The Love Language, initiated by Stuart McLamb, is a fortunate by-product of the North Carolina native’s rudderless mid-20s, where a tempest of breakup, inebriation, and incarceration found the abandoned songwriter embarking on a storage-space recording project to slow his seeming disintegration. The growing body of emotional fight songs, committed to MP3 with a high-school era multitrack recorder, became postcards from exile, a way to let his friends and former flames know he was getting along, battered but not beaten.
“The Love Language was never intended to be a band,” explains McLamb from a borrowed porch in Durham County. “Those songs were never intended to be for anyone except my ex-girlfriend. That was my outlet, and at one point, it caught fire.” The self-immolating beauty of the budget correspondences was exhausting and triumphant; McLamb’s dalliances with rejection and redemption would be minted in a self-titled debut on Portland independent label Bladen ...[more]