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STEVE SLAGG
I Don’t Want to Get Adjusted to This World (s/r)
Add date: 9.20.2024
Release date: 8.30.2024
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Rural Missouri–born, Chicago-based singer-songwriter Steve Slagg has been releasing music since 2011, a body of work that zigs and zags stylistically, guided by his collaborations within the Chicago DIY scene and his playfully curious explorations into spirituality, queerness and nature. Despite their diversity, his songs are anchored by a distinctive songwriting voice: they're earthy yet mystical, cynical yet hopeful, conversational yet poetic, and painstakingly honest, except when they’re not. As a fellow songwriter once put it, “Steve, your songs are full of poison. But also the only known antidote to that poison.”
His third album, I Don’t Want to Get Adjusted to This World, has been featured on WBEZ’s Reset with Sasha-Ann Simons and Prairie Public’s Great American Folk Show. Slagg self-produced the album, recruiting Chicago power pop band Mooner (of which Slagg is also a member) to serve as his band and co-producers, with long-time engineer Dorian Gehring (Finom, Chicago’s Cosmic Country Showcase) co-producing, engineering, and mixing. Overdubs came from Chicago and beyond, including alt-country guitarist John Gargiulo (Contorno), experimental woodwind player Eric Novak (The Curls, Dissonant Dessert), Los Angeles composer and brass player Aaron Esposito (Son Lux, Knives Out OST), and Slagg’s mentor, Massachusetts singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Erin McKeown (The Mountain Goats, Miss You Like Hell). Together they crafted lush, jangly Americana that occasionally collapses into angular noise and ambient sound, all while keeping Slagg’s voice front and center.
Track 1, “The Newest Soil,” opens with the couplet, “I spread my father’s ashes in the winter / With my brothers and my sister.” Steve has written about his father’s death as long as he’s written songs (see All Saints’ Day’s “Long Year” or Strange Flesh’s “A Thousand Tongues”). But instead of exploring grief, metaphysics, or history, this song is really preoccupied with cremains. Slagg started the song in 2009 on the farm in the Ozarks where it became a true story, but it took over ten years to finish. The ashes belonged to a man who put his hope in Heaven. The song, like his body, stays on earth.
Set in a real valley in Utah, “Fruita” is a cinematic pop song about being gay in the great outdoors, orchestrated to be pretty as a vintage national park postcard, with twangy guitars and pastoral brass. “Got back to the garden / Wasn’t quite the same / For one, it had me in it,” Slagg and McKeown sing in duet. The song’s inclusions, exclusions, and re-inclusions might sound familiar to any queer person who has received targeted corporate #Pride ads. But in this song, the in-group has been edited out entirely. The singers notice they have the whole place—the whole outside—to themselves, and they burst out in song.
Mooner (drummer David Bedell, bassist Nick Harris, and guitarist Lee Ketch) really gets to flex its power pop chops on “Heaven (Yet),” whose breezy on-the-road-again shuffle describes a weekend escape into nature that doesn’t get quite far enough from urban sprawl. You can feel the band straining so hard to stay chill in the first half, just like the song’s narrators, who want to go feral but keep remembering their responsibilities: “In the morning we should take our clothes off / in the morning we should call the landlord.”
“Alleluia Again” seeks queer joy in ancient Christian cosmology. Creation in this telling is sexy and contradictory, slippery and witchy, and real Midwestern: “My man’s a fiddlehead fern! / My woman is a joe-pye-weed!” The song itself shape-shifts from a nature-girl folk to Stones-y glam, finally settling into an apocalyptic, art rock fantasia that interpolates lyrics from a Sacred Harp hymn about being “born to die” and seeing “the flaming skies.”
Slagg’s seen a lot from both sides now: Chicago’s evolving DIY scene, his own spirituality, and three and a half decades of progress and setbacks for LGBT people and the environment. The album’s name is lifted from a traditional country gospel song, notably recorded by Iris DeMent, who gets a name drop in the title track, alongside Roseanne Cash, another of Slagg’s guiding lights. Like them, Slagg strives in these songs for mysticism yet holds onto the world for dear life, because it’s too beautiful and too real to escape.
Apple Music
Bandcamp
Official Website
Spotify
Tidal
Rural Missouri–born, Chicago-based singer-songwriter Steve Slagg has been releasing music since 2011, a body of work that zigs and zags stylistically, guided by his collaborations within the Chicago DIY scene and his playfully curious explorations into spirituality, queerness and nature. Despite their diversity, his songs are anchored by a distinctive songwriting voice: they're earthy yet mystical, cynical yet hopeful, conversational yet poetic, and painstakingly honest, except when they’re not. As a fellow songwriter once put it, “Steve, your songs are full of poison. But also the only known antidote to that poison.”
His third album, I Don’t Want to Get Adjusted to This World, has been featured on WBEZ’s Reset with Sasha-Ann Simons and Prairie Public’s Great American Folk Show. Slagg self-produced the album, recruiting Chicago power pop band Mooner (of which Slagg is also a member) to serve as his band and co-producers, with long-time engineer Dorian Gehring (Finom, Chicago’s Cosmic Country Showcase) co-producing, engineering, and mixing. Overdubs came from Chicago and beyond, including alt-country guitarist John Gargiulo (Contorno), experimental woodwind player Eric Novak (The Curls, Dissonant Dessert), Los Angeles composer and brass player Aaron Esposito (Son Lux, Knives Out OST), and Slagg’s mentor, Massachusetts singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Erin McKeown (The Mountain Goats, Miss You Like Hell). Together they crafted lush, jangly Americana that occasionally collapses into angular noise and ambient sound, all while keeping Slagg’s voice front and center.
Track 1, “The Newest Soil,” opens with the couplet, “I spread my father’s ashes in the winter / With my brothers and my sister.” Steve has written about his father’s death as long as he’s written songs (see All Saints’ Day’s “Long Year” or Strange Flesh’s “A Thousand Tongues”). But instead of exploring grief, metaphysics, or history, this song is really preoccupied with cremains. Slagg started the song in 2009 on the farm in the Ozarks where it became a true story, but it took over ten years to finish. The ashes belonged to a man who put his hope in Heaven. The song, like his body, stays on earth.
Set in a real valley in Utah, “Fruita” is a cinematic pop song about being gay in the great outdoors, orchestrated to be pretty as a vintage national park postcard, with twangy guitars and pastoral brass. “Got back to the garden / Wasn’t quite the same / For one, it had me in it,” Slagg and McKeown sing in duet. The song’s inclusions, exclusions, and re-inclusions might sound familiar to any queer person who has received targeted corporate #Pride ads. But in this song, the in-group has been edited out entirely. The singers notice they have the whole place—the whole outside—to themselves, and they burst out in song.
Mooner (drummer David Bedell, bassist Nick Harris, and guitarist Lee Ketch) really gets to flex its power pop chops on “Heaven (Yet),” whose breezy on-the-road-again shuffle describes a weekend escape into nature that doesn’t get quite far enough from urban sprawl. You can feel the band straining so hard to stay chill in the first half, just like the song’s narrators, who want to go feral but keep remembering their responsibilities: “In the morning we should take our clothes off / in the morning we should call the landlord.”
“Alleluia Again” seeks queer joy in ancient Christian cosmology. Creation in this telling is sexy and contradictory, slippery and witchy, and real Midwestern: “My man’s a fiddlehead fern! / My woman is a joe-pye-weed!” The song itself shape-shifts from a nature-girl folk to Stones-y glam, finally settling into an apocalyptic, art rock fantasia that interpolates lyrics from a Sacred Harp hymn about being “born to die” and seeing “the flaming skies.”
Slagg’s seen a lot from both sides now: Chicago’s evolving DIY scene, his own spirituality, and three and a half decades of progress and setbacks for LGBT people and the environment. The album’s name is lifted from a traditional country gospel song, notably recorded by Iris DeMent, who gets a name drop in the title track, alongside Roseanne Cash, another of Slagg’s guiding lights. Like them, Slagg strives in these songs for mysticism yet holds onto the world for dear life, because it’s too beautiful and too real to escape.