q&a: luke winslow king

It’s become tradition that we post full eMusic Selects Q&A’s here on 17 Dots, and so along with Jayson’s excellent chat with Victoire, I have Joe Keyes’ conversation with Luke Winslow King below. But before that, a quick word on how we came to both records.

Luke Winslow King’s album was recorded by a guy named Earl Scioneaux, an engineer from New Orleans who I have met on a couple of occasions, but who I primarily know through a very close friend of mine named Perry Chen. Perry happened to have the record playing at his apartment a month or so back, and upon hearing that this was a new artist Earl had recorded, I contacted him the very next day. When we found out later that Luke was close friends with Micah from Breathe Owl Breathe as well as the kids in Salem and our former eMusic colleague Patrick Lelli, it felt like destiny. It still feels like it.

As for Victoire, Jayson can better speak to that, but his own connections in the New York classical scene meant he knew Missy Mazzoli, the composer behind Victoire, as well as Eleanore Oppenheim, another member (with quite the name!). We first started talking about a song for the Selected + Collected compilation, but the five pieces they had given us to pick from were so incredible that we knew there had to be something more. And so from that comes A Door into the Dark, which I heard in its new, remastered version for the first time yesterday, and felt like crying it was so incredible. I feel like we’ve somehow pulled the wool over their eyes for them to let us release this. We promise to handle with care!

We’re already at work on finding more artists, but if you have suggestions don’t hesitate to drop us a comment here at 17 Dots, or you can reach me at selects at emusic dot com. In almost every instance these discoveries and signings have been happy accidents, and we welcome more of them, pls! Anyway, let’s get to Joe Keyes’ chat with Luke Winslow King below.

Q: Hey Luke! How’s it going? What are you up to?
A: Pretty good. I’m hanging out playing with a street band today. I do this during the afternoons on my off-days a lot with friends — we hang out in the streets and play together. It’s really cool. There’s definitely that kind of a vibe in New Orleans — different people show up and add different things to it. We play a lot of old, traditional jazz tunes that everyone knows, we bring songbooks and stuff. We have different players every day.

Q: But you didn’t grow up in New Orleans, right?
A: No, I grew up in Cadillac Michigan. I came to New Orleans on a little trip with some friends playing music when I was 19 — I think it was 2001 — and my car got stolen. We had all our equipment in the car and everything. So we got kind of stranded here for a couple of weeks, just long enough to fall in love with the place.

Q: That’s not a very auspicious beginning. What made you pick New Orleans for the trip?
A: We had met a friend in Michigan, a great jazz singer named John Boutte. He’s a local star in New Orleans. We met him in Michigan, when he was on the road with Cubanisimo. So he invited us to come down and volunteered to help us find a couple of shows. He was putting us up at the time — he actually said that the place we parked was a “safe spot” — which it turned out not to be. We did get the car back a couple of weeks later, but with none of the stuff in it. Eventually I went and auditioned for the music program at University of New Orleans and ended up going there, and I just kind of stayed here. John Boutte became a great mentor for me – and he cooks a lot of great New Orleans cuisine.

Q: How old were you when you first started playing?
A: I started messing with my dad’s guitar when I was probably 10 or 12. My dad played a little folk music, but there wasn’t really a ton of music going on at my house. I had a lot of cool friends who were playing music that I’d meet up with and play with. I played all through high school, and then I went to Interlochen Arts Academy — it’s a really great music school, a really scenic, beautiful place. It got shifted into high gear there — I would just spend hours and hours focusing on the music. After that, it was hard to find a college that I really liked, so I kinda roamed around a bit until I settled on New Orleans.

Q: What is it that you like so much about New Orleans?
A: The weather, for one thing — indoors and outdoors feel the same. The street can become your home, it’s so comfortable. I like how open people are about music, allowing people to sit in and play with each other and inspire each other. I like that there’s gigs every night, and that the music is really free and open. There are so many guys to learn from. It’s more about the music than about business. It’s just a really fertile place. Besides that, just the colors of the city — the sun-faded colors of the houses — the vegetation and stuff. It’s just so amazing. The people are so relaxed and cordial, too.

I didn’t really know much about the music of New Orleans before I got here. I had studied bebop and jazz at other schools, I kind of discovered New Orleans at the right time. I grew up playing folk music — Woody Guthrie, old-time folk music like that. When I found this, it felt like a hybrid of the two. It’s people’s music — for dancing. It’s not too intellectual, you can just enjoy it. And you can really get slamming more than you can with a folk band.

It’s also cool in the city how the legends come about — you meet people and hear stories about places and things that happened. It’s been such a fertile ground for music for so long. Even with the blues, it has different homes all over the South. It’s cool that one city has its own music.

Q: What’s your level of involvement with Mardi Gras? We on the East Coast have a very particular perception of what that’s like, but I have a suspicion it’s all wrong. Do you get involved much in the festivities?
A: I like to second line and masquerade a little bit, but I like the more regular, relaxed second lines — where people go and march in the neighborhoods on the weekends. Sometimes Mardi Gras gets a little too crazy for me and I just end up bartending and making money and not really partaking in it too much. There’s so many different crews and parades from all different parts of the city. It’s cool when you get in with your hometown crew. It’s a great time to just let go of everything and reset. It kind of feels like New Years down here.

Q: Now, New Orleans isn’t the only place you’ve lived — you spent some time in Prague, too, right?
A: Yeah, I did a study abroad program with the University of New Orleans and St Charles University. I was studying classical music, and this was an intensive study of Czech classical music. We focused on string quartets a lot when I was there, I got to hang out in the city a lot. There were these cool orchards there that I hung out in. I did some busking — that was actually kind of the beginning of me developing my love for playing in the street. It was cool, it was like woodshedding. I enjoyed my time there. It’s a really beautiful place. I was really into it. It was nice to be able to have it be specific to a place, learning about a whole culture. They have a really interesting flair in their brand of classical music — kind of experimental, kind of wild.

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time in Rome. I have a bunch of friends there, we’re working on a couple of projects. I’ve been there, like, 4 or 5 times in the last few years. I think I’m going back again this summer. It’s so beautiful. It’s definitely in contention with the beauty of New Orleans. The ancient times seem to live on because of the architecture. They eat great food — they really know how to live life over there. My music is a bit of a novelty over there, too, which is cool. I play on the street a lot, play in hotels. I’ve been tempted to move there, but New Orleans keeps calling me back.

Q: So, wait, where else have you visited? What other countries?
A: Over the last few years I’ve been to the Czech republic, I went to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, France, Denmark, England, Spain, Belgium… I just go around and play on the street. I’ll go on the internet and book a few gigs ahead of time, and then I just kind of connect the dots, play on the street when I have time. It’s always “working vacations.” I’m always trying to keep playing in the clubs, making contacts. It would be really cool to spend the summers in Europe, have a good network set up where I could go do tours over there and try to cultivate that over time.

Q: So I want to backtrack a little — you’ve managed to play with a lot of famous people. We’ve already talked about John Boutte, but what about Roberto Louti? How did that come about?
A: That’s the cool thing about New Orleans, it’s really open. It’s really not intimidating. It’s easy to become friends with these people and to develop a situation where they’re nurturing you, trying to help you. I used to see Roberto Louti playing on the street, and I became friends with him and his wife over time. His wife is “Washboard Lisa,” who’s another real legend in New Orleans. I used to watch them every night at the Apple Barrel, which is this tiny blues bar. I was so inspired by his playing, I just watched him for hours and hours. He’s just an amazing presence. He sounds like he’s possessed when he plays. I kind of re-learned the way I play slide guitar after watching him.
He actually got deported about 2 weeks before we recorded the album, so I ended up going to his home town in Italy to overdub him. All of his tracks on the album are overdubs. We did most of the tracking at Preservation Hall in here in New Orleans and in a couple of different apartments around the city.

Q: So how did it work? Would you sit down with him and have formal lessons?
A: No, I’ve never taken a formal lesson with Roberto. He doesn’t want to do that. He wants to just jam. If you ask him for a lesson, he’ll just take out his guitar and play. The blues is so much call-and-response, so you can kind of just learn by doing. He’s really into “feeling it.” He doesn’t want to talk too intellectually about it. He doesn’t really know chord changes — he just wants to go. This summer is the first time we’ll be formally playing in a group together — he’s coming with the trio on a tour of Germany and Italy this summer.

Q: So you recorded the album at Preservation Hall, which is an insanely legendary building. How did that situation come about?
A: My engineer who recorded the album, Earl, he and I studied music theory together. He’s the sound engineer for Preservation Hall, he does all the recording there. I also know Ben Jaffe, the tuba player, who’s the caretaker. We just called him up and asked if it would be OK, and he gave us some time on a couple of weekdays.

Q: That must be the kind of place where you just feel the history seeping through the floorboards
A: Yeah, it’s amazing.

Q: Your last record was basically a folk record, but this one betrays a much greater New Orleans influence. How did the decision to make a record inspired by the music of New Orleans come about?
A: My girlfriend Ji Un Choi, who is also my writing partner, is a great poetess and film writer. We’ve both been into Bob Dylan and stuff like that. We’d just been writing songs together, and there was always this group of tunes that were inspired by the music down here — whether that was on purpose or not. So we always had these tunes where we’d be like, “Oh, these don’t really fit on the other project.” We started adding more to them, and then it just all fit together, and I started working on the horn arrangements. I didn’t really think of it as being a New Orleans-themed record until I was halfway through it.

Q: Did you have any apprehension about drawing on the music of the city? Sometimes there can be perceptions of “musical carpetbagging” or appropriation or all sorts of ugly things like that.
A: I’m always pretty sensitive about that. But over time, the music of New Orleans has kind of been everyone’s music. It avoids the connotations that the blues has of being, like, “black people’s music.” There have been all kinds of people down here playing this music for a long time. I don’t ever try to claim New Orleans as my own, I just give it back. I’ve been inspired by some amazing music here and blessed enough to be nurtured by some people who have really embodied the spirit of music from New Orleans. I’m always sensitive about it, but I don’t think people are like that here. I feel like people down here are cool with it being “everybody’s music.” And the stuff on the album — it’s not like we’re playing trad jazz tunes — it’s definitely just “influenced” by it.

Q: It’s hard to talk about New Orleans without talking about Hurricane Katrina. What was your experience with that?
A: Actually, I was working as a music therapist in the North Bronx when Katrina hit. I had moved to New York the fall before the storm. A lot of my friends came up to stay with me – there were actually little New Orelans villages in New York all over the place. I stayed in New York, had a great time, learned a lot, got a straight job that kind of tightened up my skills, got a work ethic in place, but I just missed the life and the pace of New Orleans. The sunny days that seem to go on forever. It was always a dream when I’d think of New Orleans from New York. I’m just so happy to be back here now.

Q: How did you end up working as a music therapist?
A: Well, I was in NY and I was just looking for a job in music — anything I could find. I ended up really liking it, really caring about the people there and being really inspired. I was working at the Institute of Applied Human Dynamics, and also working at the Lavelle school for the blind in the Bronx, helping those kids get a rock and roll band together. It was really cool. I learned a lot about how to communicate with people, how music can be used as a tool to inspire. But at the end of it, I was ready to focus on my own music again.

Q: So what kinds of things would you do in your work?
A: At the Lavelle School, it was an after school program. There, I was getting these kids who were blind and mentally disabled organized in their rehearsals and helping them write their own songs and, eventually, helping them get to their gigs and setting up their equipment at the gigs. I also worked at a day habilitation center in the South Bronx, and that was more about music for calming people down. There were all different approaches, based on what each person needed with music. Some people really need to be engaged, so we’d hit them up with rowdier music. Some people need to be calmed down. Some people need to express themselves, some people need just to listen. It was really cool, but I’m glad to be making my own music now and travelling around. I was working 6 days a week — it wasn’t where I belonged.

Q: I want to talk a bit about some of the specific songs on the record. Let’s start with “Never Tired.”
A: Yeah! My girlfriend and co-writer Ji and I wrote that song in Italy. We were riding in the car when the first line came up. She came up with the line, “I’m so tired, I’m so tired,” and then I came up with “Tired as a tire, tired as a retiree,” and it just kind of developed from there. We just spent the rest of the day writing down volumes of ideas. We ended up cutting a lot of it and still having that many lyrics. For a while, it seemed like it was another song, and I was trying to figure out what song it was — and that’s always a good sign, when it feels like an existing song already.

I’ve always been into, kind of, satire — making things that are sad sound happy. Not musically so much as emotionally. Like the song “Shoeshine,” that’s a lullaby about heartbreak.

Q: Another one I really like is “April is to May.” I love the central image of that song.
A: That one I wrote that same week in Rome. I heard the first verse on a weird radio station on a real small radio in a village where I was staying. It was a kind of reggae, rocksteady song. I took the first verse and wrote the rest of the song after it. That song is really stark, really sharp shadows. That one came really easily, too — the ones that people like are usually the ones that were easiest to write.

Q: Another favorite is “The Sun Slamming the Highway,” which seems to do the same kind of thing you alluded to earlier — combine really bright images with really dark images.
A: Yeah, my girlfriend Ji wrote all the lyrics to this one. That’s one we don’t really play live. It’s more of a studio thing. It was inspired by this vision I had one time of being asleep and there’s both a string quartet and a street band coming down the road — which is something you always get in New Orleans. You’re listening to one kind of music and then a street band comes along and it all kind of melds together. The lyrics are, again, that same thing — something really intense and in your face, but then also having these brighter moments, too. We recorded the horns live and overdubbed the quartet later.

Q: You’ve done more than just songwriting, though. Let’s talk a little about some of the other kinds of writing you’ve done.
A: I have a really good friend and collaborator, a cartoonist named Cosmo Segurson, and I got into doing instrumental music with him. The first one we did was the Henry James play The Turn of the Screw. We wrote music to it and played the music to it in this abandoned building in the French Quarter. It was really cool — we did like a five-day run. The cast was just my girlfriend and one other actor who was playing five different roles. It ended up being this creepy ghost story with organ and electric guitar. We did a production of Wozzeck under the bridge in Strawberry Fields in Central Park with my freind Cesar Alvarez — he’s in a band called the Lisps in New York. I have other instrumental pieces that I’m saving for other projects. I did a small film project called Wanted in Rome — I acted in it, it’s my girlfriend’s script. I wrote the music for that, too. I’m really excited about the idea of just being able to compose instrumental music for other people to play. I love performing, but I like the idea of doing composition work, too.

Q: How does that alter your approach, having to write to a certain text rather than coming up with your own lyrics and ideas?
A: That’s something you work on in composition school — how to identify phrasing and lengths of verses, how to get it to all work. Sometimes it’s cool — you find yourself playing melodies that you never would have, but it’s all built around the text, which kind of changes the shape of things.

Q: One last question — you’ve mentioned your girlfriend several times now, and she’s clearly an important part of your work. Could you tell me a little about how you guys met?
A: Sure. I met my girlfriend through John Boutte. I was backing him up, it was my very first gig in New Orleans and John introduced me to her. I had to kind of chase her around for a little while, but it ended up working out pretty good. We’ve been together almost 8 years now.