Luke Temple

Artist Description

"Allow me a few minutes to overcome my enchantment. Luke Temple…shows that he condones any and all melodies, no matter their dimensions or their forecast. He doesn't abide by any particular structural mores, just a general belief that the concoctions are memorable and swing sweetly through breezes, like audible tree swings. He's a fantastic storyteller with an eye for turning those minute details of a life into little pieces of music that can then become memorable…The first keeper of 2007. There, it's said."
- Daytrotter.com



After growing up in Manchester, Mass, Luke Temple attended the school of the Museum of Fine arts in Boston. He moved to New York and found the visual art world a bit too cloistered for his liking so he started singing, singing for the ones without a fighting chance, for the voiceless, for the unheard... well, not really... Mostly just singing because he could and people seemed to like it. He tells little stories and only understands some of them. More than anything he loves texture, color and surprise. His last album was out on Millpond records in Seattle in 2004 called "Hold a Match For a Gasoline World"; and was recently released on Fargo in France and the UK. Luke has just finished another that he recorded on an old eight track in his bed room in Brooklyn called "Snowbeast". His greatest achievement to date. It is scheduled for release in 2007.

"Mr. Temple isn't part of any particular school - not even that all-purpose new songwriters' catchall, freak-folk - and his private world is fascinating."
- Jon Pareles, New York Times

"Luke released his second LP this year to raves, and "Family Vacation" proves it all just... His tenor runs the track with an alluring androgyny, managing to pull the ear despite a busy (and cool) arrangement. Consider the track stamped with our highest approval."
- Stereogum.com

"Luke Temple has one of the most beautiful voices in pop music."
- Sufjan Stevens

"There's a distinctly psychedelic bent to "Saturday People", too, with lyrical pictures like "a mescaline freak-out in an off-Broadway show/ In the morning," but another part of it is the way his voice curls around the vowels. In the song's fourth quarter, its breaks away from [Sufjan] Stevens comparisons entirely: Where Suf's endings float or soar, Temple throws in a leftfield groove, low and slithery. Cigarette, anyone?"
- Pitchforkmedia.com

"If it were just his songwriting we would be in love with these songs, but there is so much more…"
- David Dye, World Café / NPR

"Luke Temple raises impossible expectations for his second LP by opening Snowbeast with one of 2007's best songs, "Saturday People," a trilling, rolling, delightfully disjointed indie-folk anthem packed with nonsense words delivered in a rangy, angelic voice. That voice-along with Temple's supple banjo-picking-will remind a lot of listeners of Sufjan Stevens, though Snowbeast also recalls Jeff Buckley's drama, M. Ward's atmospherics, and Feist's sense of play."
- The Onion, AV Club