People will wonder where he came from. Why and how this guy could come out of nowhere and display, in his first record, lyrical immediacy and scab-picking honesty without indulging in melodramatic, maudlin techniques that telegraph to the listener, “Here I am - and I’m being earnest. No, really.”
Other people will think they know where Luke Asher and his new record, Don’t Leave So Early, came from. They’ll think he came from the house of Nick Drake down Leonard Cohen Avenue, picking up a soda pop from Duncan Sheik’s five-and-dime on his way to the town square where the ghost of Hank Williams tells all the kids that Ron Sexton’s self-titled album was his best and that he loves what Okkervil River has been up to.
Others will say he came from a kickin’, under-rated Louisville music scene, nurtured by a label (Pink Bullet Recordings) that knows how to build partnerships with their artists, and a record producer who happens to be one of the favored sons of the Louisville scene, Jamie Barnes. These people won’t be wrong, but the others aren’t necessarily crazy.
If you see Luke Asher in person, he will grab an acoustic guitar and sing his heart out right in front of you. A friend of his may pick up another instrument and join in. If you hear him in your iPod or car stereo, it will sound like you’re in a room with Luke Asher, an acoustic guitar, and an occasional friend of his who picks up another instrument and joins in. The songs are immediate, warm and tuneful, thriving under sparse, minimalist arrangements that bring out atmospheric textures from cellos, keys, banjos and glockenspiels at just the right place to make you think, “Ah … that makes sense. That had to be there.”
Hear “These Words Will Always Stay� by Luke Asher
Luke’s gentle baritone voice contains small hints of soul and country yet is too elusive for either classification. His delivery, like a good stage actor, doles out shades of emotion in measured scoops as he sings in first-person narration on each of twelve tracks dealing with loss, ambiguity, faith or the lack thereof, regret, love, longing, mortality, understanding and hope.
Luke is a storyteller, and the essence of this musical collection of stories shines through on “Wait Till You’re Older,” in the refrain “I might have something to say.” He ruminates on the characters in the song — the unknown optimist of the first verse, the artist Jacob, his lovely Rachel, “millions of others” in a dream - he casts no judgments as they pass before us but reserves the right to do so later.
The lyrics in this collection of songs are streamlined but perceptive, with a judicious, guarded use of rhyme. The storytelling is interesting enough, the melodies, catchy enough, and the musical textures are compelling enough that rhyme isn’t always necessary … in fact, those things are enough that he not only gets away with rhyming “language” with “entertain us,” in “The Hearts God Made and the Fools Who Break Them,” but it tickled me to hear it.
Asher makes impressive use of personification in “God Bless You Mary Jean,” giving weaponry a voice in
A war crossed our walls and killed our neighbors
The bombshells, they rang a song
They sang apologies for the broken-hearted
and the dead at their feet
The song also displays his penchant for fresh (though not wholly unusual) word choices:
The sinister found himself a roadblock
The shock ran right through his boots
Why “the sinister” rather than “the sinner” or, to change it up more while preserving the meter, “the sinister man found a roadblock?”
The answer is that calling him “the sinister” makes him a more interesting character. In fact, the next time I go to a costume party I may wear a scary mask and call myself “The Sinister.” I would be using the name for a different purpose than that in “God Bless You Mary Jean,” (where “the sinister,” it turns out, wasn’t so much worse than “the saint,” for whom things got hot when he fell pray to the bottle), but the point is that colorful word choices and phrases make us remember stories that would otherwise seem to be no different than those we’ve heard before.
Don’t Leave So Early boasts fine verbs that keep the action moving: in “Now That You’re Gone,” a “ghost of a memory swirls through a hall.” She doesn’t just dance or move, she swirls (and incidentally, the line “Now that you’re gone, you are mine” is one of those phrases that competes with the ability of visual art to “paint a thousand words” in a short space).
Hear the title cut, “Don’t Leave So Early,� by Luke Asher
More inventive phrases turn up in “Complicated,” like the repeated “tainted aisle” motif, even as Asher provides great detail by zooming us into commonplace scenes:
While the groomsmen bend their knees and deeply breathe
The father approaches the podium and speaks
He also knows how to turn a clever phrase, as in the bookend couplet from the title cut:
The science of sleep partly cured me
I’ll depend on a cup of coffee for the rest
and, from the closing song “Big House,” which sounds like he snatched it from a thought-bubble coming out of John Prine’s head:
A house made of bricks is settled in stone
Pardon the others, for it stands alone
Don’t Leave So Early is a solid first album. It would be a solid second or fifth album. Recorded at Louisville’s A Great Hite Studio and utilizing guitarist Joshua Hagan and cellist Mark Henderson, in addition to appearances from producer Jamie Barnes on an array of instruments, it’s a great record for a lazy Saturday morning, an introspective Sunday night, or whenever you feel like trading big sounds and glossy textures for the comfort of a perceptive friend who takes the chair next to yours, lifts his guitar out of a worn, weathered case and offers a song for the pleasure of your company.
“Don’t Leave So Early” will be available for internet purchase soon. Check out myspace.com/lukeasher for the release date, plus additional mp3s, info, show dates and more.
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That’s my boy and I still have his first guitar here at home. I’ll probably auction it on Ebay.- Luke’s Dad
PS- BTW, I’m waiting for him to ask me to do some backup on harmonica.