It’s been a minute since we’ve heard from Royston Langdon — six years as a solo artist, five years as frontman of Spacehog. But he’s back with a new album, Everything’s Dandy, premiering exclusively below, and also a new identity, Leeds, taken from his home town in England.
“I’ve been struggling to understand the kind of transcendence of the old form of the industry into what it is now,” Langdon tells Billboard about the Leeds moniker. “I was chatting with a friend one day and I said, ‘Look, I still love making music, but I really want to be there more in the service of other artists and their ideas. How can I do that without there being any conflict of interest?’ He said, ‘Just call it something else. Every time you meet someone, you tell them you’re from Leeds. So call yourself Leeds.’ And I was like, ‘OK…’
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“That enabled me to in a sense take on an alter ego whereby it’s a very personal place, a very personal expression aside from anything I’ve done before with anybody.”
The nine-track Everything’s Dandy was recorded in New York and was produced by Bryce Goggin (Antony and the Johnsons, the Apples in Stereo), with players who have worked with Yoko Ono, Prince, Jeff Buckley and Joan As Police Woman. It also features co-writes with Langdon’s brother and bandmate Antony (“What Became of the People”) and Rich Robinson of the Black Crowes and the Magpie Salute (“Your Day Will Come”), while the album as a whole reflects on the time Langdon has spent in New York, where he’s resided for 24 years.
“I’ve been in New York long enough to go through various metamorphoses, like a lot of people who stay,” he explains. “As I was writing these songs and thinking about things, I was able to see the various different chapters of my own life in the physical place, and how the physical place has changed around that. I just found it fascinating that I was in this city that also had this massive kind of change, and how that intertwined with my own experience. So it’s kind of a re-gentrification of my memories, in a way. I wanted to put it down as a means to try to understand it all, I suppose.”
Although brief, Everything’s Dandy finds Langdon covering plenty of musical ground. from the Britpop of “What Became of the People?” and the elegiac piano balladry of “Someone” to the Caribbean feel of “No No No,” the jazzy tinge of “Innocence” and the pensive, voice-and-guitar opener “You Can’t Go Home Again.” “Not to blow my own trumpet, but I have a kind of vast musical vocabulary, but I don’t really think about it like that,” Langdon says. “The most surprising feeling is just finding a real joy in the simplicity of sound again, like when I was a kid, before I took up music professionally. There’s kind of a purity of tone; I became more and more fascinated by that and wanted to pull away more than try to add on. A lot of the music I’d done in the past, I think, has really been about more is more, but not here.”
Langdon is leaving future plans open-ended with the arrival of Everything’s Dandy on May 4. For playing live his desire hews more towards secret shows and house concerts. “I honestly don’t know if there’s a lot of demand for me,” Langdon confesses. There are also more songs, including some that are “more kind of poppy” and didn’t fit Everything’s Dandy. But Langdon isn’t making any firm predictions about what we’ll hear from him next.
“I’m really only beginning to dip my toe into the outside world with this,” he says. “I’m in the formative days of venturing out with this, and I’m not in any rush, man. I’m really not. I’m not trying to prove anything to anybody. I’m excited to put these songs out, and beyond that I just don’t know.”