Langhorne Slim shakes it naturally in the shaman & showman sector of live music, & in a packed Grey Eagle on a chilly Asheville night, we to shake it right along with him.
For the last several years of touring behind the Strawberry Mansion, he brought that rambunctious rock energy to his folky intimacy. Songs about spirituality marked Slim surviving the pandemic & the Nashville tornado & getting sober (for real this time) were so stripped down, whether he was touring solo or with a full band. But with his first new album after five years, it was time for a chugging change.
His fresh album & tour for the Dreamin Kind (out everywhere back in January) sees him settling strongly into a personal & prophetic garage rock, not unlike the primal crunch that his Nashville peers Jack White or The White Stripes are known for; we hear echoes of Neil Young & Crazy Horse in the mix. Collaborations with members of Greta Van Fleet created this classic rock sound. To convey this thickness in packed clubs, Marlon Sexton, the mid-20s son of Charlie Sexton (& frequent member of Bob Dylan’s band) fills out Langhorne’s touring unit.
The current live set is appropriately preoccupied with the new material, & it all rollicks & reverberates. “Rock N Roll” is perfect as an opening song, both for an album like this & for the live set. I was grateful to hear my current favorite from the new record, “Rickety Ol’ Bridge.” With a tenuous road trip with disabled air bags as a metaphor, Slim sings about how fragile an existence it really is, with a sketchy bridge stretched between heaven & hell.
According to the setlist I scribbled, he played 11 of the 12 new tracks. When learning a new record by a beloved artist, getting to dig the new stuff in the live context is an immersion & an injection. This was true as we boogied elbow-to-elbow & as Slim looked as if he might start doing acrobatics from the low ceiling beams. If you have seen any footage of early Bono twisting around scaffolding or early Eddie Vedder tumbling into the crowd, you get the idea of how Langhorne longs to achieve a sweaty apotheosis with the audience.
To live inside a Langhorne Slim song is to live inside hope & humanism & a non-dogmatic spiritual hunger. In other iterations, he sings for a late grandfather. At the Asheville show, his solo acoustic interlude included two unreleased staples of his live set, “Song For Silver” for his young son, & “What The Fuck Is Going On” as a desperate prayer for all of us. In talking about being a Dad, Langhorne admits that parenting makes every cliche come true. Slim’s entire performance persona comes unvarnished & unwrapped in such a glorious cornball sincerity, that the cynical hipster would either surrender & embrace their feelings or feel left out.
Standing on a chair in the middle of the crowd without a mic at the end of the night, Langhorne waxed long on inherent human rebellion that’s yet rooted in universal compassion. From that, we get an anthem that’s neither religious nor even political but is adamantly adjacent to both.
Earlier in the night, crowdmembers interrupted one of his interludes with shouts of “Fuck Trump” & “Fuck ICE,” to which he responded with a cringe joke about joining Kid Rock on Super Bowl Sunday. He wasn’t serious but he wanted to reel us back in, not to a space that’s apolitical or “both sides,” but to one that transcends politics with luminescent & sacred humanity. Like I already tried to say, pessimists & cynics would not like this vibe. Not to put too fine a point on it, Langhorne isn’t hiding his anti-authoritarianism, but he isn’t signing any petitions for the social media tone police either. His joy is infectious & without borders.
With a rapt & responsive crowd at the end of the 19-song set, the glorious benediction was clear. Lyrics say:
So let us love our neighbors
Protect the land
Look our sister in the eye
When we shake her hand
It's been this way a long time
It's written in their plan
The time has come for everyone
We the people, fuck the man
To partake in such a universal middle-finger to fascism without it turning into an affinity group speaker stack to hedge out every nuance & acknowledgement (that all has its place, too), Langhorne Slim’s campfire revival was everything we needed to connect with ourselves, our human community, & the world that evokes way too many F-bombs these days. All these feelings & more certainly kept us warm in the wind chill on our walk back to our rented room.
-Andrew/Sunfrog, Teacher On The Radio/Everything’s Folked
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