In Love
Love, love, love... been on my mind a lot lately, obviously, because I ran off and got married to my lady, then went on a honeymoon. So I apologize if I kept any of you hanging, though I know that robots Mark and David kept things running while I was away. So onto love, with something we used as part of our ceremony:
“Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists. When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.â€
- Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
Ian Love is another story - a former junky who found music to be both his outlet and his fix, he spent over half a decade on and off heroin. Playing in various bands since the age of 17 (including a stint as bassist for noise rock band, Die 116), but getting himself deeply tangled up in drugs meant that by the age of 23 he was in rehab, where he decided it would be the last time. He started playing with a few friends and running sound at LES hotspot Brownies, as well as travelling the world. Through this time and effort at staying clean, the result was the band Rival Schools (with his friends from CIV, Quicksand and Radio 4). They did well, which meant big shows, big tours, good press, and again, thankfully for Ian, staying clean. At the same time, Ian was working on material of his own, which he put together, and assembled another band, Cardia, to play it. Ian also managed to build a good home-studio, where he recorded and mixed music for various friends' bands, and last year, started working on solo material for himself.
This is the result, a fairly broad step in another direction from Rival Schools' and Cardia's noisy modern rock: mostly acoustic, lushly layered, and I think pure sounding pop music. It is really beautiful stuff, that on first listen I knew I was totally hooked on. His new self-titled album is ten tracks of this pure goodness - much of which has to do with Ian having been through so much earlier in his life, but most recently getting married, and having a child. The record comes out February 28th on the Philly-based Limekiln Records, so keep your ears peeled for it, as it is damn good.
Love (and I do mean both Ian Love, and the feeling itself) does some pretty amazing things - I'm no recovered junky, but I know that much to be true myself.
PS: Heard from Ian that he's got a show in NYC (Mercury Lounge) coming up in the first week of March, so I'll keep you all posted on the dates - also, his new website will be fully operational in a couple of weeks, plus he's got a Myspace page with more stuff to check out -- the management