Xtra Mile Recordings will release the debut album by Saint Leonard’s Horses entitled Good Luck Everybody on 14 October 2016. Preorders are available now via our shop or download from iTunes. You'll receive the tracks 'Rise Up' and 'Spooky Lover' instantly for preordering. You can listen to the track, premiered on Q Magazine's website.
After signing his recording contract in the shadow of William Blake’s grave in London, it was only a matter of time before this curious artefact would be brought into the world. It’s a record that started life in the Hollywood Hills with a detour through the Mojave Desert, a cabin in Nashville, and a gothic church on the Yorkshire moors, and that ended up being recorded at Childwickbury Manor in St Albans, the former home of director Stanley Kubrick. It’s an ungodly collision of big country sound and misty isle musings – as thrilling a listen as is the story of its conception.
Produced by Nick Trepka and engineered by Jack Hobbs in a studio adjacent to Kubrick’s study, it allowed Saint Leonard to absorb the creative energy that has bounced around the building. Putting sounds down in the place where parts of famed movies The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut were filmed, as well as drawing inspiration from filmic memorabilia that has found resting places there, has lent an ominous quality to the record. You can hear it in the echoes of melancholy sweeping through the harmonica intro to ‘Well, Well, Well’, it seeps into the spaces and bends between notes on ‘Spooky Lover’, the tinkly of piano and strummed, dusty chords of ‘Goddess Of Electric Gold’, and the echoed piano stabs on ‘The Strangelove Hotel Suite’.
But this isn’t the only palette available to Saint Leonard’s Horses, not by a long shot. ‘Long John Silver’ is an Americana-steeped bluesy riot, rhyming Hotel California with Johnnie Walker and leading with honky tonk piano. The build from fiddle drone to dynamic crescendo, borrowing from gospel, rendering drama with orchestral strides, warped guitar chimes and biting solos, it’s all storytelling via sound, soaked in experience.
And all of this is a whiskey and sawdust backdrop for Saint Leonard’s lucid, intoxicated, dream-like and twisted lyrics, depicting friendships "made in haunted houses" to tales of Los Angeles. Fractured and surreal though they may sometimes be, his words just help bring scratchy, authentic sepia to life; often vibrant, sometimes violent, even bold and beautiful.
Explaining further, Saint Leonard says: “I wanted to make a record that unflinchingly documented and almost forensically examined the extremely peripatetic and emotionally turbulent two years I had during the odyssey of its conception. To that extent the album is a self-analysing artefact of my psyche. I wanted it to express the intense polarities of the experience both internal and external, psychic and geographic, in all it's ecstatic, beatific, horrific, glamorous, occult, painfully narcissistic, quasi-mystical, robustly loving and ultimately redemptive wonder. Essentially: the feel good hit record of late autumn/winter 2016 (nee; soundtrack the twilight of our species).”
In the past few years Leonard has toured the UK and USA supporting and playing shows with Ryan Adams, Father John Misty, Bob Dylan, The Strokes, Beck, The Libertines, Billy Bragg and Wolfmother. The live band then further honed their skills and the songs through extensive touring and festival appearances (including Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds, The Great Escape, SXSW and British Summer Time in Hyde Park). Saint Leonard’s Horses will now unleash these fully-formed songs on live audiences wherever and whenever they can.
Live dates:
OCTOBER
14 Brighton - Green Door Store
16 Birmingham - Sunflower Lounge
17 Manchester - Night & Day
20 Liverpool – Shipping Forecast
21 Newcastle- Think Tank
23 Nottingham- Bodega
24 Leeds – The Library
26 St Albans - The Horn
NOVEMBER
02 London – Jamboree Cable St
03 Margate – Tom Thumb
facebook.com/kieranleonardmusic / Twitter @THESAINTLEONARD / www.saintleonard.co.uk