Indoor Safari by Nick Lowe & Los Straitjackets

Six years ago, the revered British artist and songwriter Nick Lowe had almost abandoned the idea of making another full-length album. The realities of the marketplace and the expense aside, Lowe was busy enjoying the more immediate “camaraderie and rewards” of touring with Los Straitjackets, those masked marvels who've been his fellow musical voyagers for the past decade. Together, they'd released a handful of EPs and singles between 2018-20. But Lowe saw those mostly as “souvenirs to let people know the store was still open.”

But this fall, Lowe returns with his first LP in over a decade - Indoor Safari. So what changed his mind?

“We've really got a style together now,” Lowe says. “When it started out, it was just to do shows. We had no thoughts of recording, really. But after a while, we started to attract an audience – and a much younger one. When we started noticing the younger fans, I realized my fate maybe wasn't to just keep playing the same old songs to the same old tubby ex-pub rockers (laughs). Suddenly, the whole thing started to get some bounce to it. Like, 'Wait a minute, this is really something.'”

The accumulated experience of touring also showed Lowe that Los Straitjackets were simpatico in ways that remind him of what he calls his “beloved old firm and gents' club,” the ace studio band behind the string of near-perfect career renaissance albums he made in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Lowe lost two of his closest “key oppos and friends” Bobby Irwin and Neil Brockbank, in 2015 and 2017, respectively).

“The Straitjackets like all kinds of music, and are very good, open-minded musicians, apart from being very agreeable people,” he says. “And they also have a sort of punk rock ethos, which, unfortunately, I do too. I've tried to shrug it off so many times, but I just can't get rid of it.”

Indeed, there's an immediacy and kinetic energy to the twelve mostly uptempo songs on Indoor Safari, with Lowe and Los Straitjackets buzzing from number to number. “Went to a Party” is a Kinks-style rave-up, “Crying Inside” is a classic happy-sad masquerade, grooving like some lost Ricky Nelson hit, “Blue on Blue” and “Jet Pac Boomerang” both deal cleverly with hearts in limbo. The Bacharach-flavored “Different Kind of Blue” is a loaded rose with the candid confession of “I can't afford the luxury of having you come back to me,” while “Trombone” and “Don't Be Nice to Me” possess the forlorn elegance and tunefulness that are Lowe trademarks. With his intimate baritone, he croons them all as if they're already standards. So much so that when he does land on two well-chosen covers, “A Quiet Place” and “Raincoat in the River,” the join is seamless.

Fans and keen-eared listeners will surely notice that there are reworkings of previously released songs here, including “Love Starvation” and “Trombone.” While there was nothing wrong with the initial recordings, many captured on days off while touring in whatever city they found themselves, Lowe viewed them more as documents - artist sketches before a final canvas. It’s an approach that goes back to Lowe’s earliest studio albums, with “Cruel to Be Kind” and “Heart of the City” undergoing similar creative makeovers.

“None of us really thought they were that inspiring,” he says. “They were lacking somehow in the sound quality, performance or atmosphere. And I felt maybe we'd sort of thrown away a few cool tunes. When it was suggested that we should do an actual full-length album, the songs had evolved, and had some air blown into them. After playing them in front of an audience a dozen times, the players know what they're doing and they start listening to everybody else, and adjusting their thing accordingly. And suddenly, hey, presto, you've got the sauce on it all!”

There were still logistical challenges to finishing the album, with Lowe residing in England and Los Straitjackets in the US. But the crew convened at Reliable Recorders in Chicago, with engineer Alex Hall (JD McPherson, The Cactus Blossoms) helping to glue everything together. “Alex is great in so many ways, and he put his stamp on it,” Lowe says. “There were some further adjustments, but at the end, I thought, 'When you hear the songs all together, it sounds of a piece, and you can't tell that it was all recorded over a period of five years.'”

And so, 2024 has become a little brighter with record number seventeen from Nick Lowe, who recently celebrated his diamond birthday (“I don't feel 75,” he says. “Yes, I do feel older, but in a sort of nice way”). Within a storied fifty-plus year career - Brinsley Schwarz, Rockpile, “Cruel to Be Kind,” “(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” collaborations with The Pretenders, Elvis Costello and Johnny Cash, modern classic albums that MOJO calls “stories of love and loss so beautifully simple that you'll never get to the bottom of them” - how does Lowe see Indoor Safari and the adventures ahead?

“My feeling is that the record is pretty good, actually,” he says. “I think there are some cuts on it which are really fabulous. Will I make more records? Well, if I can come up with some more cool tunes, I don't see why not.”

Nick Lowe has made his mark as a producer (Elvis Costello-Graham Parker-Pretenders-The Damned), songwriter of at least three songs you know by heart, short-lived career as a pop star, and a lengthy term as a musicians’ musician. But in his current ‘second act’ as a silver-haired, tender-hearted but sharp-tongued singer-songwriter, he has no equal.

nicklowe.com
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