Hometown: Brooklyn, N.Y.
Fun Fact: As a child, Massachusetts native Luke Temple begged his mother to take him to one the kitschy “witch museums” that populate the town of Salem, preserving the city’s sordid past for tourists—and unsuspecting local children. “The second we walked in there, the floor lit up red and there was some cackling. I just completely lost my papers,” he remembers. “I started screaming. She had to take me out.”
Why He’s Worth Watching: Temple’s dreamscape lyrics, playful instrumentation and warm, ethereal tenor deftly nudge the would-be boundaries of the singer-songwriter tag.
For Fans Of: Jeff Buckley, St. Vincent, Grizzly Bear
To the imaginative outsider, Brooklyn might seem like some musical Magic Kingdom where all the finest indie rockers romp about together in skinny jeans, tossing out catchy songs like candy from parade floats. But in reality, it’s no fairytale. Luke Temple, who admits his own “romantic love affair” with NYC drew him down from Boston after art school, knows this first-hand.
“It’s not like everyone is playing out in the street and celebrating,” he explains. “New York can be pretty cloistered in some ways. Everyone pretty much keeps to themselves.”
But for every aspiring rock star holed up in some Williamsburg apartment, there’s a neighbor reaping the bounty (or shouldering the burden) of their fellow Brooklynite’s musical aspirations—though it’s likely that few have flatmates as courteous as Temple. With only, “like, a piece of drywall” separating his and a neighbor’s apartments, he thought it best to warn her before converting his living room into a makeshift recording studio last year.
“I told her I was going to be making a record and she was like, ‘That’s fine. If it gets too loud, I’ll just bang,’” Temple remembers. Although he and the musician friends assembled for the project tried to keep it down, often singing and playing as quiet and close to the microphone as they could, the neighbor had to pound a few times. But, Temple says, the limitations—both the implied sound ordinance and the financial concerns that pushed him to record in his apartment in the first place—only enhanced the sound of the final product: his second LP, Snowbeast, released on Mill Pond Records this past August.
Speaking to Paste in early November amidst a stint of tour dates with Chuck Prophet, Temple faces a dilemma of the opposite sort. On the road for the first time without bandmates, he's tackling the wilds of the interstate system in a rented, pearl-blue 2007 Mustang convertible with just his guitar for company.
“I see [Prophet and his band] at the shows, but I’m driving around by myself,” Temple says. “I expect some kind of existential crisis, then catharsis.” Temple is home now, and at the end of the road, Brooklyn was there to welcome him back—maybe not with open arms, but at least with a friendly bang on the wall.
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