Ben Schneider might not have all of the solutions, however he certain asks nice questions. In a track launched forward of Lord Huron’s new album, the frontman/guitarist wonders, through impassioned vocals with a tinge of desperation, “if no one lives forever, who laughs last?” The question is repeated, monotone right into a payphone, by actor Kristen Stewart, who seems on the track and within the David Lynch-ian fever dream of a video for “Who Laughs Last.”
A search of “The Cosmic Selector: Vol. 1” lyrics reveals 27 query marks throughout six of the band’s 12 new songs. From the title “Is There Anybody Out There?” to the lyrics “living infinite lives / are they mine?” from “It All Comes Back,” Schneider asks ineffable questions in poignant songs typically imbued with quirky, understated profundity.
“That’s kind of what the music has been about; posing questions and not trying to be the font of knowledge,” the singer says, perched on a stool in his practically empty home, a guitar case containing his well-used 1991 Gibson Dove acoustic at his toes. Whereas Lord Huron’s multiplatinum single, 2015’s “The Night We Met,” is one in all Spotify’s High 30 streamed songs of all time and the band — rounded out by Tom Renaud, Mark Barry and Miguel Briseño — will headline hometown area the Kia Discussion board in November, Schneider nonetheless evinces a plausible disbelief about Lord Huron’s success, and followers’ rabid rabbit-holing into each side of the band.
From the nice and cozy crackle of the hovering but intimate and melancholic opening observe, “Looking Back,” to the ultimate notes of “Life is Strange,” “The Cosmic Selector: Vol. 1,” launched on July 18, is introspective and typically offbeat, providing these intrigued followers loads of fodder. Schneider typically writes from the POV of characters, however the lyrics “life is strange and so am I” appear self-referential.
“All the weirdos out there, I love you. Strange-ers, you too. That goes back to what I was saying about embracing strangeness within and without,” says Schneider, referring to a conversational thread about David Lynch, notably his admiration for the late auteur’s outlook on life. “I think people sometimes bury that part of themselves because they’re afraid of how others will perceive them. But they’re always the most interesting people. Someone I know calls people like that ‘crucial weirdos.’ People you encounter in your life who are undeniably strange but have a very positive impact on the way you go through your life.”
Lord Huron might play that “crucial weirdo” position for some. To wit, the ideation behind the “Cosmic Selector” — a mysterious, possibly metaphysical jukebox the place the punch of a button would possibly result in different life trajectories. It’s an concept Schneider returns to typically: “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize that mystery and beauty are so intertwined. I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately, how the mysteries of the world are really the things I’ve always been most interested in, whether it’s love, cosmos, consciousness; things that have seem to have no definite answer are really, really inspiring and interesting to me.” Not that he essentially desires these enigmas solved: “I want there to be some mystery left in the world.”
“I kind of just assume that nobody has heard of our band; that’s kind of my mindset,” Schneider says. However the frontman was on the dentist, and a Lord Huron track got here on the workplace’s audio system. “It was a very odd experience,” he stated.
(Cole Silb)
The Lansing, Mich.-born musician comes from a household {of professional} wordsmiths — his father, mom, brother and sister have all been journalists; Schneider earned a 2005 bachelor’s diploma in portray and graphic design from the College of Michigan. He tried unsuccessfully to interrupt in as a painter in New York earlier than transferring to Los Angeles. On the West Coast, he discovered extra “openness” and an “anything goes” ethos that noticed the struggling artist transfer additional into music as a method to elucidate and discover creativity.
Regardless of his journalistic household, “I guess I was always more interested in bending yarns than telling traditional truth,” he muses. “Although, at the end, I think I’m trying to do the same thing with just different means.” Schneider can also be possessed of a sublime and prolific literary bent, citing Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” as his present favourite novel.
On tour, Schneider has time to learn/take heed to books, and an writer he’s devoured is Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård. So, reasonably than a boilerplate press bio that accompanies most albums, “Kind of the spirit of his record, where I was just reaching out to people I admired and seeing if we could do something together, we reached out to a couple authors,” explains Schneider. “And Karl Ove was the one I thought had the least chance of writing back.” Nevertheless, the “My Struggle” writer did, and the pair spoke for a number of hours. Then Knausgård “kind of disappeared for a while,” however when he resurfaced, his discourse for a band bio captured LH’s spirit, the writer writing about “…the presence of the past in the present, the trembling afterimage of the dead on the retina, for this is where Lord Huron dwells. … If this sounds like a vague, unclear, diffuse and blurry place — or one of the characteristics of the past is that it lacks clear edges — the music that rises out of it is full of presence, beauty and emotional power.”
“The Cosmic Selector: Vol. 1” is the band’s fifth album, and if Lord Huron aren’t family names, Schneider has had surreal moments round fame. “I kind of just assume that nobody has heard of our band; that’s kind of my mindset,” he says. However the frontman was on the dentist, and a Lord Huron track got here on the workplace’s audio system. “It was a very odd experience,” he recollects with amusing. “I really didn’t do anything; I actually did have that little suction thing in my mouth. If someone asks what I do, I tell them. Sometimes they know what I’m talking about. Sometimes they’re like, ‘Oh, another guy in L.A. in a band. There’s tons of them.’’”
As the nice and cozy L.A. day ebbs, the house’s expansive entrance window frames dense, variegated foliage falling into shadow. Schneider, 42, is clad in a number of muted shades of inexperienced — a short-sleeved work shirt with a Bic four-color ballpoint within the left breast pocket, paint-spattered pants and lighter inexperienced socks. The house, like its resident’s songs, is typically spare, however strong and thoroughly crafted, filled with particulars redolent of the previous, however constructed to final. It’s directly haunting and charming, appropriate for Schneider’s sometimes-wistful nature.
“[Nostalgia] was a big thing, the last album was called ‘Long Lost,’ which was kind of about lamenting something that never existed, at least not in the way you think you remember it. There’s a mystery to that too that I can’t really give up on,” he says with a sigh. “As much as I know it’s not rational to dwell on missing things, there’s a beautiful mystery to it that I can’t seem to get away from.” He’s even nostalgic for “things I didn’t necessarily experience, which is weird.” But not so uncommon that it’s anonymous: in a couple of language, “Sehnsucht” and “anemoia” seek advice from that feeling.
“I do feel very lucky to be alive in a time when making art is facilitated in a lot of ways by technology, and to some extent, social attitudes. I have a lot of old gear, and I love combining those things. That’s true flexibility, all the experimentation that technology allows you these days,” Schneider says.
(Cole Silb)
Regardless of the yearnings and longings that contribute to Lord Huron’s haunted Americana sound, Schneider is glad to reside on this second. “I do feel very lucky to be alive in a time when making art is facilitated in a lot of ways by technology, and to some extent, social attitudes. I have a lot of old gear, and I love combining those things. That’s true flexibility, all the experimentation that technology allows you these days,” he says. “To be honest, there’s a certain aesthetic to digital stuff too that is its own thing, which adds texture and modern color. That’s very real to our world too, to recordings these days. I’m not an analog purist; I embrace all the stuff.”
As for residing within the literal second, the “be here now” of all of it, the lyrics “I sure like the feeling of an endless road / My life is still a tale untold / I’ve gotta stop believing in a long-gone past” look like a delicate reminder to self. “It was kind of the flip side of that coin of feeling like my choices are limited. You can get hung up on that. Or you can be, ‘I don’t know how long there is, but at least the next few minutes.’ It’s about living in the moment, which is such a cliché we’ve heard all our lives.”
But few discover that presence straightforward. “I’m getting better at it … I’m getting better,” Schneider repeats with little bit of resignation. “It’s hard. When you really stop to think about how much time you spend on either worrying about what’s going to happen or dwelling on something that’s already happened, it’s unbelievable. But we’re at a point in history now where we don’t need to be that way necessarily; we don’t need to remember everything that’s happened, because we’ve probably got it recorded somewhere,” he says with amusing. “So maybe we could free up those parts of our brain for something else. But it’s a lot easier said than done, that’s for sure.”
