Ground Control Touring

The Love Language, initiated by Stuart McLamb, is a fortunate by-product of the North Carolina native’s rudderless mid-20s, where a tempest of breakup, inebriation, and incarceration found the abandoned songwriter embarking on a storage-space recording project to slow his seeming disintegration. The growing body of emotional fight songs, committed to MP3 with a high-school era multitrack recorder, became postcards from exile, a way to let his friends and former flames know he was getting along, battered but not beaten.
“The Love Language was never intended to be a band,” explains McLamb from a borrowed porch in Durham County. “Those songs were never intended to be for anyone except my ex-girlfriend. That was my outlet, and at one point, it caught fire.” The self-immolating beauty of the budget correspondences was exhausting and triumphant; McLamb’s dalliances with rejection and redemption would be minted in a self-titled debut on Portland independent label Bladen County in March of 2009. Although The Love Language is a remarkable oeuvre, re-creating it was the last thing anyone wanted for the victorious McLamb. “I think another record like that would have to come out of another near-death, bottom-rising situation—I didn’t really wish that upon myself.”
Ironically, McLamb was in a similar place during the conception of Libraries. His mighty ensemble—a dysfunctional symphony of musical vagrants—disbanded to pursue personal projects. McLamb, who had roamed the state since recording The Love Language, moved back to Raleigh where Libraries producer/engineer BJ Burton adopted the one-man band and helped harness the extraordinary might generated during these sessions.
“The idea was that we weren’t going to try to clean up the last record. It was more about ‘What was I going for on the last record, sonically? Let’s go for that.’” Although The Love Language was applauded for its fashionable fidelity, McLamb’s budget debut was more of a testament to the impulsive nature of his art than about contributing to a larger movement. “To me, Lo-Fi is almost an anti-aesthetic, where you’re more interested in capturing the energy than spending your own energy on figuring out tones. It’s more about ‘Let’s capture the moment.’” Among the moments captured on his Merge Records debut are Spector-esque walls of reckless sound, cavernous drums, middle-school percussion, and moody swells of stringed instruments, all decorated hastily with stray leads, which bleed beautifully all over everything.
“I looked at the album as a series of checklists, you know? This album is done when this last check is checked. But when you’re kind of obsessive like me, the checklist can get pretty crazy.” Fortunately, Burton was there to hinder McLamb’s compulsion to redub acceptable takes, hampering urges to potentially perfect the album to imperfection. The effective average of McLamb’s madness and Burton’s discipline rendered an album in the classic sense, in which no song is expendable and no passage is without purpose. With it, McLamb transitioned from a guy who could write a good album to an individual who can maintain a good band. The sooner we listen, the sooner we may figure this whole love thing out.
—Jon Kirby, Paris, 2010
PHOTO BY CHEATER SLICKS