I'll Follow Your Trail - Sean Rowe
For our LCM featured artist today we head to Troy, New York to meet singer-songwriter and naturalist Sean Rowe. Our LCM #SongOfTheDay is the great 'I'll Follow Your Trail', a heartfelt ode to parenthood taken from Sean's latest album 'New Lore' released in April 2017.
Sean came of age listening to a father’s record collection that included The Beach Boys, Elvis Presley and more. But in his late teens it was soul and blues that spoke to the bourgeoning singer-songwriter. “I was listening to records by R.L. Burnside and John Lee Hooker and others which are basically just guitar and drums and really raw sounding. I was also listening to the early soul records like Otis Redding and Ray Charles. I didn’t want to try and duplicate those sounds, just take aspects of them and make them my own.”
Though Sean has often made his hometown of Troy, New York and its surrounding areas his creative base, 'New Lore' brought a new environment, and a new producer. Appropriate to his love of folk-blues legends like Howlin' Wolf, he ventured to Sam Phillips Recording studio in Memphis to work with Matt Ross-Spang (Jason Isbell, Margo Price). They tapped into the history of the legendary space to hone a sound that is at once rich and stark, putting Rowe's deep and dynamic rage at the forefront. Because if high notes can shatter windows, Rowe's low and guttural ones can meld sand into glass.
The songs on New Lore were often built to let Rowe's voice come through in its most stirring capacity from the "I'll Follow Your Trail" to the naturalistic "The Very First Snow," instrumentals are layered carefully and artfully over the vocals, finding footing in Sean's sly and idiosyncratic guitar style. Much of what came was a result of Sean going into the studio with a more relaxed approach – no pre-production was done, no demos finished. Rowe and Ross-Spang embraced an organic style that is so representative of how the singer-songwriter leads his life, and that is one of always fighting to flow gently with the earth, not against it.
