Neal Lucas – Music in the Making
Though it is not the easiest task to take the sum of a man, Neal Lucas seems like the sort unlikely to stake his identity in ego. His grasp of the beautiful simplicity which makes life meaningful is apparent in both his demeanor and his music. He sings of green-eyed girls keeping secrets, and the worst parts of ourselves we drag home to our partners at the end of the day, and about how, just maybe, the best parts turning it all around.
His music explores the enigma of the void and the universal mysteries in more prosaic contexts, “the same kinds of things we always write songs about – relationships, death, loss, the unknown,” he says simply.
His upcoming album, engineered and produced with drummer, Sean O’Rourke, is still being recorded, and one particular set of songs has an overarching theme, that of “two stars colliding and imploding to become a black hole.”
A self-proclaimed “amateur scholar,” Lucas makes a point of educating himself, spending “a lot of time looking at things that interest me. I got into black holes for a long time. I’ve always been fascinated by them. They’re unknown and symbolic in a way…the same way you’d look at death, or what’s beyond this. Because everything that gets sucked into a black hole ceases to exist, at least as we know about it…you want there to be something on the other side.”
The beauty of music lies in its ability to describe the mundane and the extraordinary in the same breath. “The stars are drawn to one another, only to implode because there’s not enough energy to sustain them, which can be analogous to a relationship,” Lucas explains.
His music may sound cerebral, but there is something grounded in the relentless beat he picks in stark counterpoint to the gritty, melancholic crooning. To listen is like driving down an endless highway in the dark, surrounded by nostalgia and cigarette smoke, the beat of the tires the soundtrack to your inner montage. The lines turn ceaselessly, bewitchingly, in the tension between hopeful tempos and tenacious minor tonalities.
“I’ve always been a guitar player,” says Lucas, “But the longer I go, the less music is about just playing the guitar.” This shift is one of the most significant changes he has seen in his music since his last release. “I’m expanding on how I write songs and the kind of songs I write. It can be cool sometimes not to just write a blazing guitar solo, and just have a song. With Sean, we jam so much when we play live, so maybe some of that jam element is coming back in too.”
Lucas began writing his own songs after picking up guitar as a child. “I was always into creative writing in school,” he says. “Poems. I’ve always liked to be creative in that way.”
His evolution, as a human and a musician, has led him to a place where “words come easier now that I’m less critical of myself and focused on what I want to say,” he says. “I just want to get it out of myself and on to the next one. That doesn’t mean I write good songs, but I’m more comfortable with myself and less critical of my own work. Whether it’s received or not doesn’t matter, as long as I’m communicating properly.”
When asked about his inspiration, Lucas recalled his childhood. “When I was growing up, my dad would play in bands every weekend. He taught me to play, and I would go play with him sometime with his bands. I’ve always been more of an improvisational player, and I think that’s because that’s how he started me off. He’d throw me into a bunch of musical situations, and I think that kinda set me up to have a looser, more improvisational style.”
Lucas is currently working on a new release to come out sometime soon. In the meantime you might catch him playing shows with Sean O’Rourke and bass player Neal Fountain. “This thing’s just coming together,” says Lucas, “we jam some, we play gigs. There’s chemistry with those guys…the way they play my tunes, a particular sound we come up with. They are just themselves within it, and just let it go wherever it wants to go. I haven’t had that with a band in a long time, and I’m excited to see where it goes. The kind of music I make with these guys is what I want to be making all the time. They play with all kinds of other people too – they are well accomplished. I feel like I’m the weakest link in my own band when I’m playing with them. It’s not lost on me that they are as good as they are and I get to play with them.”
For more information about upcoming shows, and to keep up with Neal Lucas and his upcoming album release, you can follow him on Instagram @neallucasmusic and on Facebook, Spotify, and Apple Music.
By Sarah Algoe