Singer, Songwriter, Musician
Nick Lowe (Photo by Dan Brun-Forti)
Six years ago, the revered British artist and songwriter Nick Lowe had almost abandoned the idea of making another full-length album. The realities of the marketplace and the expense aside, Lowe was busy enjoying the more immediate “camaraderie and rewards” of touring with Los Straitjackets, those masked marvels who’ve been his fellow musical voyagers for the past decade. Together, they’d released a handful of EPs and singles between 2018-20. But Lowe saw those mostly as “souvenirs to let people know the store was still open.”
But this fall, Lowe returns with his first LP in over a decade – Indoor Safari. So what changed his mind?
“We’ve really got a style together now,” Lowe says. “When it started out, it was just to do shows. We had no thoughts of recording, really. But after a while, we started to attract an audience – and a much younger one. When we started noticing the younger fans, I realized my fate maybe wasn’t to just keep playing the same old songs to the same old tubby ex-pub rockers (laughs). Suddenly, the whole thing started to get some bounce to it. Like, ‘Wait a minute, this is really something.’”
The accumulated experience of touring also showed Lowe that Los Straitjackets were simpatico in ways that remind him of what he calls his “beloved old firm and gents’ club,” the ace studio band behind the string of near-perfect career renaissance albums he made in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Lowe lost two of his closest “key oppos and friends” Bobby Irwin and Neil Brockbank, in 2015 and 2017, respectively).