And sure, if I’d heard this back in 2012 when it was new, I might have thought that this band’s apparent hero worship was a bit on the nose – there are even some lyrical bits and snippets of vocal harmony that come dangerously close to imitating rather than being inspired by the Foxes, or My Morning Jacket, or probably some other bands riding the wave of that trend at the time. The joy I once felt when unraveling the twists and turns of Fleet Foxes‘ first two records came rushing back to me. All I knew was that I was getting a heavy sense of nostalgia for the “folk revival” period when lush acoustic instrumentation and impeccable vocal harmonies ruled the day in the world of indie rock. I truly wasn’t aware of any of this when I first heard those two magical songs, though. It offers me the (admittedly somewhat arrogant) hope that if I listen enough times, I might just be able to piece enough elements of the story together to make sense of the bigger picture. But I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for album-spanning narratives that don’t spell out all the plot elements and characters verbatim, but that hint at a greater story being woven together which only exists in the mind of the writer.
Ghost on the shore lord huron movie#
Basing an album around an entirely fictional narrative that the audience is supposed to pretend is real with a wink an a nod is nothing new – we’ve had plenty of clever songwriters pitching their records as soundtracks to movie that never existed, and Garth Brooks even did the whole “Chris Gaines” thing that one time. The high-concept shenanigans weren’t really the thing that got me hooked on Lord Huron, though they certainly helped to seal the deal.
They are credited to the author George Ranger Johnson.
Ghost on the shore lord huron series#
Schneider envisioned the album Lonesome Dreams as a soundtrack of sorts to a book series of the same name.The band’s name derives from Lake Huron, which frontman Ben Schnieder spent time on the shores of as a child, but the band itself is based in Los Angeles.So I’ll try to break it down into bullet points to ensure that this doesn’t get too long-winded and confusing.
And I’ve chosen it as the subject of this month’s “nostalgia review”, even though to my ears this thing is still very new.Įxplaining the concept behind Lord Huron is likely to be met with a hefty dose of “Wait, so let me get this straight…” type responses. Their debut album, Lonesome Dreams, pretty much instantly rocketed its way into the upper tiers of my best-of-the-decade list when I made a point of listening to it in full. Really all it took was a single song on a personally curated playlist (and later another for good measure) and I was pretty much instantly hooked. Turns out I had heard them before, but never heard of them. Very late in 2019, in the middle of a gargantuan attempt to catch up with as much great music as possible that I had missed out on earlier in the decade, my wife managed to blindside me with the discovery of a band that I had honestly never heard of before. The band has evolved a bit in the years since, but nothing they’ve done since then has hit me nearly as hard. Lord Huron’s unique habit of weaving together pieces of a story in anachronic order, told from the perspective of a not-so-reliable narrator, as well as their occasional use of electronic and worldbeat elements, helps to set their songwriting style apart from influences like Fleet Foxes and My Morning Jacket that they quite obviously wore on their sleeves at this point. In Brief: An astounding debut that immediately transports me back to the days when the indie folk revival was still going strong.
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