Meet Lutalo, the indie-rocker telling reflective, powerful stories from childhood
On their superb debut album ‘The Academy’, Lutalo Jones shows a knack for connecting past and present with an open and honest viewpoint.
Lutalo Jones’ debut album, The Academy, is named after the Minnesota school the now-Vermont-based musician was educated at. The same school also hosted F. Scott Fitzgerald for a time in the 1900s, and provides the conceptual backdrop for a debut album that mines Jones’ childhood in search of pearls of wisdom and connections to draw with the 24-year-old’s adult life.
Across the album, Jones uses beautiful and sparse indie rock sonics to flesh out stories of their post-financial crash homelessness, mental health issues in their family and how your childhood will always stay with you. They are stories told via superbly constructed songs, and delivered with a unique and laid-back voice.
“I started writing some of the songs, and then I started really looking at the big picture, and working out the trajectory and story I wanted to tell throughout this project in general,” Jones tells Rolling Stone UK. “I’ve always liked sagas and trilogies and how they can all connect with an arc. I approached it from that angle and I had some songs that just happened to be reflecting on my past. It felt like a natural beginning, and happened to align with all of the creative and visual ideas that I wanted to pursue as well.”
Watch Lutalo’s video for new single ‘Oh Well’ and read our Play Next interview below.
Tell us about your time at The Academy and how it shaped your life.
The idea of calling it The Academy was for it to [represent] ‘the academy of life’. Everything leading up to this point was a lesson for me to help inform how I choose to go forward in my life. Even when I wasn’t getting good grades at school, I was applying the information that was given to me to my life, and it ended up becoming a valuable trait for how I engage with my art and the world around me. Since I wasn’t getting the best grades, I assumed that I was just bad at learning. With reflection, I feel that I’m not – the learning structure just didn’t work for me. I came to understand and respect that and just take what I could get from it. That’s why I feel like it was such an important thing and why I wanted to focus on it for my album.
I definitely spent more time at that school than at home. Not because it was a boarding school… some people keep saying that for some reason! It was just that my dad would work late and I would end up staying at school for a long time. I moved quite a few times within those 13 years, so the only consistent thing was my school and my best friend’s house.
You and your best friend, both from low-income families, attended the school on scholarships – did that change how you approached the education and what you wanted to achieve from it?
Even though I’m an artist, I still fell for the concept of the American dream, and the idea that if you work hard, you too can make it. That’s not going to stop me from continuing to dedicate myself to my craft, but we both had that same feeling going to that school. We both reflected on the fact that we were given this opportunity to break out of our family’s history of not having money.
He went down the path of following those cultural rules and that mindset of business and playing into the system as much as possible; I was raised to do pretty much the opposite. I felt like it was a great subject [for the album] because we both had similar upbringings, but we both approached wanting the same goal – some form of success that our parents wanted for us, a better future, better living situation – in two very opposite ways. I see what he’s doing, and I’m like, ‘Okay, fair enough, that’s what you got to do’. And he looks at what I’m doing, and he’s like, ‘Yeah, fair enough, you can do it.’
How did thinking about your past manifest itself in the lyrics of the album?
There were moments where I was just having a really shit day, and I was thinking about existence and just being a living fucking person, and from there thinking about how my youth informs the decisions that I make now. That’s something that I’m definitely coming to terms with and really having to reflect on.
You spoke of your love for sagas and trilogies – if this is the beginning, do you know what the middle and end are yet, or is the discovery along the way the most exciting part?
A bit of both! That’s my practice and how I approach my artistry. I have an intention but know that I can’t predict what I’ll turn into or how it will sound. I have colours and feelings that I chase after – I pick a colour for each project that I make, before the music’s even been written, and then I make the music that ideally fits within that colour spectrum so that I get a consistent feeling, I’m chasing a strong emotion and feeling with some technical aspects, I analyse music all the time, but creating something that is both intricate and emotionally evoking can be kind of hard.
What is the colour that you used as the base for The Academy?
The colour that I was really inspired by was a nice warm-ish brown. I associate the colour purple a lot with an ethereal kind of feeling, so there was a dark purple that was swirled in there as well. I was just like, ‘Let’s make sure it feels raw’. The idea was that there’s a tension between the ethereal realm and an earthly tether. Every song had to have something that was very grounding to it, but also something that made it feel almost mystical and otherworldly as well.
Were there insights you gleaned into your current life from this process of writing, and are you thankful for that?
That was kind of the point. I was looking back and reflecting on how I perceived things at that time, and I look back at those moments [now, and think], ‘That’s really funny that I thought of things that way’. Then I realised that I still carry that thought process. It might seem subtle, but in certain elements of my life, I realised that maybe I haven’t changed as much as I thought I did since I was a kid. It’s just shifted in how I engage with reacting to things. The whole point was to at least acknowledge that. I’ve grown and I’ve matured in a lot of ways, but the ways I think that I matured were survival mechanisms so that I could be able to get through life without being fully mentally broken.