give you a quick aside as to why I consider this a good thing.

This is Brad Paisley, legendary country singer, performing "Ticks". "Ticks" is a song built around an absolutely goddamn wretched pick-up line, and its sole redeeming feature is that Brad is mostly in on the joke. Unfortunately, it's also emblematic of a lot of male-lead romance music in the aughties and 2010s. Even music made by thoughtful, introspective bands tends to veer into embarrassing machismo or adolescent angst when the subject of love comes up. Like god, at least "Ticks" is at worst a cutesy joke song about bad pick-up lines. The year after we got Lonesome Dreams, this song jumped all the way to number two on the pop charts.

Yeugh. It's like inhaling axe body spray right from the bottle.

What I'm trying to say is to greater or lesser extent, pop and alternative music have a running problem where romance songs skew really angsty, really creepy, or really stupid. They never really feel Romantic anymore, capital-R.

Lord Huron's tendency to throw away machismo and bury themselves in the emotionality of their songs really elevates their material in that regard. Their romantic pining can be immature, silly, and self-destructive, but it never feels creepy or forced. It reads a bit like a modernized take on old romantic sonnets, where the feeling of being-in-love and the idealized subject of the poem kinda supersede reality a bit, especially on songs like La Fleur Belle Sauvage.

My favorite thing about the band, though, is that not only are they nearly void of forced machismo when they want to get romantic, they're also capable of self-awareness and damn good storytelling. For example, consider this song from their second studio album, Strange Trails: "Fool for Love".

In case you missed it the first time you listened through - and I did, because it was so damn unexpected - "Fool for Love" is a story about just that, a fool in love. The protagonist is about to hit the road for a better life and decides before he goes, he should propose to a girl he's sweet on. Unfortunately this girl is involved with the biggest, toughest man in the county. Souped up on love the protagonist challenges Big Jim to a fist fight and gets beaten up so badly that the song ends with him lying in the snow, contemplating his possible impending death.

What makes the song so great is threefold: first, the bouncy and upbeat instrumentation work as a counterpoint against the tragic ending. Second, the self-awareness: the protagonist is, in fact, an absolute fool for love, and he pays the price for it. The third thing ties back to what I said about Lord Huron's emotionality. Another band might be tempted to take the dark subject matter of the song and play it for laughs - after all, the subject's not too dissimilar from "Three Steps". But Lord Huron plays it completely straight, with the protagonist's maybe-death taking up the entire last verse of the song.

I could write a whole essay about this song, but we're going to have to save that for another time because I have so much more ground to cover.

Where Should I Start?

As a relatively new group, Lord Huron's only had three full studio albums hit. The most recent one, Vide Noir, actually was only released two months ago and is amazing. They trade some of the '50s cowboy groove present on their previous two albums in and lean hard into '60s rock and roll, resulting in some delightfully Doors-y tracks like "Ancient Names Part I".

That said, all three of Lord Huron's currently released albums are excellent starting points. Lonesome Dreams is the most direct and interesting concept, Strange Trails has some of their strongest individual songs, and Vide Noir is their trippiest and most musically ambitious. Really it just depends on which of those three things grab you the most. That said, all of their albums are absolutely worth a listen, and with a fifty-minute-ish runtime for each you can burn through their entire discography in an afternoon.

Once you've done that if you're still hungry for more, there's also the two years of self-recorded and produced EPs Schneider produced when Lord Huron was his solo project to check out. While most of them aren't nearly as ambitious or awesome as the songs he recorded once he had a full band, I do have a soft spot for "Mighty", which just makes me feel giddy every time I hear it.

And of course the band is still together, actively making music, and touring right now to promote their new album - so hey, if you like what you're hearing and you live near one of the cities they're hitting up next, maybe you can catch them live!

If you read to the end of this, thank you so much for your time. I always feel a bit self-conscious when I do these silly side projects where I talk about a thing I just really like on a personal level - I have more fun with them than I do with any other kind of content I make for this blog, but they tend to have the lowest overall retention rate of readers. If you want more of me nattering about bands, please comment and let me know. Comment in general! It's nice to hear from people.

Until next time, may you always find a way back to the night you met.

¹Still standing by that black panther thing tho. You goddamn talented Australian SOB.

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