Music Review: Luke LeBlanc, ‘Fugue State’
This Minneapolis singer-songwriter’s deceptively sweet and mellow new album explores societal crises and relationship struggles with a world-weary but resilient outlook.
Luke LeBlanc’s Fugue State album artwork.
Fugue State, the new album from Minneapolis-based Luke LeBlanc that drops tomorrow, is one of those collections of songs that feels so good to listen to, even though it’s steeped in some pretty heavy stuff.
Musically, it’s a laid-back, rootsy affair. LeBlanc hits a heavenly sweet spot of Americana that lies comfortably in that gray area between folk, country and rock. Electric and acoustic guitars and drums are joined from time to time by pedal steel, fiddle, other strings, even a saxophone at one point. LeBlanc employs these elements in a restrained, selective way so they never overpower or disrupt the even keel of the album.
LeBlanc’s vocals belie his age (26); like Hank Williams Sr. and Colter Wall, he belongs to the club of singers with naturally weathered voices when they were still young. There are moments where you hear shades of Tom Petty or Bob Dylan in his timbre and inflection, but LeBlanc’s voice is his own, a generally soft and relaxed tenor that sometimes surprises with unexpected intensity and a range that can go from a falsetto to almost a baritone growl.
Lyrically, Fugue State is quietly powerful and thought-provoking. The first few times I heard it, the sound and the feel washed over me as a whole, stirring and comforting at the same time. With every listen, new lyrical fragments come to the surface, sometimes pointing to a literal meaning, sometimes sliding the song’s message farther out of reach, hovering at the liminal edges of comprehension.
These kinds of albums have nearly limitless life because they’ll shift and evolve depending on the listener’s mood and mental state. They leave room for mini-epiphanies whenever a line or verse calls attention to itself in a slightly different way. (In other words, take my current interpretation with a grain of salt!)
Considered as a whole from beginning to end, Fugue State feels like it has a gradual, not quite linear trajectory from chaos and unrest to, if not peace, at least an acceptance that ongoing movement and growth (with no natural conclusion other than death) is how you get through life.
Luke LeBlanc. Photo credit: Tom Smouse, 2022.
“Come Clean” describes our fractured society in subtle but unsparing terms, with a couplet that could be about the 2021 insurrection but also so much more: “There’ll be a party in Washington / All our demons will come marching in.” Each verse ends with the phrase “That’s when I’ll come clean,” which suggests not just admitting secrets or sins but also the cleansing that’s possible when ugly truths are finally brought out into the open and dealt with.
The next track, “Take Your Mind Off It,” also acknowledges our turbulent times but expresses an all too relatable urge to distract ourselves from it when it gets to be too much:
I think we’re living in a fugue state
Only way to love is through hate
And if you need a ride you gotta pick a side to follow around
Now I don’t mean to bring you down
I just want to take your mind off it
“Slide on Over” conveys a similar longing to get lost in love as a panacea to complications and internal or external troubles, but by the end of the song it’s clear that it’s not that simple: “You might think I’m free / But I’m stuck inside the middle of an old time riddle that just won’t let me be.”
In “Anymore,” the perils of trying to avoid troubles instead of dealing with them are chillingly portrayed. The track depicts a relationship that’s all over except the leaving: “There was a ghost on the pillow next to me / She didn’t talk but she wore your perfume.” If there had been a way to fix things, it’s gone now: “We buried the key under a concrete floor / And we can’t go there anymore.”
Melancholy but oh so sweet, drenched with pedal steel and strings, “Down Low” is almost inspiring in its embrace of defeat or decline. The song captures an odd paradox of life, that there’s something freeing about hitting rock bottom. “Down Low” luxuriates in that mixed feeling of despair and a kind of relief.
But the album doesn’t surrender to inertia for long. The remaining songs all have a recurring theme of movement. “Still” asks a restless lover “Why can’t you stay still?” while tacitly acknowledging the impossibility of that with the unrealistic request: “I wish you’d tell a story and every word’s the same.” By the end the narrator turns the question onto himself: “Why can’t I stay still?”
Luke LeBlanc. Photo credit: Tom Smouse, 2022.
In the bouncy “Walking Days,” bright with fiddle and pedal steel, moving is a way to deal with any number of situations, good or bad: “Walking days put your mind at ease, put the pilot in the sky, set the sailor to the sea.” There’s a nod to the collective slow-moving trauma we’ve all been going through for a few years now: “We’re all living in the walking days / Everybody walking in the walking days.”
“When I Walk With You” uses the idea of movement as a metaphor for going through life with a partner: “A touch as light as a feather will push us through when I walk with you.” “Now” takes that notion of time passing and looks at a parental relationship, examining the shifting dynamics when a parent and child become two adults, their relationship changing but their perspective on life growing more similar:
When you were right I was righter than you
Now that I’m right I know that I’m wrong too
We’re a little closer now
We’re a little wiser now
We’re a little stronger now
“Soothes Me” returns to the idea of love combating unease, or maybe a dichotomy between a roving spirit and a desire for a stable relationship: “I don’t know how and I don’t know when / I find myself back here again … But she soothes me.”
The final track, “Long Way to Go,” starts with literal roadtrip/touring imagery but evolves into a journey of self-discovery and honesty. Maybe this is the “coming clean” that was promised in the opening track, culminating in an admission:
I’m just a liar like everybody else,
I make up stories about the trophies on my shelf
Because if I were an open book then everyone would know
I got a long way to go
The song’s all about constant motion with no end point in sight, and yet, in its clear-eyed embrace of living and learning as a continual journey, it evokes a feeling of calm, almost peace.
Luke LeBlanc. Photo credit: Tom Smouse, 2022.
Fugue State takes us on a trip through societal and relationship turmoil that brings to light disquieting truths and observations. But there’s something comforting about the album. Maybe there’s no obvious solution to humanity’s many woes, but there’s power in reflection, in movement, and in our ability to gather up scraps of wisdom and perspective in our journey through life.
Fugue State comes out Friday, October 28, 2022, the same day as Luke LeBlanc’s album release show at Icehouse in Minneapolis!
Carol Roth. Photo credit: Dan Lee.
Carol Roth is a full-time marketing copywriter and the primary music journalist and social media publicist for Adventures in Americana. In addition to studying the guitar and songwriting, Carol’s additional creative side hustle is writing self-proclaimed “trashy” novels under the pseudonym T.A. Berkeley!
