Charles Crossingham and Stuart McLamb, best known for The Love Language, have released a record full of polished, hook-filled songs.
by David Menconi
Years in the making, Fancy Gap’s self-titled first album took massive amounts of painstaking effort to pull together. And when the duo of Charles Crossingham and Stuart McLamb were in the latter stages of tweaking the sounds, an unlikely point of comparison emerged: the grueling lengths that director George Lucas had gone to in making the first Star Wars movie.
“Stu would ask me if it was done yet,” Crossingham remembers. “And I’d say, Almost, but the lightsabers don’t look cool enough yet. I mean, you can’t release Star Wars unless you have perfect lightsabers that sparkle and shine.”
All that detail work definitely paid off, because the 10 songs on Fancy Gap (Ghost Choir Records) are buffed so fine they practically glisten. The hooks are gargantuan, with vibes landing somewhere between Americana and pure pop — a twangier version of McLamb’s previous group, The Love Language, with hints of everyone from Fleetwood Mac to Glen Campbell.
While The Love Language is now a well-known band, it started out as the working title for McLamb’s solo project. After parting ways with the local band The Capulets, as well as his girlfriend, in 2006, McLamb retreated to his parents’ house in Cary to figure out his next move. Feeling bereft, he wrote songs for solace and began recording them alone — obsessively magnificent torch songs, in versions that were both low-fidelity and operatic. Keyed around McLamb’s epic wail, they were stunning.
McLamb put some of these recordings online via MySpace, and they picked up enough attention that show offers started coming in, even though he didn’t have a band to perform with. Hastily assembling musicians for live shows, McLamb released his solo recordings as the group’s self-titled 2009 debut album.
Love Language members came and went over the next decade, with McLamb the sole constant member. But no matter his collaborators, the results were consistently brilliant across four albums.
Work was underway on what was to be the fifth Love Language album when the coronavirus pandemic shut everything down. Unable to record or play live, the band fell apart. But McLamb and Crossingham, who had been producing the Love Language sessions, kept working as a duo, playing most of the music themselves. Retreating to Crossingham’s cabin in the rural environs of Fancy Gap, Virginia, they crafted songs that turned out more polished and rootsy than Love Language.
“Charles started bringing in what he called cheeseburgers,” says McLamb. “An opening lyric, a title, a central riff. I don’t know the science of it, but it always seemed to work and we rarely hit any walls musically.”
As work progressed, McLamb and Crossingham enlisted other musicians to contribute. Adam Lazzara from the platinum-selling band Taking Back Sunday and singer/actress Sharon Van Etten both sang choice cameo vocals. And for added musical ambience, they turned to pedal-steel guitarist Jon Graboff (who has played with everyone from Willie Nelson to Cyndi Lauper) and Foo Fighters keyboardist Rami Jaffee.
“The luck of the pandemic,” Crossingham says with a laugh. “Everyone’s schedule was open, and they were bored. Pedal steel and Hammond B3 organ are drony, textural instruments that add so much liveliness. Jon and Rami were the secret sauce, floating through the sound like a bird in the sky above or an orca underwater below. They didn’t compete with the economy of noise going on with Stu’s voice.”
For live shows, including this month’s Hopscotch Music Festival, they’ve put together an all-star band of locals: ex-Ben Folds Five bassist Robert Sledge, Backsliders guitarist Steve Howell, The Old Ceremony keyboardist Mark Simonsen and well-traveled drummer Nick Baglio. And while The Love Language never officially broke up and might ride again someday, Fancy Gap is very much McLamb’s focus right now.
“Never say never,” McLamb says, “but I feel like another Fancy Gap record is more on the horizon than another Love Language album. That’s where all cylinders are firing nowadays.”
One difference between the two bands is perspective. Compared to the desperation McLamb evoked in The Love Language, Fancy Gap is downright modest. “When the world starts over,” he sings in the album-opening first single “How To Dance,” “I just wanna be in the band.”
There have been times in the past, McLamb acknowledges, when he leaned a little too heavily on real-life drama to fuel songwriting inspiration. But he’s married nowadays, in a better place emotionally than he was for many of The Love Language years.
“Life experiences inform good songs, and there’s always a tinge of that,” McLamb says. “It’s hard for me to write a completely happy song because life’s not one-dimensional. Hope, bitterness and excitement are always creeping into what I’m writing. But I don’t believe I have to suffer for it anymore. I can take pain and translate it into music without feeling like I have to fit drama into my life.”
This article originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of WALTER magazine.
