A Beautiful Struggle

“With this record, I wasn’t trying too hard,” Louris says of his new album, Vagabonds. He wrote the songs as they came to him and recorded them in eight days in a studio in LA, with a band that producer Chris Robinson of The Black Crowes helped pull together. The focus was all on “vibe and inspiration,” not obsession. “At this point in my life I’m not thinking about getting on the radio,” Louris says. “I’m just trying to do something that sounds good to me.”

Vagabonds will sound good to his fans. The instrumentation is spare and tasteful—the choral fills on “She Only Calls Me on Sundays” are particularly stirring—and he gives the songs plenty of room to breathe. Musically, the album isn’t tremendously ambitious—it’s heavy on moody, folk-tinged tunes with lazy, loping tempos—but Louris does stretch his palette a bit, most notably by introducing some Nick Drake–style folk picking on the closer “Meanderings.” There may not be a “Blue” on Vagabonds—that’s a high bar—but there are no obvious clunkers either.

Louris says he’s excited about launching his solo career, although he misses being part of a band: “I’m still learning about that. There are positives and negatives. When you’re a band guy, you know who’s going to play on your record, you know who’s going to be on tour, you have a sound, you have an identity. But you’re also kind of beholden to everybody, and if they feel like they need to make money and go on tour, you feel like you have to go. I don’t want to be as responsible as I used to be.”

He will play dates, though, starting in mid-March. Just don’t expect the T-shirts to list a ton of cities. “I’m not going to be the guy who goes out on the road 280 days a year,” he says—especially not with so much going on at home. Louris has a studio in the basement of his house in Bryn Mawr and has farmed himself out as a producer and writer for hire. He gets plenty of calls, from such artists as the Dixie Chicks, The Sadies, and even from Hollywood (that’s his song during the closing credits of the crossword-documentary Wordplay).

What’s burning up the fan pages these days is the announcement of a new album and tour later in the year with the man he still considers his musical soul mate: Mark Olson. After many years of not speaking to each other—“It was just [long pause] misunderstandings,” Louris says—the two started playing together again in 2005 to see if they still had their chemistry. They did. They got together last year and wrote fourteen songs in five days.

“It happens quickly for us—it’s effortless,” says Louris, who has been enjoying their new collaboration, although he can’t help but wonder what might have been. “Looking back, I wish Mark had stayed in the band,” he muses. “It would have been interesting to see what we would have done.”

But life goes on. He’s learned that. On Vagabonds, Louris sings early in the album about the need to “strip life down to what you believe in.” For him, that’s family, the Twins and Vikes (he’s a KFAN junkie), reading, Spain (he has a getaway in El Puerto de Santa María), and music. That’s it. That’s plenty. “I’m rarely happier than when I write a song,” he says. “Then I think, ‘That’s what I do. I’ve still got it.’ ”

Louris never got the big payoff that he believed was due him, and that used to drive him nuts. But now, he figures he gets to do what he loves on his terms, and occasionally someone will come up to him and stammer something personal. He’ll take that.

He may prefer to be left alone, but Gary Louris is not ready to be forgotten. Not yet.

Adam Wahlberg is the executive editor of Minnesota Law & Politics.