The New Cue #302 July 17: Oscar Lang
"When I'm low, I can do music, and it will take me out of it for a few hours."
Good morning!
Welcome to your weekly free Monday edition of The New Cue, your favourite music Substack newsletter™. Go on, say it out loud: The New Cue is my favourite music Substack newsletter™ (you don’t have to say the ™ bit, I just keep using that because there’s something pleasing about the way it hangs in the air ™ - oops, did it again!).
Today, we’ve got a chat with London singer-songwriter Oscar Lang. It’s a good one, so let’s get to it.
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Oscar Lang
On Friday, Oscar Lang releases his brilliant second album Look Now. The London singer-songwriter has already built up quite the catalogue since emerging as a prolific teenage prodigy in 2017, releasing a steady stream of EPs and a first full-length (2021’s Chew The Scenery), music that took in summery art-pop and fuzzy, melodic indie-rock, plus there’s also been production work and collaborations with fellow Dirty Hit artists Beadadoobee and Wallice. But Look Now sounds very much like a debut in that this is the music Lang should’ve been making all along, containing piano ballads that go from being emotive and raw to playful and darkly funny, richly-layered psychedelia and 60s-y guitar-pop. It’s a profoundly personal work, too, Lang using a painful break-up to go deep on all areas of his life, including writing about his mother’s suicide. Not long ago, Niall met this charming, skittish chatterbox in a café in Clapton, east London, where Lang had recently relocated from where he was raised on the west side of the capital, to hear all about how Look Now came together. Here’s all the songs he’s released from it so far handily grouped together to listen to whilst you read:
Hello Oscar. Let’s start at the start – where did Look Now begin?
It’s been in my head for a while that I wanted to return back to the piano. For a while, I was doing guitar rock songs trying to be a rock star and be wild and then I realised that, at the heart of it all, I just love ballads. My biggest inspirations are people that can just sit at the piano and sing a song that everyone can relate to.
What was the spark for that?
It was actually quite weird. Before January last year, the record was actually going to be quite upbeat and almost 80s, a lot of drum machines and disco- things. Then I went through a break-up and it just completely changed everything. I started writing ballads about the break-up and I realised, 'oh, this is what I wanted to be.'
It starts off with definite break-up ballad in A Song About Me…
Oh yeah, it's the biiiiig break-up song, that one. It's a hard song for me because it is so personal. I'd broken up with my ex and I was very heartbroken, it was the collapse of a childhood love, the first person I'd ever been in love with. She broke up with me just before I went off to write a lot of music, in the hopes that it would keep me distracted. But that was fueling the fire! We met up and she asked me if I’d been writing songs and said, ‘I don't want you to write a song about me'. In my songwriting brain, I went, 'oh, that's a great idea for a song!’.
A Song About Me: the track that sent Oscar off in a different direction on the new album
Haha. It’s quite a change in sound from your first record, which was rooted in heavy-ish guitars and indie-rock choruses. Was there any overlap?
No, not really. The last album was written at the end of lockdown. We had recorded two EPs, and then sort of went 'well, I've not got anything else on because it's lockdown and nobody's doing anything, I might as well do an album’. In my head, I sort of wish that I'd taken a bit more time with it. I view the two EPs that we did that year as an album, and that should have really been the album. It’s not to say that I wasn't necessarily happy with my last record, but it just got to the point where I was making so much music that I didn't know what it even sounded like anymore.
What did you have in your head sonically for the new album? It's got a very distinct sound from start to finish.
I wanted to do things that were closer to piano ballad artists, and for me, it's Elton John, Paul McCartney, Hall & Oates, Michael McDonald, Billy Joel - I was listening to The Stranger by Billy Joel a lot. I just fucking love that album. I love songs that tell stories and I wanted to have that in my own songs but this time the stories be real. Before I was writing stories that were fictional stories but by the end of this album, I looked back and went, 'Oh, fuck, every single song means something to me and is personal to me', which I've never had before. Music for me is like therapy so a lot of the time when I'm low, I can do music, and it will take me out of it for a few hours. It's the only thing I can do in this world that I can sit down, blink, and then four hours later, I've got a song and I'm like, 'Oh, that was great.' Especially when you're feeling low, and time seems to pass so slowly, for time to pass quick like that, I feel very lucky that I have this crutch to fall back on. That's why a lot this album is quite emotional to me and the things I talk about on the latter half of the album, especially with songs like On God, that's a lot to do with my mum and it was a real healing process.
On God: Look Now’s epic standout song
On God feels like a really important song on the record, like everything else is pieced around it.
My mum committed suicide when I was seven years old and for years, I really didn't think about it too much. I think as a seven-year-old, you don't process much really. You don't realise the severity of it and what it means to you and I didn't for ages and just got on with life. When I went through this break-up, as much as my dad was there to help me, and to comfort me and be there for me, all I really wanted was a hug from my mum. I wanted my mum to come in and go 'can I make you a cup of tea?', just be there, it's where I really felt I missed this motherly presence in my life. In the last year, it really has dawned on me how I really miss this side of my life that I wish I could have had, having a mum around.
I'd wanted to write a song about my mum for a few years. But I didn't want it to be like, 'I miss you', I wanted it to have some meaning to it and discovering what that meant and addressing it from the outlook of also the struggle I've had with religion. I was raised Roman Catholic by my mum’s family and the whole time I was sort of going 'this is all bollocks, I don't really believe any of it.' But at the same time, they were telling me that if this is all true, that means your mum is watching down on you and you get to see her one day when you die, she'll always be there kind of thing. So I always held on to this idea that maybe God does exist because that means I get to see my mum again, which is a sweet idea but I despise organised religion.
Yeah, I was dragged along to church every Sunday as a kid too…
But [going to church] instilled a love in me for choral music and, and that's what came through on that track. I wanted it to feel like a choir when the chorus hits in with the with 'so I hold out on God', all these different voices coming together to be a choir. My dad would take me to Sunday mass to put the little slip in so I could get into the secondary school I went to, we’d go to these masses at 7pm and it was really peaceful, there's not many people and you get a choir singing beautiful songs and you sort of doze off, I didn’t really care what they're actually saying, I was more there for the ambience.
One Foot First: “I wanted to write a song about all the things I've been thinking but personify them in other people.”
Did you learn anything about yourself making this record, putting yourself through this process of writing deeply personal songs?
I came to realise that a lot of my creative energy comes out of feeling quite low. And that's what I mean that it's very much a therapy thing for me is that when I'm at extremes of emotions, when I'm either falling in love and super happy, or really low and I've just broken up and I'm heartbroken, those are the times where I find I'm most creative. I don't know why, it's just the thing that happens, I suddenly want to write songs all the time and ideas are always coming to me, those things I wanted to say but I couldn't really say them so the only way you can really say them is by writing a song. And then eventually they’ll be heard two years later!
One Foot First was written when I was in a really dark place. I wanted to write a song about all the things I've been thinking but personify them in other people. And especially as I've been hurt a lot as a victim of somebody that had been affected by suicide, that's why the chorus is about if I could go, I’d disappear and not hurt anyone. With songs like When You Were A Child, it was stuff like I remember growing up, and I think everyone really feels this, but when you're growing up as a kid, you're like, 'I just can't wait to be an adult and be able to do my own things'. And then I found myself being an adult and I was truly on my own for the first time, in this flat surrounded by my old relationship, and that was really hard. That's why I wrote When You Were A Child, because it was the memory of a time when your friends are always there, you see your friends every day and it's just a lot easier and you think you want to be an adult and then here, I was an adult, and I wasn't enjoying it as much as I thought I would.
What was your favourite moment making it?
A song called Everything Unspoken, which was quite heavily influenced by Here We Go Magic and [Here We Go Magic frontman and songwriter] Luke Temple, who writes all of it. He likes to build up a lot of layers and create a sonic world and that's how that song came to be, jumping from instrument to instrument, I'd do a Rhodes line and then I'd be like, 'Oh, it needs a piano' and then another Rhodes and by the end you look at this thing and there's 18 layers of different sounds.
Everything Unspoken: influenced by US indie-rock experimentalists Here We Go magic
Each song on the record seems to come from a different place or perspective, is there a theme that runs right the way through it?
The main theme really was a lot of dealing with loneliness. I struggle a lot with social anxiety as well and that's where songs like Leave Me Alone came about, all of the emotions that I felt going through this break-up. It was the toughest year of my life and the lowest I've ever felt, so addressing that. I think themes of loneliness and healing and social anxiety and my views on the world. Blow Ur Cash stemmed from whilst I was going through all this rough time, I started to notice that my hair was falling out in quite big clumps. My mental health has a really bad effect on my body and I've had stomach issues for years and I’m still trying to get it sorted, it really translates into a literal physical pain and so I noticed that my hair was falling out. I panicked and looked up these fucking hair treatments and ended up spending way too much money on a hair treatment that I shouldn't have.
And now you’ve gone and bleached it.
Yeah, now I've bleached it! I've got to the point now where I don't really give a fuck about it, what will be is what will be and I think at the time I was very panicked and anxious about things. I was just spending whatever money I could to make me feel good.
Given you put yourself through the wringer making this record, how did you feel when you got to the end?
Immensely proud. I just felt really proud of myself that out of this low, in this dark, there was this thing at the end of it all, that was the light that was keeping me going through it all. Every time I would feel low I'd go, ‘well, at least I’ve got the album’. I want it to be out and I want to show everyone and go, 'I can do this!'.
ND