Lone Stag and the plaintive descent into "The Werewolf"

 

"I let the moonlight be my guide / I am guilty of awful crimes / I thought I told you to run and hide / I thought I told you to leave my side"

I have to be utterly honest with you, when I pushed play on "The Werewolf" I wasn't all that excited. I mean I was familiar with the enigmatic Lone Stag having featured him before on AP, it's just that I have had my fill of werewolf material just like zombies. The mythology has been squeezed to death for me. But I pushed play anyway with a kind of twisted look on my face, Good news, as I soon had a wry smile on my face. 

Well, the plaintive descent into "The Werewolf", by the mystery man known as Lone Stag, not only gets under your skin, in gentle but imperceptibly deep ways but invades your thoughts after like a mediation.  As with other Lone Stag songs, the song pitches itself against the majority of songs because it leans toward the less is more aesthetic. This reveal is, obviously, produced but it's constructions don't grab you by the shirt collar, they just exist in nuanced ways, the instrumental connections' subtlety is their ultimate strength as is the vocals bathed in a beautifully earnest performance. The core of this track is the textured, tactile acoustic guitar picking, upfront in your ear so intimately that you feel like you are in the front row of an intimate space and when the storytelling rattles out be prepared to be quietly mesmerized. 

"I am a liar, I am a thief

I am the last one you should believe
I am a werewolf out in the woods
I try but it does no good

There’s nothing else to do
I’m only human with you

I let the moonlight be my guide
I am guilty of awful crimes
I thought I told you to run and hide
I thought I told you to leave my side

There’s nothing else to do
I’m only human with you"

As the story unfolds it is clear that the character is one hell of a scoundrel, unhappy and shrouded in his own pain and disdain for others, except for one chosen person. It reminds me that we all wear many masks in life and take off that mask for only a select number of people. 

I don't know much, or more specifically, I don't know anything at all about this UK artist but hope to find out. This is what he shares:

"The Lone Stag who sings is a character. An amalgam. A fiction. He might not be real, but he still finds something to say. He is an outsider, probably born in the wrong place and time, searching for meaning amidst the exigencies of modern life in Scotland. He hopes others will join his herd. If not, he still has his guitar."

Hope you delve into Lone Stag.

-Robb Donker Curtius

THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM 

https://open.spotify.com/artist/3yXTUSktrIeHBElNToIluC

https://www.instagram.com/lone_stag/

https://www.facebook.com/LoneStagMusic/


The Lone Stag who sings is a character. An amalgam. A fiction. He might not be real, but he still finds something to say. He is an outsider, probably born in the wrong place and time, searching for meaning amidst the exigencies of modern life in Scotland. He hopes others will join his herd. If not, he still has his guitar.

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Just trying to make music that I and other folk love as much as I love the music of my heroes - Bonnie Prince Billy, Iron & Wine, Hiss Golden Messenger, Joan Shelley, Jason Molina, Gregory Alan Isakov and myriad others. I will forever reach for that rainbow.

Lone Stag, Scotland, acoustic, folk, folk indie, storyteller, rustic sounds, acoustic folk, vast, romantic, "The Werewolf",