Slim Pickings? Not on This Langhorne's List!

June 05, 2008 - M.J. Fine, Jewish Exponent Feature

When I was growing up, Langhorne meant just two things to me, and they put me in vastly different moods. One was Sesame Place, a beloved summer destination that brought together a few of my favorite diversions: roller coasters, water slides and "Sesame Street." The other was my first-grade teacher, who would probably be appalled that a quarter-century after she finished with me, I can recall her hometown but still struggle with telling time on an analog clock.

Now I can add to the list Langhorne Slim, a singer-songwriter who's making a name for himself. And I'll bet his show is more like a theme park than a classroom. See for yourself when he entertains at World Café Live this weekend.

Sean Scolnick came up with the tongue-in-cheek appellation when he left Bucks County to attend college in New York. Nearly 10 years later, the Brooklyn transplant answers to the name on and off stage.

"Some friends will call me Langhorne, and some people call me Sean," he quips. "And some people call me things that wouldn't end up running in the Jewish Exponent."

In middle school, well before he played music with anyone, young Sean would draw pictures of bands. Part of the appeal was shaping his own identity.

"For the record, I think that a self-given nickname is still a real name," he says.

By the time he picked up a guitar when he was about 14, he was hungry for a creative outlet for his teenage rebellion.

"I had been just writing little stories and poetry and stuff like that, like a lot of kids," he recalls on the phone from eastern Oregon. "And [at that time] my mother co-owned [a] cheese shop in Jenkintown, and one of the people that she worked with had given her an old guitar. It had no strings on it and it was pretty busted up, and I came home one day from school and I said, 'Can you fix this guitar for me?' And she was wonderful enough to do it."

Then a cousin taught him a few songs, and things snowballed from there. Langhorne built his confidence and made professional connections at open-mike nights in Brooklyn that led to 2005's "When the Sun's Gone Down." Disappointment struck when his label, V2, went bust before it could release the follow-up record, but he quickly bounced back.

Plugged-In 'Love Letter'

His song "Electric Love Letter" appeared in last year's quirky romantic comedy "Waitress," and in April he released a rollicking self-titled album on Kemado Records.

When I catch up with him, he's at a casino in eastern Oregon. He and his band, The War Eagles, are more than halfway through a monthlong, 20-state tour, and they'd spent the previous night celebrating bassist Paul Defiglia's birthday. Langhorne graciously spares a few moments to talk before they begin their long drive to Salt Lake City.

Four years after teaming up with Defiglia and drummer Malachi DeLorenzo, Langhorne is pleased with how their first headlining tour has turned out.

"We've always opened up for other bands, which has been great," he says, "but for us to be able to be the headlining band, we've been very pleasantly surprised at how many people have been coming out to the shows. It's been really special so far."

Touring offers many fun distractions, in contrast to holing up in rural Maine to work at Sam Kassirer's home studio. Kassirer, who plays piano, organ, accordion and percussion on the record, had gone to school with Defiglia and knew Langhorne through the ill-fated V2 label. The intricate webs of their acquaintance only strengthened the connection. So did being in the middle of nowhere.

"It was very comfortable," says Langhorne. "Not very many, if any, distractions. There's nothing really to do out there other than, you know, go to the Wal-Mart, and see if they have a ping-pong table or write and record the record. And they didn't have a ping-pong table."

Recorded in eight or nine days, the album has gotten a warm reception from Entertainment Weekly and David Letterman, but Langhorne takes it in stride. He's not shocked when people get what he does, and he's not shocked when they don't.

"I think the beautiful thing about music is how it touches people in different ways," he says. "Some people will love it, and some people will not like it."