It’s easy to mistake Shlomo Franklin for a farmer. There’s the plain, unmarked baseball cap, the earnest face, and an overall look of youthful single-mindedness and purpose that one associates with small family farmers in John Mellencamp songs. But mostly it’s the overalls that read agriculturally.
But Franklin isn’t a farmer. He’s a brilliant singer-songwriter. And the overalls aren’t an affect nor are they a tribute to 90s hip-hop. For Franklin, wearing overalls is a spiritual act.
“They connect the whole body because they’re one thing; it’s a jumpsuit,” Franklin explains from Rockland County, New York, about an hour outside of New York City. “And it feels unifying. Growing up in the ultra-religious world, we were always supposed to wear belts. Especially in places of prayer one would wear a garter belt or a string around their waist. That was supposed to separate the upper body — the divine, the heart, the mind — from the lower body was therefore sort of demonized and made to feel less-than and separate which represents their whole relationship to sexuality and their humanity and being honest about what being alive truly is. So for me wearing overalls is sort of the opposite of that.”
The ultra-religious world Franklin references is the Hasidic Jewish community. Clothing is important in that world. All men wear uniforms of long, dark jackets and black hats, in addition to the aforementioned belts. Franklin grew up in that environment, in upstate New York. His family split their time between suburban Monsey, an Orthodox Jewish enclave, and a farm in Bethel, where in addition to cows, tractors, and barns, Franklin was also exposed to the spiritually uplifting nature of overalls. Like so many before him, he eventually left a religious community to pursue rock and roll. Of course, the history of rock and roll is the history of separating the music from its underlying sexuality. Elvis Presley’s hips were once considered so dangerous to society that he was only filmed from the waist up. But that’s now how Franklin rolls: “Overalls connect the whole body and remind me that every part of humanity is sacred and special and if there is spirit, then it runs within all of us.”
The sacred beauty of humanity is palpable on Don’t Love Anybody, Franklin’s achingly beautiful debut EP. Over the course of just five songs, his honest rasp sings sadly over sweet, folk-inspired melodies. Each song on the EP is meticulously constructed, but it’s the honesty of the performances that makes the album something special. Franklin communes with the most honest parts of himself and then shares it with the listener in a way that belies his 22 years. Even more impressively, he’s only been writing songs the past five years or so. Perhaps those two factors are the secret that allow him to be so honest with his music.
“The reason I put these five songs out is because they didn’t feel very cool to me. They felt kind of not very cool but a little bit more transparent but still confident and strong. I liked a certain quietness, in that they felt very mean. Even if I’m not in that place anymore, they exercise a certain kind of empathy that I really like.”
Franklin is a prolific songwriter, writing far more than he can record. In fact, he had written two new songs the night before this interview. His process is to write songs and to put them away for a year, or even longer. In many ways, it seems more akin to making wine than to making music. “I have a certain time-testing period to see if the song stands the test of time in my book. I need songs to age.”
The impressive song backlog allows Franklin to create new albums out of existing ones. Just as novelist William Burroughs cut up his work and then reassembled it into new forms, Franklin chops up unrecorded albums and reassembles them, then committing the new work to tape. “I do find myself falling into scenes and creating collections of songs that feed off one another,” Franklin says, explaining how he organizes his albums. This process is one of the reasons Don’t Love Anybody sounds so cohesive. It’s not a collection of Franklin’s most recent five songs, but rather it’s five songs with a similar sensibility, with a strong sense of love and loss running through all of the tracks.
Love and loss are common songwriting themes but Franklin sees them as even larger, more universal concepts. “Folk music and rock and roll are sort of biblical, in a way. It’s a better fit than some might fear.” He’s certainly not the first artist to see the connection. Pete Seeger transcribed part of the Book of Ecclesiastes to create “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season),” which became a huge hit for the Byrds and is the required soundtrack to any film scene indicating change over time. Religion and rock are intertwined, either in their communion with or opposition to each other.
Some might say the Jewish people are uniquely qualified to be songwriters. Jewish religious ceremonies feature a cantor, whose job is to sing during religious ceremonies. And Judaism has a concept called midrash, which is commentary on Jewish law and teachings. The commentary often circles the words on the page, so that the two–the law and the commentary–are intertwined. It’s not unlike how songs circle our daily life, commenting on what’s happening. Franklin agrees that being raised in a religious Jewish community helped prepare him as a writer. “Growing up there was almost an expectation for everyone to have something to say. And questioning the world is ritual; it’s ritualistic. It can become somewhat diluted, but I think the inherent intentions are sort of truth-seeking. A wondering and a wandering of sorts.” The wondering and wandering are also present in the work of Jewish-raised artists like Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and Leonard Cohen.
Given Franklin’s maturity and discipline, it’s easy to forget he hasn’t been able to drink legally for all that long. So while it initially comes as a shock to learn he’s a fan of Chance the Rapper (“He’s a great lyricist”), it does make sense that Franklin has a different frame of musical reference than older artists. However, the love of Chance does not mean subsequent Franklin releases will feature beats and samples. It’s quite the opposite. “I’d like to see if I can record with less instruments and make it sound bigger. Kind of like how Johnny Cash’s recordings would sound so big even though they’re just three instruments.”
Conventional wisdom tells us, over and over and over again, whether we want to hear it or not, that people in Franklin’s demographic have no interest in albums. Which makes it interesting that he’s so album oriented. Is he an outlier? A contrarian? Are, gasp!, generations not as homogeneous as we’ve been led to believe? “As far as I’m concerned, the album itself is just a marketing tool made up by record companies. I don’t see the album as something inherently sacred . They’re collections of songs that I very much would want to keep together.”
In addition to songwriting, Franklin is on the road, having recently off of a west coast swing that provided time for hiking and camping. He has a decidedly mixed attitude toward performing. When asked how he feels about performing, Franklin immediately and enthusiastically exclaims that he loves it. “It’s a full manifestation of some parts of me. It comes very easily and naturally and after a good performance I feel like I’ve truly given something of myself.” However, later in the conversation, he compares playing shows to sometimes feeling like “a public colonoscopy.” Part of the attitude split is Franklin learning how to distance himself from the emotions that led to the song. “Songs are an exorcism of pain and then you move on. But in art–and this is weird–you keep reliving that pain. And you relive it again and again, in different scenarios, in front of different people. You can’t put yourself through that every night and then pretend it’s still honest.”
Franklin gets into literal acting in his new video for “About Last Night” (see the exclusive premiere below). The song is about a relationship where the two parties can’t, or won’t communicate. Franklin sings and plays guitar as a woman packs her suitcase, gathering the strength to leave her home and relationship. Tellingly, Franklin the songwriter exists outside of the video narrative, observing and describing, but not interacting.
Great artists observe and describe, showing us the beauty in something as mundane as, say, overalls. But one can see how the unifying nature of the garment would appeal to someone like Franklin. He cuts up his albums to assemble the songs into new works. He’s working to reconcile the joy of performance with the pain of songwriting. And while it’s not due to his clothing choices, the process is very much a result of his being able to find peace and joy in a simple article of clothing. “There’s nothing to separate,” Franklin reminds us. “It’s all beautiful.”
The exclusive premiere for”About Last Night” is available here:
