The debut album by Brooklyn’s own Luke Roberts is an intimate and immediate experience. Songs about running, stumbling, falling, crashing, crying, spitting, fighting, sleeping, dancing, healing, bruising, the butterfly, crawling, creeping, building, flying, fording, gargling, just starting out, homecoming, claiming, calling, bridges, tunnels, planets, and the sun and money. Essentially they are just gifts for Luke’s loved ones. Luke says it best: “They are poems that I didn’t feel comfortable not reciting before I go.”

You can watch the video for “Unspotted Clothes” and stream the track here:

http://vimeo.com/15286128

http://soundcloud.com/thrilljockey/luke-roberts-unspotted-clothes/

01. Somewhere to Run

02. Anyway

03. All American

04. Just Do It Blues

05. Epcot Women

06. Unspotted Clothes

07. Coo Coo Bird

08. You’ll Walk Away

09. Dime Song

The cover photos is a freight train pulling out of a carbon mill at a place called Devil’s Peak, in Utah. Trains and Luke go way back.

“I’m from East Nashville. My dad tried to move us up to the mountains where he was from in West North Carolina, but abandoned us out there in this cabin when my mom was pregnant with her third child and so the church we were members of in Nashville came out and brought us back. There was a lot of singing and dancing at the church. My mom took me to contra dances and square dances too. I wanted to be a dancer. My mom enrolled me in a saxophone class.

I roamed around East Nashville with hard kids, always in the creeks and on the train tracks. We were always out there in these little jungles by the train tracks. Trains would go by and I fell in love with them. They would sometimes stop in front of us and I started to dare myself to get on them. We would sometimes walk 15 miles on the train tracks to go to the Rivergate Skating Rink. Between the track and the creeks you could get anywhere. When I was twelve me and a boy named John Roberts ran away. We slept in Shelby Park, stole peanut butter crackers and Dr. Pepper from an Exxon, and when we got to the train tracks, where we’d built a fort, there was a train stopped in front of us and we decided to get on. There weren’t any boxcars, we were just kind of hanging off in between on these big metal things. It took off and it didn’t stop for hours and hours till the sun went down. I had started to fall asleep and woke up as we were going over this high bridge and I was just hanging there on this big bumpy dangerous train.”

Luke is gathering a live band for future shows that will include, among others, Stephen Tanner from Harvey Milk and Allison Busch from Awesome Color.