Stuck between the brain suck of devices and the anxiety of living.
It's one thing for an album to trace the path of a relationship along its traditional arc; early curiosity expands into lunatic passion before cooling to inertness. But what if that line were not a curve at all, but instead a jagged sawtooth of highs and lows thrusting the listener into the air before crashing them into the dirt below? Well that would be a much more visceral, and accurate, telling of the modern relationship. That is the story of Drunk Lil Guy, the latest album from chamber folk innovator Noah Kite.
A work of several years and two coninents penned in the throws of terrorism, between classes taught at Parisian elementary schools, in the public square minutes from the Chateau, in Italian living rooms, sketched on Hungarian packing slips, in friends closets, on the cheap carpet of a new apartment, in the Marais, and on a bunk bed at Camp Arrah Wanna.
I stayed at my friend Justin's cabin while I worked on Light by Light. It's a simple two room house tucked into the woods on larch mountain, a few miles beyond the burned out shell of the view point inn, and about thirty or forty minutes from portland, depending on how fast you take the turns. When I wasn't picking away at the unsettling task I had put to myself, I'd run his malamute, Koa, along overgrown logging trails, crash weddings at edgefield, and watch the days shorten and curl, hiking through the surrounding forest at the edge of August. This record was the greatest thing I'd ever made. Every bit of each song was painstakingly deliberate. There are ten seconds, maybe twenty, of Going Blind that made the entire struggle worth it for me.