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Lou Barlow.
 Bespectacled and bookish, Lou Barlow has always been an unassuming looking rock star. He is a heart-on-the-sleeve songsmith, as prolific as he is sensitive in songs that he once recorded straight into a tape deck, earning him the badge of honour/albatross of lo-fi genius throughout the 'nineties. After the demise of a string of projects including the fantastic Folk Implosion, Barlow has released 'Emoh'; a collection of fabulous folky pop songs recorded at home and with studio producers such as Mark Nevers.
"When it was finished I gave it to my friend Adam [Harding]," the affable Barlow begins, explaining how 'Emoh' came to have its name. "Adam recorded one of the songs on the record with me, did backing vocals. He took the record home and he called me a little while later and said 'Lou, did you know that Home spelled back wards says Emoh?' and I was like 'You are a genius! That is so great!' He started telling me all the reasons it was a good title, all of them I agreed with, such as 'oh' at the end, like in Sebadoh and Sentridoh, the 'oh' thing that I have been stuck on for years, and obviously the Emo kind of music. And coincidentally 'Emoh' is being released in the US on the same day as the Conor Oberst record, Bright Eyes, which is kind of funny. He's the new poster boy of emo, let's say. He is so popular it drives my wife crazy."
Though not directly acknowledged, the irony is hardly lost on Barlow. The similarities are often striking: the deeply personal lyrics, the delicate and plaintive delivery.
"With 'Emoh' being home backwards, a lot of the songs are about home, going home, or being home, being afraid of losing home," Barlow continues. "I just thought that is great. And I sat down almost immediately and came up with the album artwork."
A visit to Barlow's very twee website loobiecore.com is a little window into his world, and is also clearly a home for the cabal of Barlow fans around the world. "The website has become such an important part of what I do," states Barlow, still a master of DIY.
He good-naturedly fields inevitable questions about the comparatively grand and clean sounding 'Emoh'. "As a listener, if you like the song you will forgive anything, but when I listen to anything that I do I don't forgive anything,' he explains. "So I really tried to get it to the point that I thought it sounded good."
It is not merely romantic love that inspires troubled masterpieces such as Legendary. "That song is about a friend that I was involved with in a non-sexual relationship," he chuckles. And then more seriously: "To me, losing friends... I have found that it is just as affecting, but almost in a really insidious way. I think the friendships with the men in my life are just as important in their own way and in a different way. I need to overcome losing a friend, and unless you really understand what happened you are not going to be able to grow in your other relationships. Losing people is heartbreaking regardless."
Given his prolific output, I was curious as to whether the flow of melody ever dries up.
"I guess I did have something that would be summed up as a block. It was around 2000 and Folk Implosion had broken up and my friend John had split, and it was really painful. A lot of stuff happened around that time with Folk Implosion and Sebadoh, we a had a couple of records that did really poorly, people said some really mean stuff about us, we went on tour, and generally the crowds were a third of what there were before. When I came back from all that and picked up my guitar all I would think about was failure, and here I was trying to write these new songs, and I was happy with the last batch, but everybody hated them. So I got really caught up in that. But the weird thing is that I can point to three or four songs from that time that I am happy with."
"It is like a Darwinian thing, you know, if a melody is really good it can make it through my most cynical period, and it will pop up in my head again one day."
Narelle Walker
 | 'Emoh' is out now through Remote Control/Inertia. |
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