Luke Sital-Singh

After an international move from L.A. to London and again from London to the countryside, Sital-Singh and his wife finally realized the long-held dream of conceiving in the last couple of years. Throw in a global pandemic and the pressures of being a musician in the digital age and it's not a surprise that the acclaimed singer-songwriter says he needed a way to escape every now and then.

Sital-Singh is certainly happy as a burgeoning family man, but he's also happy to have gotten away every now and then to tinker with a new record that was also birthed during this season of sea changes. We often seek something we can control when we feel overwhelmed and this record gave Sital-Singh a healthy outlet for those energies.

Fool's Spring is the forthcoming album and it's a bit of a surprising but welcome step for a singer so often linked with melancholic songs. There's a higher ceiling on Fool's Spring and Sital-Singh says he was ready to experiment while in his private studio in London. It's his "escapist record" and it's also one of his best.

We recently caught up with Luke Sital-Singh to hear more about balancing the new demands of home, working with Lisa Hannigan on the new LP, and what it was like to escape from time to time.

Analogue: You’ve now got a new baby, family, and home and I’d love to start there. You've been at this for a while, so how is the balance between the career and all the support for a new album you have to do and things at home?

Luke Sital-Singh: I feel like you’re asking me at the precipice of the first wave of seeing how that's going to go. I've been quite blessed to just be at home. He's six months old already, and I’ve mostly been here for it.

This record is coming out, and we’ve been releasing lots of songs from it, but it's all kind of attainable from home pretty much. But I've got these tour dates coming up and that'll be my first stint away. My wife's quite nervous about it, and I'm kind of dreading it a bit. So, yeah, I feel like I don't know how to answer that question yet because it could go either way.

Even when I was younger—and I don’t want to say back when I had more of my moment in the sun—but back on the first record on the major label, lots of radio and all that kind of stuff was happening. Even then, I wasn't out on the road for months on end. I guess I'm not in a rock band.

I know singer-songwriters do tour, but I don't think we kind of live or die on the road in quite the same way. So my road life for my own shows has been two or three weeks max, and then I have done long-distance opening for other people. But over the 10 years I've been doing this, I haven't done that much traveling away from home. Hopefully, I won't change that now. And now the baby's here, you know, I don't suddenly want to become a road dog, although you never know. I might want to escape. Who knows?

Analogue: That makes sense that you’d want to be home more.

Luke: Yeah, I think it’s going to be a bit more conducive for me to be around my family more. And it's funny, especially during COVID and stuff, some of the ways that I kept this thing going was writing songs on Zoom and stuff with people. Some of the more business ends of songwriting and pitching songs for TV shows and films and things like that can all happen from the house. There are little things now in the music world that enable me to be here a bit more, which is a nice thing.

Analogue: I’ve read these quotes from you about walking through some darker spaces and processing them at this time for this album. Has songwriting always been the outlet for you to work through the wrestling, the despair, the whatever?

Luke: I think so, yeah. It’s pretty safe to say, yes, that's been an outlet for working things out. Just from an early age, I'm thinking about my family and the culture of my family, which is very deep and thoughtful. We're always thinking. We’re always talking about our feelings and what's going wrong. We're quite an honest family in that sense. Although I've got two older brothers, and they're not musical. Well, that's not true. My oldest brother does play music, but that's not his career choice.

But we all have this kind of outlet, this need to sort of work through these things and not brush them under the carpet. We want them talked about and expressed. So I think even before music, that was just sort of part of my personality. And then when I found music and songwriting, those things went hand-in-hand for me. So, yeah, it's kind of a natural thing.

Analogue: Can you take us into what was happening in that time that you referenced?

Luke: Well, it took us a long time to get pregnant. So there was this whole thing going on with that while we were in LA. And then it was dawning on us that we would have to move back to really pursue that, which we didn't want to do, if we wanted to start a family. So it was this kind of ripping away of one adventure and one dream of life out there to start this new one here. Both were amazing, but which one was more important? It brought up all these questions.

It was quite a trying time, especially for my wife and I was feeling quite powerless to help. It's quite a hard thing to go through. It’s ended well. You know, we've got the fairytale ending, as it were, but life never really feels like the fairytale ending, even when you kind of get what you want. You just get more problems.

When I get problems, I'm really excited, but we still kind of miss that life out there that we had. It's funny because I reflect on this album and what it sounds like to me anyway, compared with other albums, is that it feels like my happiest album. Musically, there’s more tempo to it and there's more color. But I was in some of the darkest places I've been in. That’s funny to me because I think my shtick before this record was that I was always drawn to sad music. And even when I was feeling sad myself, sad and melancholy music would help me process that sort of thing.

I haven't quite processed exactly why I think this is, but what we were going through during this time was so acute or just had a different flavor to it that sad music was the last thing I wanted to listen to. I was just like, ‘No way, man. I'm too bummed out to even listen to Nick Drake anymore. I need to put on some ‘70s prog or something.’ [Laughs] I think that had a joke about it, but I think that played a big part. It was more of an escapist record for me, faking it as well. And I made this pretty much on my own, which was the first time for me.

Analogue: How was that to work on your own like that?

Luke: I don't even have a distinct memory of making this record. It feels like this happened alongside all this life change—leaving L.A., coming back, getting pregnant, then leaving London again—all these different changes going on and somehow I made this record.

This was the first time I'd had a studio because my studio in London was the first time I'd had somewhere to work outside of my house. I usually just had a little set-up at home, and then I’d go and use other studios and stuff. But I've got this private studio in London. I think I’d just sort of go there to disappear and get a little break from what was going on. I could lose myself in this record.

When I listened to it, it’s quite meticulous. And I don't know how much that comes through, but I've thought about every sound and every moment. I don't know if it was necessarily a good thing that I did that, but I felt like I needed to really go there. I just got obsessive about everything. Nothing was left at the default setting. It was like, ‘How can I make this bit interesting?’ I think I wanted to bury myself in it and escape a little bit of what was going on.

Analogue: I'm curious about the new single, “Santa Fe.” How did you connect with Lisa Hannigan in the first place?

Luke: Oh, man, That takes me back to the very first days of just being on this journey. [Laughs] It’s a weird, long time coming for me because Damien Rice started it all for me. I heard his record and I was just smitten.

I think I was like a metalhead back then. My teenage years, I was into the sort of nu-metal stuff—Slipknot and Korn and all that stuff—with my mates at school.

Then I heard the Damien Rice record on a TV ad and the scales fell from my eyes. I was like, ‘What's this?!’ I’d never really heard acoustic music particularly. I just got obsessed with that record, and Lisa's obviously singing all over that record. Her voice and those two voices together, it was just this beguiling thing. She became this kind of angelic-like person that just didn’t even exist.

I went to see my friends in Villagers, the Irish band, play in London. This was a long time ago. My wife and I knew those guys, so I was backstage walking down the corridor. I was going to say hi and then Lisa came out of the corridor. I’m quite a reserved person, really, but I had to stop and talk to her and say how much of a fan I was. And my wife was like, ‘I've never seen you that nerdy and lame. You were so nervous and such a weird little fanboy.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, my god, I just had to! She means so much to me!’

From there, we connected properly in a musical way at this festival in Amsterdam where we were both on the bill. A mutual friend who set up the festival knew I was a fan. He was setting up these video performances of artists collaborating with each other to do these acoustic sessions around the city. And he was like, ‘Mate, you're going to love me. I've got you doing a song with Lisa.’

I was so scared and nervous, but she appreciated it because we did one of her songs. You can see the video online of me singing her song “Prayer for the Dying” with her. And she was really smitten because she's usually the featured singer on other people's songs. She was like, ‘No one ever sings with me on my songs.’ So she was quite excited to do that.

So we just connected through that, and then when I wrote “Santa Fe,” I just could hear her on it. I thought, ‘She’ll never do it, but I’ve got to ask.’ I just emailed her manager and said, ‘Look, I know it's an ask, but here's this song. It would mean the world to me if she sang on it.’ And she agreed to do it.

It took her a while to get it done. But once it was, she just sent it and I was like, ‘This is mad!’ The 15-year-old version of me would be absolutely losing his shit now. But yeah, that was a good 20 years ago. No, hang on… ten years. Ten years of dreaming to make it come true. Don't give up, kids. Don't give up.

VISIT: Luke Sital-Singh

Photo: Harvey Pearson