Music / Lord Huron

I had a vision tonight that the world was ending
Yeah, the sky was falling and time was bending

"To the ends of the Earth, won't you follow me?"

Lord Huron is a Los Angeles-based indie folk band consisting of Ben Schneider (Lead vocals, guitar), Mark Barry (Percussion, vocals), Miguel Briseño (Bass, keys, percussion), and Tom Renaud (Guitar, vocals). Originally, the band was a solo project by Schneider, who released the first few EPs on his own in 2010. Other members of the band joined later to help play live shows. The band has since released four albums: Lonesome Dreams in 2012, Strange Trails in 2015, Vide Noir in 2018 and Long Lost in 2021.

With the release of Lonesome Dreams, the band began releasing a series of music videos, each in a '70s Western style and forming a sort of narrative for the album. “We had this fun idea that Lonesome Dreams was kind of this series of old adventure tales. It's sort of a collection of pulp fiction and we wanted the videos to kind of reflect that and have that same feel and style,” Schneider said in an interview. This same music video style would be carried over and used again for Strange Trails.

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Band members:

• Ben Schneider - Lead vocals, guitar
• Mark Barry - Percussion, vocals
• Miguel Briseño - Bass, keys, percussion
• Tom Renaud - Guitar, vocals

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Discography:

• Into the Sun EP (2010)
• Mighty EP (2010)
• Time to Run EP (2012)
• Lonesome Dreams (2012)
• Strange Trails (2015)
• Vide Noir (2018)
• Long Lost (2021)

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I've been troping high and low:

• Album Title Drop: Strange Trails lacks a Title Track, but the title does pop up in "Way Out There" (and "Cursed" has a singular "strange trail", which is close enough).
• Back from the Dead:
  • The song "Dead Man's Hand" is about a corpse that simply gets up and walks away into the desert.
    I laid him down in a grave in the sand
    And he grabbed my arm with his dead man's hand
    He said: "I know I'm dead but I don't wanna lie
    In a grave out here where the coyotes cry
    I stared right into the endless void
    And I ain't going back if I got any choice
    I know how to live, I don't know how to die
    And there ain't no thrills in the afterlife.
  • "The World Ender" is written from the perspective of a character who has returned from death to avenge their own apparent murder.
• Belated Happy Ending: A possible example occurs in their "Strange Trails" album. The narrator of "Fool for Love" seems to die at the end of his song, but he's also the narrator of the later song "Louisa" which implies that he actually lived.
• Berserker: The protagonist of "World Ender" has been murdered alongside their wife and daughter, and their home has been burnt to the ground. When he rises from the dead, he's seething with rage and thirsts for unrestrained bloodshed.
  Sent back for to lift my curse
  I'm gonna get me a taste of some chaos first
  Untied, gonna get little wild
  Go screaming through the dark like a demon child
  Close your eyes now, the light is fading
  And the noise in the night is gonna get a little louder, baby
• Big Guy: Big Jim from "Fool for Love", described as "tall as hell and broad as a train".
• Concept Album:
  • Both Lonesome Dreams and Strange Trails form a series of adventure/romance narratives that share the same setting; all of the songs are based on the novels of a fictional writer named George Ranger Johnson.
  • Vide Noir is, in the words of Schneider, "an epic odyssey through the city, across dimensions, and out into the cosmos".
• Dark World: "Meet Me in the Woods".
• Don't Go in the Woods: "Meet Me in the Woods" is sung by someone who went into the Woods and returned changed, describing it as an endless night with things that he doesn't have words to describe. When he comes back, only days have passed after what "feels like ages".
  • Also shows up as a theme in The Yawning Grave from the same album
  I tried to warn you when you were a child
  I told you not to get lost in the wild
• Duel to the Death: "Fool for Love".
• Eldritch Abomination: Whatever dark force the singer encountered prior to "Meet Me in the Woods" is described to be beyond earthly comprehension.
• The End of the World as We Know It: "Until the Night Turns".
• Epic Rocking: "Time's Blur" from Long Lost is by far their longest song, clocking in at over fourteen minutes.
• Fading into the Next Song: All over Strange Trails and occasionally over Long Lost.
• Fool for Love: the protagonist of the song by the same title.
• God Is Evil: Downplayed. The Balancer isn't purely evil, but it doesn't care about humans all too much:
  Nothing’s waiting for us in the great sky
  Life is equal to dust in the balancer’s eye
• Go Mad from the Revelation: The subtext of "Meet Me in the Woods". The song describes someone who has encountered a force beyond human understanding that lingers in their mind, and is trying to communicate what they've seen to the only person they trust to listen, their lover.
• Gratuitous French: Vide Noir is French for "Black Void". The outro of "Mine Forever" is also spoken in French.
• If I Can't Have You…: Said verbatim in "Love Like Ghosts".
  There ain't a language for the things I feel
  And if I can't have you then no one ever will
  Oh, if I can't have you then no one ever will
• Longest Song Goes Last: "Time's Blur" closes Long Lost as a fourteen-minute instrumental.
• Love Nostalgia Song: "The Night We Met", used fittingly in 13 Reasons Why.
  I had all and then most of you, some and now none of you
  Take me back to the night we met
  I don't know what I'm supposed to do, haunted by the ghost of you
  Oh take me back to the night we met
• Love Triangle: "Fool for Love".
• Lyrical Dissonance: common to their songs.
  • The upbeat "Fool for Love" describes the thoughts of a man as he loses a fight for the hand of his intended bride and then almost freezes to death on the cold winter ground.
  • Not only has the protagonist of the cheerful, fast-paced "Meet Me in the Woods" been overpowered and corrupted by the forces of darkness, he's willing to lead his lover into the "endless night" as well.
  • "Until the Night Turns" is a happy song about the end of the world.
• Miniscule Rocking: Three of the interludes from Long Lost are shorter than thirty seconds.
• Not Himself: "Meet Me in the Woods".
  I have seen what the darkness does (say goodbye to who I was)
• Nothing Is Scarier: The singer in "Meet Me in the woods" never actually describes what it was he encountered, only calling it a "darkness", an "endless night", and proclaiming it to be stranger than in his worst dreams.
• One-Man Song: "Hurricane (Johnnie's Theme)" and "Louisa".
• One-Word Title: "Cursed", "Louisa", "Moonbeam", "Lullaby", "Brother".
• Place Beyond Time: "the unknown" in "Meet Me in the Woods".
• Recycled Lyrics: "Meet Me in the Woods" and "Love Like Ghosts" (both off Strange Trails) share the melody and some of the lyrics ("There ain't a language for the things I feel").
• Shout-Out: Their studio, Whispering Pines, is modeled after the Red Room from Twin Peaks.
• Snow Means Death: "Fool for Love".
  I lie in the drifting snow
  Bleeding out as it covers me up
• Title Track: Lonesome Dreams, Vide Noir and Long Lost both have one.
• Wanderlust Song: "Ends of the Earth".
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: The titular woods of "Meet Me in the Woods" seem to have this effect, as when the singer asks how long he has been away, he's told it's been only a few days, but it felt like ages to him.

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