Orchestral noir pop singer-songwriter L.C. Franke has released his debut album, Still in Bloom, today. Easy listening for anxious times, torch songs for a world on fire, orchestral pop for the algorithm age: this is the twilit milieu of L.C. Franke. The album builds a bridge between 20th-century nostalgia and our modern alienation. Across 10 tracks of pure mood-indigo music, inspired by the jazz-club savoir-faire of artists like Frank Sinatra, Scott Walker, and Ella Fitzgerald, Franke’s barstool croon smolders against a backdrop of woodwind trills and string quartet swells. It’s a musical tonic that pairs equally well with gin and general malaise — light on the ears, heavy on the heart.
PURCHASE/STREAM STILL IN BLOOM
The album was originally heralded with the singles “You and Me Against the World,” “You’re Not Alone,” and “Wish the World.” Soaked in exotica and existential disappointment and inspired by the likes of Leonard Cohen, “Wish the World,” was accompanied by a vintage-mystery thriller official music video. Magnet premiered the clip, and in an exclusive quote, Franke said: “I got a Facebook message from Dan Brown, an old acquaintance I hadn’t seen in about 20 years. It said, ‘I love the new music I’m hearing. We should make a video.’ The timing was impeccable, as I’d just been talking about making a video for ‘Wish The World’ — and Dan has a successful production house and a few Emmys. I met him for coffee, and we randomly started talking about films like Sunset Boulevard, D.O.A., and Where The Sidewalk Ends — and how ‘Wish The World’ would make a perfect noir soundtrack. We shot the video over three days around Austin. We worked on the scenes where I get strangled and drowned the most—and I was starting to wonder if that was just for everyone’s entertainment. The real star though is that beautiful ’89 Cadillac Brougham.”
WATCH “WISH THE WORLD” OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO
LISTEN TO “WISH THE WORLD”
LISTEN TO “YOU AND ME AND US AGAINST THE WORLD”
WATCH “YOU AND ME AND US AGAINST THE WORLD” LYRIC VIDEO
WATCH “YOU AND ME AND US AGAINST THE WORLD (LIVE FROM AUSTIN)”
LISTEN TO “YOU’RE NOT ALONE”
In a previous life, L.C. Franke was known as Jeff Klein, an Austin-by-way-of-New York indie rocker who spent the better part of his youth garnering widespread acclaim as a solo artist, as a collaborator with countless other songwriters, and as frontman of the Southern gothic soul outfit My Jerusalem. But by 2017, Franke had hit a wall. Feeling lost and jaded, his mental health teetering, he decided to take a year off and reassess.
That hiatus turned indefinite with the pandemic and Franke found himself suddenly isolated and adrift, unsure whether he would ever get back to who he was. But then he realized, perhaps he didn’t want to. The opportunity for reinvention presented itself when his friend, the Bessie Award-winning dancer Melissa Toogood, asked him to compose the score for her performance with the Boston Ballet. Franke bought a Mellotron and began noodling around with the sounds of flutes, clarinets, and strings.
As he explored, Franke sat down at the piano and wrote “You and Me and Us Against the World,” the song that would become the lodestar for his new musical approach. The music brought him back to his roots – all those Brooklyn and Fort Lauderdale summers spent with his grandmother, Elsie Franke, losing himself in her dusty record collection filled with golden greats like Glen Miller, Blossom Dearie, and Jimmy Durante. In this music of his past, he saw a future. Borrowing inspiration from his grandmother’s records, and paying homage to her with his name, L.C. Franke was born.
“It really made me fall in love with music again,” he says. “I’ve always been sort of sentimental.”
Still In Bloom is the sound of midlife crisis turned spiritual rebirth. Recorded live in the room with an actual orchestra, and completed over just three weekend sessions, the album is both musically rich and emotionally direct. The shimmering “You’re Not Alone” and the slightly sinister “Wish the World” are enthralling, smoke-gets-in-your-eyes songs, rendered as sharp as a custom-cut suit, evoking lonely subway rides past abandoned automats, and those halcyon days before the Brill Building housed a CVS. The album finds its bruised thematic heart on its title track, “Still In Bloom,” where a pensive piano melody and wintry strings provide the stripped-down bed for Franke’s late-night ruminations on the everyday struggle to find resilience amid the ruins.
After making his live debut as part of Austin City Limits Music Festival’s 2023 ACL Nights, Franke has gone on to support such diverse artists as The Walkmen and The Wallflowers, earning applause and attention for his visionary approach to the music of the past. Becoming L.C. Franke has proven the gateway for this gifted artist to finding his truest self, allowing him to hang up the well-worn rocker persona and let the sophisticated songsmith that was always within him move at last to center stage.
“I take out the contacts, put on the glasses, and it’s like a reverse Clark Kent,” says L.C. Franke.
L.C. Franke & The Best Little Orchestra in Texas will perform at Pangea in New York City on July 25 at 7pm and The State Theatre in Austin, TX, on August 3.
CONNECT WITH L.C. FRANKE:
