A call awoke my cell phone early on the morning of August 7th as it was still plugged in for a charge. Luke Temple, who was flying into Rock Island special for a session and a show that night, before flying back home first thing the next morning, was in Chicago, but he was stuck. Weather had cancelled all flights out of Chicago to Moline that day. He said he’d rent a car, but he didn’t have a driver’s license. We faced a predicament. Luckily, there was another morning flight touching into Cedar Rapids, Iowa – an hour and a half from the Quad-Cities. I rounded up some road tunes – the new Magnolia Electric Company box Sojouner and the Avett Brothers kick ass disc – and hit the road to pick him up. The drive’s a short and open one, giving you a great view of the strength of the nation’s proudest corn crop along Interstate 80. Temple’s plane was on time and he walked from the terminal with a backpack and his guitar, not quite haggard, but weary of the travel. He’d been up since 4 o’clock in the morning for the flight out of New York, but insomnia kept him up the other hours of the night when he should have been sleeping. The depravity would hit him later in the afternoon as a slobbering humid day shut us all up. Our pores dripped with quickly escaping sweat, but the conversation was good for strangers. It can be contended that after listening to his latest album Snowbeast dozens of times that the man isn’t a total stranger, but we still can’t get him. We got to the studio just after Smoosh had arrived at the studio – Temple would be the second of three sessions this afternoon, the third being Smoosh tour mates Aqueduct. Temple and I took a walk for some smokes and then he rested on the lounge’s couch as Smoosh played in the room next door. When he played, the long day was getting to him and the best attribute of the tiredness thread itself through the songs. At the end of the recording day, we went home, where Temple passed out to the hum of a window air conditioning unit for an hour before his performance here in town. After the show, we hit a German pub for a short nightcap. We discussed spiders and heard a bashful old man bust out a four-octave performance of a train whistle that blew us away at the open mic. Then he slept and we got him to the airport in the morning. – Sean Moeller

First song
Owl Song (Luke Temple) [2.49MB] [1791 downloads]


– original version appears on Snowbeast

Third song
Medicine (Luke Temple) [2.07MB] [1566 downloads]


– original version appears on Snowbeast