ALBUM BY ALBUM

The man who invented ‘folkcore’ picks highlights from his time with Dinosaur Jr and many others

“I felt so intimidated”: DinosaurJr,October 1987 – (l–r) J Mascis, Murph,LouBarlow

LOU BARLOW contains multitudes. He began his musical journey as a member of Boston’s teenage hardcore band Deep Wound with J Mascis, with whom he then went on to form Dinosaur Jr. Leaving the band after three albums following a bust-up with Mascis, Barlow devised lo-fi home recording projects Sentridoh and Sebadoh, until the latter evolved into an influential ’90s indie-rock band. A modest and self-deprecating character, Barlow says acclaim came as a surprise. “I’ve never felt like people really wanted Sebadoh,” he says. “It was kind of like we forced the issue.”

At the peak of Sebadoh’s success, he formed alt.folk duo The Folk Implosion, who briefly flirted with the Top 40, before finally releasing records under his own name. Ahead of a new Folk Implosion album, Walk Thru Me – the band’s first in 21 years. Barlow suggests his varied career spanning indie, hardcore, folk, lo-fi and alt.rock has been a lifelong pursuit of “always wanting everything” like his hero Neil Young. Along the way he has set out to “push the boundaries of acoustic music”, even coining a genre that he calls folkcore. This merging of the tenderness and vulnerability of open-hearted acoustic music with the primal, raw, instinctual charge of noise has come to define Barlow’s life in bands, as a solo artist and in Dinosaur Jr, whom he rejoined in the mid-2000s.

“I didn’t in my wildest dreams ever think I would be in a band that could be considered something approaching a classic rock band,” he says of the group’s pedigree. “But I love that.”

DANIEL DYLAN WRAY

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UNCUT CLASSIC

DINOSAUR JR YOU’RE LIVING ALL OVER ME

SST, 1987

The alt.rock heroes’ second album. A rare moment of harmony, togetherness and powerhouse songs creates something blistering and unique

BARLOW: We had done the first record [Dinosaur] and played these shows, but we were still feeling our way. We had amazing songs, but I was very self-conscious that I wasn’t playing that well. But in between the first record and You’re Living All Over Me, I really started to examine the music that I liked. I listened to Black Sabbath in particular. I remember having a revelation that the bass and the drums were connected, which sounds like a ridiculously obvious thing but I had not really understood what that meant. Their music really spoke to me at the time. They were like the next step up from the Ramones, as far as being an idiosyncratic band who developed their own style, but that was not outside the realm of our skill level. Led Zeppelin and Cream and things like that seemed so incredibly ambitious. Black Sabbath and the Ramones felt doable.