conflict. Now, it’s a shadow being cast. “I’ve got the jitters. I never get the jitters,” McLamb says, opening the door of the band’s sparely stocked dressing room backstage at Koka Booth Amphitheatre. Generally smiling and calm, he’s visibly flustered now, running his hands through his hair and walking semi-circles with brisk steps. “I need another beer.” Perhaps too well, McLamb knows that tonight’s show in Cary — with his friends, label heads and more than 4,000 strangers — might be a potent catalyst in his career, moving his music away from smaller stages like the one his exes are playing in downtown Raleigh (and one he’s often played) and to slots on marquee tours. Sitting among the rows of lockers that the North Carolina Symphony uses here, the band discusses its business and realizes that such change is already happening. After their manager and agent struggled to land a handful of shows in the Midwest, a quick East Coast run with the Glaswegians of Camera Obscura — coupled with these Phoenix shows in Cary and Charlotte — have helped them turn the corner. They’re trying to decide which shows to take. McLamb, like the rest of the band he’s built for himself, is thoughtful and inquisitive. When he hears of an unfamiliar book or idea, he always asks for a little information. With Rodermond, backstage in Cary, he wanted to know more about peak oil; a month earlier with Thangs, in their shared practice space and bedroom, he wanted to know about whatever record it was she’d put on the turntable. Concomitant with that approach, though, is McLamb’s strange mix of self-confidence and self-doubt: After a few half-hearted sessions with the old band, he was strong-willed enough to head to Raleigh and record with Burton, with whom he’d worked on a compilation of Triangle bands. Tonight, he admits that he regrets the way he handled the situation, initially sneaking into the studio like an unfaithful man seeking a mistress. And when the band he’d called his own for more than a year finally called it quits, he never offered the necessary closure or inspiration.
“I don’t write songs, sitting on the edge of my bed with an acoustic, and come and show them to the band. ‘Oh, I’ve got these chords and a couple of lines,’ ” McLamb explains. “I do these demos that I orchestrate. I play the drums shitty, and the lyrics are last. I definitely know what I want. There was a gorgeous element to that first incarnation of the live band. But I had a hard time figuring out how to put it to tape. I felt like I could make a cohesive album by myself—like I did last time.” But he didn’t know if he’d actually written the album yet. Unsure of the songs he’d demoed while living in Carrboro and Wilmington, McLamb hoped a move to Raleigh would inspire a few more possibilities for the big follow-up. He wasn’t sure these tunes were the right ones for the Merge debut. He’d started this band to distract himself from trouble while living at his parent’s house in Cary. Now, people had expectations. “When BJ got to me, I was like, ‘Man, I got these tunes, but I don’t know if I like ’em all. I’m going to scrap a couple of these and write some shit,’ ” McLamb says. For all of McLamb’s wiry energy, Burton’s presence exudes a certain aloof, slightly goofy Zen, though he’s five years younger. Burton listened to the songs and had the nerve to tell the songwriter he was wrong — this was the batch. The tension of making Libraries now resolved, McLamb agrees. In the end, Libraries isn’t a perfect record. It drags toward the middle, and its reliance on layers and density occasionally makes it languish with its own stylistic bravado. By and large, though, it’s exactly the record McLamb needed to make to prove that his debut — “You know that quote? ‘You have your whole life…,’ ” he says — wasn’t a farce or a fluke. A handful of cuts — the nervy, name-calling kiss-off “Brittany’s Back” and the boisterous, smiling comeback “Heart to Tell” — feel smartly like refined leftovers from album one. Every four tracks, though, McLamb shows that his intentions and capabilities outstrip simple, Phil Spector-sized
“I wanted to get away from thinking of myself as 18 shuffle eight The Love Language