Nightlife / Music

Audience feedback draws artist to music

By David Burke | Wednesday, August 08, 2007 | () comments

It’s lunchtime at an art studio in New Jersey and Luke Temple is taking a break from painting a mural on canvas — a trompe l’oeil, a French art term meaning “fool the eye” — of a Venetian molded ceiling.

“It’s the illusion that something is real, but when you get up close you realize it’s a painting,” Temple said. “We’re making it to look like an old, molded ceiling.”

Temple, 32, stepped away from a promising art career to concentrate on music. His first album, “Hold a Match For a Gasoline World,” was released to critical acclaim in 2005, and his second, “Snowbeast,” is due out Aug. 21.

Part of the process in either music or art is the same, the Manchester, Mass., native said, but it’s the audience and the ability to change that make the difference.

“It’s more immediately emotive for me,” said Temple, who lives in Brooklyn. “It’s something that is always changing. I can do it in the moment and experience it with people who are listening or musicians where it’s also a communal thing. The song is always going to be changing every time I perform it where a painting is something you work on for a period of time and it’s finished.”

Also, “I like the relationship with an audience more than I did when I was doing visual art. It’s less detached,” he said.

Temple’s music has received acclaim from a variety of places, including singer Surfjan Stevens, to whom he’s frequently compared. “Luke Temple has one of the most beautiful voices in pop music,” Stevens is quoted as saying in Temple’s press material.

A Rolling Stone review said Temple’s debut album was “a collection of songs that even the most jaded anti-folk hipster could catch himself humming on the street.”

Rock Island-based music download Web site Daytrotter.com calls Temple “a fantastic storyteller with an eye for turning those minute details of life into little pieces of music that can then become memorable,” calling “Snowbeast,” which it previewed in January, “the first keeper of 2007.”

Daytrotter is presenting Temple’s concert Tuesday at the Redstone Room in the River Music Experience, Davenport.

Temple said it was a gradual transformation from artist to musician. Although he played the bass in high school, it was strictly during informal jam sessions.

“I was always opposed to any kind of structure with music,” he said. “I wanted it to be completely improvisational always.”

By college, he had taught himself chords on the acoustic guitar, and “it gradually sort of took over without me realizing it,” he said.

Temple was glad for his decision after moving to New York, where he could not afford to rent space for an art studio but could pluck out songs on his guitar.

“I think I always have to be doing something creative,” he said. “I think I wasn’t able to work on my visual art and music kind of gradually took over.”

Since Temple sings in a falsetto, he said he’s been lumped in a category of singers such as Thom Yorke and Jeff Buckley, which, he says, is “an all-too-easy comparison.”

He likes comparisons with the early music of Paul Simon. Just as Simon’s music was influenced by a world sound, Temple’s newest album has a Brazilian undertone to it, he said.

“There’s so many influences that I’m unaware of that infiltrate my music, I’m sure,” he said.

Temple said listeners need to have a “sincere relationship” with “Snowbeast.”

“I hope people listen to it in their cars. I hope it’s a record that connects on an emotional and visual level with people,” he said. “I hope it creates a career that’s sustainable for me. I don’t know if it’ll be the ‘next big thing,’ but it’s a really sustainable endeavor.”

It may not be something fans will immediately embrace, he said. It may have to be heard a few times before full appreciation is gained.

“I think it’s a record that can kind of evolve,” he said. “It has staying power, but people need to have patience with it.

“I’m not as concerned with literal storytelling as I am with creating visual worlds. That’s where the visual part of me comes into play.”

David Burke can be contacted at (563) 383-2400 or dburke@qctimes.com.

if you go

Who: Luke Temple

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 7

Where: Redstone Room, River Music Experience, 129 Main St., Davenport

How much: $5

Information: (563) 326-1333 or RedstoneRoom.com