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Luke Rathborne
I Can Be One/Dog Years EP
Luke Rathborne writes songs about life, and life is rarely simple, neat and easy.
On his I Can Be One / Dog Years split-EP, to be released March 8 via Dilettante Recordings, the singer-songwriter defies today’s cookie cutter flavors, preferring to hold true to his artistic vision – a vision that embraces the zen of Leonard Cohen and the weathered tone of Bob Dylan, basking both in a heady aura of dialed-down pop exuberance.
Luke Rathborne shimmers, because his songs emit an incandescent glow as warm and inviting as they are naked and vulnerable. It’s not about finding answers to life’s questions, it’s about shedding light on life’s experiences. Seeing how they make us better for the wear while they ruffle us around the edges.
“Hopefully, people will see the difference in the music here,” says the 23 year-old troubadour of his ambitious release. “They are two groups of songs that belong with each other, but not necessarily together. As an artist, you really have to think about the way you’re putting a record together, and it’s got to be done in a way that interests people – if you think, in your gut, that you’re just going to smash songs together and call them a record… that’s just material, that’s not a record.”
Rather than muddling his music’s disparate take on the world around him, attempting to intertwine songs written under different circumstances and in different frames of mind, Rathborne decided to offer audiences his ideal window into his headscape – two EPs, each unique in their own right, as one album.
Dog Years embraces Rathborne’s more pop aesthetic – not shiny, happy pop, but effervescent, melancholic pop. The title track offers a cynical poke to not letting the ‘dog years’ pass you by, and if you hear a bit of Dylan in the New Yorker’s tone, you aren’t mistaken. He also cites a lot of ‘60s and ‘70s music like the Kinks and the Beatles as impacting those early tracks, written as a teenager in Maine.
The material from the second set, I Can Be One, was penned following Rathborne’s move to New York City after high school and completed with members of Antony and the Johnsons contributing to the arrangements. Big Star and Lou Reed’s Berlin enter the realm of influences, and the material takes on a somber, darker hue. “Motor City” elicits a somber sense of pining, while closing track “Solon Town” is an arching epic that bridges Rathbornes rural roots with his transplanted Brooklyn home. Its title track, “I Can Be One,” is one of the tracks that led Devendra Banhart to invite him on tour and exclaim, “I love this young dude,” in a recent Magnet piece.
“The second EP is more of a reaction to living in New York, and it’s a lot more personal and minimal,” he says. “It’s like battery acid – people are really freaked and don’t know what to do with it.”
But while the tones change, the inspiration is largely the same. “All of the songs – on both EPs – are about being afraid of connecting, because connections open up the possibility of being harmed… It’s interesting that they intersect here, because I’d been playing with the idea of putting them together and seeing how they mix, but this seems a lot more pure – this is my music, this is what I want to say, and this is how I want to say it.”
I Can Be One E.P. / Dog Years E.P. is out March 8, 2011 via Dilettante Recordings
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I Can Be One/Dog Years EP - Album Art
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Cody Smyth