“I try to disregard politics as much as I can, but it seems like every day when you wake up there is something else crazy going on-not normal crazy, but more like movie script crazy,” he says. Lang breaks out the slide for the title song, “Signs,” which extends outward from personal stories into the dramatic events of today’s world. That song could be applied to any situation in which you feel like you are struggling.” I want it to be whatever it is going to be for the listener. “When I was coming up with lyrics, it was personal, but I don’t want to analyze it too much. “We built the song around that premise,” Lang explains. The anthemic “Last Man Standing” started with a hook Drew Ramsey brought to the recording date. “You are overconfident, thinking you are ready for whatever the world will throw at you, but have no idea some things are affecting you until much later in life.” “It is mostly about the mistakes I made through not approaching life with humility, and the things I was susceptible to that distracted me,” says Lang. “Being proactive has been a weak spot for me, and the song is about doing your part to get things moving.”įueled by some evil guitar sounds, “Snakes” turns the well-known warning about “snakes in the grass” into a poetic tale of a young man dealing with hubris and temptation.
“There have been times in my life where I thought something would take care of itself, when I should have put some effort forth to help it happen,” says Lang. Starting off the record with a juke joint stomp, “Make It Move” is the singer’s story about going to the mountain rather than waiting for it to come to you. If I can’t make it work using just my personal experience, I use my imagination to fill in blanks.” “The main goal is for folks to be able to relate to what I went through. “Some of the songs are autobiographical, but not usually in a literal way,” Lang explains. The record, which features funk, rock, and blues elements, is held together by Lang’s distinctive playing and singing, and the lyrics, which center on themes of embattlement and self-empowerment. and Nashville, and some further help from Dwan Hill, Dennis Dodd and Josh Kelley, Signs was done. With a bit of overdubbing and further recording in L.A. In this simpler spirit, Lang, Drew Ramsey, and Shannon Sanders convened in a Los Angeles studio with some melodic and arranging ideas and proceeded to crank out a dozen basic tracks in a few days. Still, I let the writing be what it was and that was sometimes not necessarily the blues.” I had an itch to emulate some of that and I think it shows in the songs. “I have been appreciating how raw and unrefined that stuff is. “A lot of my earlier influences have been coming to the surface, like Robert Johnson, and Howlin’ Wolf,” he reports. Beyond focusing attention on his soloing prowess, it is about recapturing the spirit of the early blues, where the guitar was front and center, fairly leaping out of the speakers. Signs is not merely a return the artist’s guitar-based beginnings, but an embodiment of an even more elemental sound. Lang’s distinctive, blues-inflected licks appeared on every album, but became one element in a sea of passionately sung and tightly arranged songs. King, and Buddy Guy, evolved over those recordings into a modern R&B style closer to Stevie Wonder and contemporary gospel music. What began as a bluesy sound, influenced by electric pioneers like Albert Collins, B. “There is a lot of personal history in there, and also some things that relate to world events.”
“I got married, had kids, and that arc has been recorded on albums along the way,” says Lang.
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Actual life experience was yet to come, and has been subsequently chronicled in a series of five uniformly excellent recordings. Also, setting Lang apart from the wunderkind crowd was a 15-year-old voice that sounded like a weathered soul shouter. No flashy re-hasher of classic blues licks, even at that early age Lang was a full-blown artist with a style of his own. Lie to Me revealed a talent that transcended the crop of blues prodigies floating around in the late Nineties. It is hard to believe that at 38 years old Jonny Lang has already had a successful career for two decades.Įasier to believe when you learn he released his first platinum record at 15-an age when many young people are just beginning to play music.
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