MANSION ALBUM SKIN
The talking blues song “Panic Attack” on Strawberry Mansion chronicles one incident without flinching: “Sometimes my skin starts crawling, sometimes the creature’s calling, sometimes the walls start caving in.” He became dependent on the antianxiety medication Xanax, and found himself unable to cope when his supply ran out. “It just became the loudest voice I was hearing,” he says. “I haven’t had a drink in seven and a half years,” he says.īut over time, his struggles with anxiety grew. In 2013, he quit drinking on his own, chronicling it on his 2015 album The Spirit Moves. This isn’t Scolnick’s first bout with addiction. And it coincided with a time that I realized that was something I needed.” Just to slow down, simplify and find some stillness. And then it was forced upon me, and everybody. “But for me, in a deeply personal way, it was almost like I started training for some stillness, a much needed simplification of how I live my life. “When I talk about this, I never want to diminish the tragic situations that so many people are in,” he says, speaking from the home in Tennessee that he shares with his cat, Mr. “It’s been cosmically good for me,” says Scolnick, talking about life during quarantine. He’d been touring steadily for 15 years, then jumped off of what he calls “the hamster wheel on fire” of life on the road and checked into a treatment center for addiction to prescription medication just before the pandemic shutdowns began. Strawberry Mansion’s lively 19 songs, all written in the early months of the pandemic, arrive at a pivotal juncture for the 40-year-old musician. It’s a bountiful, country-and blues-infused folk album that marks an artistic flowering for Slim as he confronts fear and anxiety with melodic grace, earning an honest measure of uplift and optimism. And Strawberry Mansion - whose title comes from the Philadelphia neighborhood where his late grandfathers grew up, in a Jewish community his lyrics locate “down the street from the house of Coltrane” - is no downer, either. It decimated the next street over, but left his home unscathed. Just a week before the pandemic shut down live music everywhere, a twister that killed 25 people in Tennessee ripped through his East Nashville neighborhood. The plague is COVID-19, and the tornado was tragically real, too. Slim, who takes his name from the town where he grew up and whose given name is Sean Scolnick, isn’t just being metaphorical. “Someday the world might come and blow your house down,” the Nashville-by-way-of-Bucks-County musician sings on “Mighty Soul.” “First a tornado, then a plague.” The first words heard on Langhorne Slim’s new album Strawberry Mansion might lead a listener to believe they’re in for a bummer of Biblical proportions.