“I wanted to be too quiet for the aggressive people and too angry for the acoustic people—I just wanted to sit somewhere no one belonged.”
Lou Barlow has never felt at ease within just one setting. Like his previous solo efforts, the soft-spoken, grizzly-faced singer/songwriter’s new album, Reason to Live, is framed within the context of acoustic folk sensibilities, a noticeable contrast to the bombastic and abrasive delivery of his other band Dinosaur Jr.
“I think that was my initial inspiration and introduction to underground music was really extreme noise music,” Barlow says. “But at the same time, I’ve always really loved acoustic music. You can hear it on ‘Poledo’—a song I kind of tape-collaged together on the second Dino Jr. record—and on early Sebadoh.”
“Something I’ve really loved about hardcore is that I was a really confessional, emotionally raw music,” Barlow continues. “Some of it was a more wordy and politically angry—like The Clash and Sex Pistols. But a lot of what I found in domestic hardcore, stuff like Black Flag, I found it to be this very lonely and emotionally vulnerable music. Really talking about being alone and feeling alienated—I wanted to take that raw sensibility and apply it to acoustic music.”
Now 54 years old, Barlow has spent decades learning how to reconcile the contradictions between his internal and external surroundings. Dropping on May 28 via Joyful Noise, Reason to Live was written and recorded in his home in Massachusetts, where he now lives with his wife and three children.
“Moving back to this part of the country has been good for my creative life because it’s just not as epic as California,” Barlow says, laughing. “There’s something about the epicness of the conditions that I was living in that almost robbed me of my ability to describe it! So, I’m out here now, and I have to create mine. My creative life has blossomed out here. But I would love to go back to California and try again!”
Though he was raised in the Bay State, Barlow and his wife still yearn for Southern California, a place they called home for over 17 years.
“I’m not gonna lie—I got really used to California,” he reminisces. “Two of my kids were born there. I had to do a video for ‘Over You’ and I’m like, ‘What do we do this about?’ She and I both independently were like, ‘We’re not really over California, are we?’ So, I was like, let’s just collect a bunch of random videos that were taken. When I got my first good smartphone, I captured a lot of my time in California on video.
The place I lived in the longest in California was perched on a hill, it was the most absolutely cliche beautiful; every night, I’d watch the sun set into the ocean. I had Griffith Park to my left and expansive West L.A. to my right. And on a clear day, I could actually see the ocean. So, I just saw this insane fucking beauty every night!”
“This is just a fucking fact—I do a fair amount of traveling,” he continues. “The only place in the world that even approaches the exotic, urban beauty of Los Angeles and much of California is Rio De Janeiro, for god’s sake!”
With his constant tour cycle put on indefinite hiatus in 2020, Barlow had more time to workshop the material that would go on the album, even going so far to make almost 400 handmade sleeves for the album art. But like many of us in the last year, it didn’t take long for the existential dread to start creeping in.
“I think I’ve always been really paranoid; I just didn’t realize it until quarantine!” Barlow confesses. “Over half of any given year, I’m running. I’ve never been in one place where I had to sit with my own thoughts and my own fears and really face them. And that’s something I’ve had to do over the last year-and-half is really sit with myself and be like, ‘Oh dude. You’ve got some fucking big issues!’”
“During this last year, there were times I just found myself having some rough periods of extreme paranoia,” he reflects. “I would get up and would be in such a state of anxiety and developed that kind of COVID-insomnia where I’d be awake every fucking night from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. There are several songs on the record that touch on it. I had to really sit and have these soul-searching talks with my wife. But it’s good, too, because I had to really talk myself down and really had to develop some real coping mechanisms that weren’t chemically derived.”
Paranoia and isolation have become such recurring themes as of late, it seems silly to forget that when we were kids, these emotions practically ran our daily lives. For many of us, it’s what made discovering music so crucial in the first place. In writing Reason to Live, Barlow channeled his inner teenager for inspiration—sometimes literally, as was the case with the album’s third single “In My Arms.”
“It was about high school,” Barlow recalls, looking back on the single. “The song is based around a sample I took from 1982 of the basic guitar riff from the song. As I was writing it, I was like, ‘Where am I going with this? Am I going to complete this lyric about walking through my high school hallways? No! Not really feeling that!’
“But I found as I was singing it and ruminating on it, I realized I needed to write about music. And about discovering music and the comfort—music gave me so much comfort during those times, in high school when I was feeling pretty alienated. I was a pretty isolated kid. Music was really what embraced me, so that’s what I ended up writing about.”
Watch the video for “In My Arms” here:
For more from Lou Barlow, find him on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Photo courtesy of Lou Barlow and Adelle Barlow.
