Harvey Robinson
With a pandemic, tornado,and bomb blast all terrifying the city last year, Nashville felt on edge for most of 2020—and many of our artists felt the same. But folk troubadour Langhorne Slim found the light at the end of the tunnel with Strawberry Mansion.
Marking Slim’s seventh album, the project was both deeply personal and a document of the times, addressing a world in turmoil and also a long battle with anxiety, depression, and prescription drug abuse. That fight had all but blunted Slim’s razor-sharp creativity before the album, and yet somehow, Strawberry Mansion finds him reclaiming his own playful, whimsical identity. It’s full of bounding optimism even as it rips the bandage off some still-painful wounds. And that hope is something we could all use.
“Through all the tragedy of it, there’s been beauty in it for me personally,” Slim says now, looking back at a process that nearly became his own personal end times.
Flashing back to late 2019, the singer-songwriter was in a bad spot. Living in Los Angeles and stuck on an album that refused to come together, he hadn’t written a song in over a year—and worse yet, he’d been self-medicating to deal with it. By the start of 2020 the outgoing artist was feeling like a shell of his former self and made the hard decision to move back to Music City for some professional help ... and then COVID-19 arrived.
“It was a forced simplifying of my life, a forced slowing down,” Slim explains of the months-long exile that followed. “That combined with some other shit, and to my surprise, songs just started to come. .... Once I got that initial part under control and got off of that medication, it was an amazing, profound transition of a spiritual nature.”
Feeling like a sonic sunrise with glowing electric guitars and Slim’s reinvigorated vocals, “Mighty Soul” captures that new beginning. It’s a spirit-stirring opening track that cuts right to the redemptive point, with its first line noting both the tornado and the “plague”—before calling out the hands and hearts that healed those twin tragedies. Through 19 songs (and three bonus tracks) Slim continues to explore his own reconstruction that way—by looking at the community around him—but he’s careful to note it’s all a work in progress.
The song “Panic Attack,” for example, mines one of Slim’s lowest points—a quirky stream of consciousness that captures the skin-crawling anxiety of anxiety itself. Slim’s therapist challenged him to pick up a guitar during his next panic attack, and he begrudgingly did so, ending up with a word-for-word transcription of something exceedingly hard to describe ... but oh, so relatable.
“To my friends in the same position,” he sings, “I wish there was a cure / But I know that life’s worth living / It’s the only thing worth living for.”
Just like the album itself, its sound is raw and unadorned, recorded in a backyard studio and speaking to the messy process of recovery as a whole, while others like “Morning Prayer” offer submission to a higher power. Elsewhere Slim takes on national politics as the testy “High Class” skewers a careless one-percent, and “Blood On Yer Lips” offers a warning to those making deals with the metaphorical devil. But even so, it all comes with a neighborly sense of just-sayin’ affection.
“I find myself a forever optimist, but a skeptical one,” he says with an audible smirk. “A lot of days for me, it’s hard not to get cynical—or even angry. And you get online and it’s just like digital road rage. But I do forever believe in the connection with others, even if you disagree with what they think.”
Unfortunately, getting folks to agree is harder than ever—even on the facts in front of them. The jaunty blues folk of “House of Fire” shines a light on that truth, with Slim narrating a cautionary scene beside a whirring organ and acoustic guitar. He sings of a family watching with horror as their house burns down, and yet the fire isn’t the saddest part. It’s that no one around them seems to care, since it’s not their house on fire. Slim describes it as a perfect simile for the politicizing of the coronavirus and the social injustice that continues everywhere, dividing Americans into teams that don’t care what happens to the other side.
“It seems like most people can wrap their heads around these subjects only when it’s them or their sisters or son or whatever,” he says. “But until then? Not so much. And I include myself in that. I didn’t feel the pandemic nearly as much until somebody I knew got sick and died from it. Maybe we don’t look out for those of us who are not treated equally, until we ourselves are treated unjustly.”
In the end, that realization might be the real silver lining Slim’s found—and the one he most hopes to pass on. He had his own storm to weather and found that it wasn’t too late to change. And with Strawberry Mansion, he’s holding out hope for all of us, too.
“Until we’re not here anymore I’m gonna try to remain hopeful, because I don’t know how else to be,” he explains. “I’ve lived in the darkness in my own way, and it ain’t there; that’s no way to live. To try to live in the light as much as possible is just a better option.”