Lou Barlow

All Music Guide:

Arguably the most prolific songwriter of his generation, Lou Barlow has also been one of the most influential; thanks to his lo-fi legacy, any geek with a guitar, a four-track machine, and an unrequited crush on a girl could become an underground pop star. Although born in Dayton, OH, on July 17, 1966, Barlow was raised primarily in Amherst, MA, where during high school he joined forces with fellow introverted outsider J Mascis in the hardcore band Deep Wound. After the group's breakup in 1983, Barlow and Mascis reunited in Dinosaur (later Dinosaur Jr.), one of the most acclaimed indie bands of the era.

Long-simmering tensions between Mascis and Barlow, who rarely spoke to each another, hastened the latter's exit from the group after 1988's superb Bug. After his dismissal, Barlow turned his focus to Sebadoh, a side project that he had begun with multi-instrumentalist Eric Gaffney several years prior. While Dinosaur Jr. had won acclaim for its monolithic guitar sound, Sebadoh was initially conceived as a bare-bones, deliberately low-fidelity home recording project spotlighting Barlow's pensive, emotional songs and Gaffney's noise collages. Over the course of a barrage of singles and sprawling albums like 1989's The Freed Man, 1990's Weed Forestin, and 1991's Sebadoh III, Sebadoh -- which later added drummer/songwriter Jason Loewenstein -- matured and expanded its scope; while still defiantly anti-commercial, the group's music grew more complex and fully developed, and moved progressively away from its primitive origins.

No doubt as a reaction to Sebadoh's growth, Barlow started the first of many concurrent side projects, dubbed Sentridoh, and released the Losers cassette in 1991. For all intents and purposes a solo project, Sentridoh allowed the staggeringly prolific performer room to explore not only his shambling acoustic folk-pop but also whatever other ideas he felt like entertaining. A series of other releases followed, most of them on cassette, although the highlights were compiled on CD collections like 1994's Winning Losers: A Collection of Home Recordings, The Original Losing Losers, and Lou Barlow and His Sentridoh, which featured the sublime love song "Forever Instant." Another Collection of Home Recordings, released under the name Lou Barlow & Friends and featuring Bob Fay (Gaffney's replacement in Sebadoh), appeared in 1995.

In 1994, Barlow also teamed with fellow singer/songwriter John Davis in the Folk Implosion, another home-recording outlet (albeit one marked by odd stylistic detours into blue-eyed funk, Lennon-esque pop, and noise abrasion). Following a series of EPs and singles, in 1995 the Folk Implosion recorded a number of songs for filmmaker Larry Clark's acclaimed feature Kids; the soundtrack's infectious "Natural One" became a surprise Top 40 hit later that year, further raising Barlow's increasingly high profile. After Sebadoh's acclaimed 1996 LP Harmacy, Barlow recorded the Folk Implosion's Dare to Be Surprised for release in the spring of 1997. A steady flow of Sebadoh, Folk Implosion, and collaborative records continued in the years to come, as did the solo efforts Emoh and Goodnight Unknown.

Wikipedia:

Louis Knox Barlow (July 17, 1966) is an American alternative rock musician and songwriter. A founding member of the groups Deep Wound, Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh and The Folk Implosion. Barlow is credited with helping to pioneer the lo-fi style of rock music in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Barlow was born in Dayton, Ohio and was raised in Jackson, Michigan and Westfield, Massachusetts.

Dinosaur Jr.

Barlow attended high school in Westfield, Massachusetts, where he met Scott Helland. The two formed the Massachusetts-based hardcore punk band Deep Wound. J Mascis joined the band after answering their ad for, "drummer wanted to play really fast". After becoming disillusioned with the constraints of hardcore, Deep Wound broke up in 1984. Mascis and Barlow reunited to form Dinosaur (later Dinosaur Jr.) later that year. Throughout its early existence, however, Mascis and Barlow had frequent personality conflicts and after the release of their third album Bug in 1988 and the initial supporting tour, Barlow was kicked out of the band.

In 2005, Barlow rejoined the band alongside the original drummer, Murph. Since then, the band has reissued its first three records, toured the world extensively and released two new records, Beyond and Farm.

Sebadoh and Folk Implosion

After his dismissal from Dinosaur Jr., Barlow turned his attention to his side-project Sebadoh, which he had formed several years earlier with the multi-instrumentalist Eric Gaffney. The project featured lo-fidelity recording techniques and combined Barlow's introspective, confessional songwriting with Gaffney's discordant noise collages. Bassist and songwriter Jason Loewenstein was later added to the line-up. Sebadoh's early efforts include 1989's The Freed Man and 1990's Weed Forestin', which were later combined and rereleased as the double album The Freed Weed.

In 1991, Barlow began work on the first of many side projects in reaction to the growing popularity of Sebadoh. He dubbed his largely solo effort Sentridoh and reverted to earlier recording techniques, making much use of sampling and a four-track machine. Sentridoh released a series of recordings available only on cassette tape on the Shrimper label, with the highlights later being compiled on CD on 1994's Winning Losers: A Collection of Home Recordings and 1995's The Original Losing Losers and Wasted Pieces in 2003. Another EP, Another Collection of Home Recordings was released in 1994 on Mint Records.

In 1994, Barlow formed the Folk Implosion with fellow singer-songwriter John Davis. After the release of several Folk Implosion EPs and singles, Barlow & Davis composed most of the soundtrack for Larry Clark's film, Kids. From those songs, "Natural One," recorded by Walton Gagel, became a surprise top-40 hit following the success of the film. It remains Barlow's biggest commercial hit. The soundtrack also included previously released songs by Slint, Daniel Johnston and Sebadoh.

After the release of The Sebadoh in 1999, Sebadoh went on hiatus and its members went on to pursue other projects. Barlow continued to work with the Folk Implosion, releasing One Part Lullaby in 1999. Barlow took a break from the Folk Implosion in 2000 to collaborate on an album (Subsonic 6) with Belgian musician Rudy Trouvé. In 2003, Barlow released The New Folk Implosion, an album which featured a new line-up, with Imaad Wasif on guitar and Russ Pollard, a Sebadoh veteran, on drums. This album met with mixed reviews according to the website Metacritic. Also in 2003, Barlow appeared as a musician in the film Laurel Canyon. In Spring of 2004, Barlow briefly reunited with Jason Loewenstein for the Turbo Acoustic tour. During this tour, Barlow and J Mascis also reunited for a single performance of the song "Video Prick" with former Deep Wound vocalist Charlie Nakajima. This brief song with Mascis led to a full fledged Dinosaur Jr. reunion in 2005, with Barlow, Mascis & Murph playing "The Lung" on the 'Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson' on April 15, 2005 and a show at Spaceland in Los Angeles the following night. They then mounted well-received tours of the United States and Europe throughout the rest of the year. They continued to tour throughout 2006, heading to Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

2007 saw Barlow, again, reunite with a former bandmate when he and Jason Loewenstein reformed 'Sebadoh Classic' with Eric Gaffney and went out on the road from February through April as the original lineup for the first time in 14 years.

Other collaborations

Solo work

Barlow's first "official" solo effort, is entitled Emoh and features many long-time collaborators and colleagues, including Abby Barlow and Jason Loewenstein. The album, released in January 2005, takes the songs of Sentridoh and rolls them up into the production values of Folk Implosion to create a sound rarely found in the Barlow catalog. In November 2005, he toured Spain and the Iberian peninsula to promote Emoh.

Barlow's second solo LP, Goodnight Unknown, was released October 6, 2009 via Merge. The record was produced by Andrew Murdock and features guest turns from the Melvins' Dale Crover, singer-songwriter Lisa Germano as well as ex-touring guitarist of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs Imaad Wasif. He toured the album in the US in the fall of 2009, opening for Dinosaur Jr. Mike Watt's band, The Missingmen, supported Barlow on the tour.