Lord Huron’s Ben Schneider reveals the ghost stories behind fourth album

I’ve never taken to audiobooks, but I’m a sucker for musical narrative. With a fourth album on the way, Lord Huron’s extensive universe of characters and landscapes is due to continue, meaning I need never bother downloading Audible for a free trial. Upon e-meeting the band’s frontman, Ben Schneider, it’s clear that metaphors and alternative perspectives are embedded in his way of thinking.
“Waiting to put a record out is like… I don’t know what it’s like being pregnant, but I feel like it’s like that: where you just can’t wait to get it out in the world and let people meet your creation.”
Through Zoom, I can practically see the storyboards in his mind drafting the experience of a mother to be – admittedly something of a tangent from the dead men and cosmonauts we’ve been introduced to on their previous records. As for Long Lost, the fourth of Lord Huron’s LPs, ghosts return in a setting closer to home than usual.

“I guess the genesis for this record was it started in our studio, Whispering Pines,” Ben explains. “We’ve been working there for the past seven years, did our last three records there – it’s kind of like our clubhouse.

“It’s this great old studio built in the early ’70s; we took it over after it had been abandoned for about 25 years, so it’s filled with all this old outdated gear that we had to strip out and rebuild. It’s a beautiful space.

“We’ve always wondered about who had worked there before us,” he continues. “We found a little information, but there’s not much. So, we started imagining who’d gone through there and created these characters of old showbiz folks who’d come in and out of [the studio], and what they’d done there.

“Then I started writing songs from their perspectives: I find it really useful to create avatars to write songs through, sometimes just as a way to change up my perspective. I always like to start with something that’s personal, but then look at it a different way – through the eyes of a different type of person...

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