Luke Temple

I want to call Luke Temple a disciple of Hank Williams and Roger Miller. I want to call him an avant-garde traditionalist. I want to say he???s got an unmatched intuition for the askew. I want to say his only real contemporary peer is another master songsmith named Cass McCombs. I could make a pretty infallible case for any of these statements. But at the end of the day, it???d be adding too many bells and whistles to what his new album is. At its core, it???s one of the year???s most stunning folk records. You should just let Temple???s high-and-lonesome salve of a voice raise your goose-pimples from their dormancy. You should let his insightful, devastating lyrics make tiny, tender tears in your soul.
A Hand Through the Cellar Door is, in many ways, Temple???s most straightforward collection of song-storying tunes to date. There are tales of dysfunctional, broken homes and of dysfunctional, broken people. ???Birds of Late December,??? with its fluttering, nimble fingerpicking, paints an exacting but impressionistic portrait of divorce through the eyes of an exceptionally wistful child. In both ???Maryanne Was Quiet??? and ???The Case of Louis Warren??? we follow two characters whose lives unravel in very different ways, though their central question is the same: After you shed all the things you think make you who you are, what is left? Temple is creating small, confident stories with a massive scope - like a good Alice Munroe story. Album standout ???The Complicated Men of the 1940s??? is a thought experiment concerning the sacrifice of a passing generation, where the heroes of yesterday seem like the stuffy, old guard to a new generation that???s grown just a bit too entitled to their comfort.
But this being Temple and all - the creative mind behind Here We Go Magic - nothing is really ever so straightforward. The arrangements, kept to a minimal drums/guitar/bass/string set-up here, expand and contract in unexpected ways.Temple writes with the eye of a painter like Eric Fischl. Whereas Fischl will put a subtle provocative image in the margins of a piece to create a feeling of imbalance, Temple will add a guitar hiccup or a just-behind-the-beat string section to create a sensation of everything being slightly off. And in that imbalance, both artists show us grace. Yes, while the tales Temple weaves are bleak, the aura of hope never quite fades from the picture. He turns the tragedies of human folly into a celebration of our eccentricities.
Originally from Cape Anne, Massachusetts, Luke moved to the North West, sleeping rough in the woods, working in a candy store and as a janitor at a suburban mall. While in Seattle Luke met some people headed down the coast. All of his aimlessness lasted a year and half before Luke had had enough. He enrolled in school of the Museum of Fine Arts and spent five years painting portraits, after which Luke moved to New York and worked as a muralist and plasterer. As painting drifted from the foreground little songs started to emerge. He tried them out at the famous Sidewalk Caf?? Monday open mic and the people there liked it.

After recording two critically acclaimed albums for Mill Pond, to little commercial reception, Luke was at the point of quitting a career in music. In 2008, feeling free in his new state, he made what would become the first Here We Go Magic album, forming the band and releasing the self-titled debut in 2009. Positive critical and commercial response to the record kept Luke busy through touring and recording two more full lengths and an EP. Since Here We Go Magic's 2012 release, the Nigel Gordich-produced A Different Ship, Luke has returned to his original solo ideas.

In a sense Good Mood Fool is an extension of the first self-titled Here We Go Magic record. It was recorded with the same sense of freedom and joy. The meat of the record finds Luke taking a sharp turn in order to keep himself interested. First single "Katie" is a prime slice of mid-80s intelligent pop, almost So-era Peter Gabriel in its rhythms and sound. Meanwhile, "Florida" is a blue-eyed soul hit, a lazy sunny evening of summer beauty. Good Mood Fool draws from myriad influences, from the hushed soulful wail of Curtis Mayfield to the dense harmonies of Gill Evans and the Bulgarian Women's Choir. It is meant to be clear in production and in content, hiding nothing.