Easy listening for anxious times, torch songs for a world on fire, orchestral pop for the algorithm age: this is the twilit milieu of L.C. Franke, whose debut album Still In Bloom, releasing July 19, builds a bridge between twentieth-century nostalgia and our modern alienation. Across ten tracks of pure mood-indigo music, inspired by the jazz-club savoir faire of artists like Frank Sinatra, Scott Walker, and Ella Fitzgerald, Franke's barstool croon smolders against a backdrop of woodwind trills and string quartet swells. It's a musical tonic that pairs equally well with gin and general malaise--light on the ears, heavy on the heart. In a previous life, L.C. Franke was known as Jeff Klein, an Austin-by-way-of-New York indie-rocker who spent the better part of his youth garnering widespread acclaim as a solo artist, as a collaborator with countless other songwriters, and as the frontman of the Southern gothic soul outfit My Jerusalem. But by 2017, he had hit a wall. After a demoralizing experience with his then record label he was feeling lost and jaded, his mental health teetering. He'd given so much of his life to music, with so little to show for it. He decided to take a year off and reassess. Then, along came the pandemic. That hiatus turned indefinite, and he found himself suddenly isolated and adrift, unsure whether would ever get back to who he was. Then he realized: Maybe he didn't want to. The opportunity for reinvention presented itself when his friend, the Bessie-winning dancer Melissa Toogood, asked the artist to compose the score for her performance with the Boston Ballet. Franke bought a Mellotron, started noodling around with the sounds of flutes, clarinets, and strings. He reached out to John Mills, a professor of jazz studies who's worked with the likes of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles, to help him turn his horrible caveman arrangements into something a 65-piece orchestra could play.
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