Landon Pigg is one rock star who earned my esteem before I had ever heard him sing or seen him perform onstage. It's an odd name - the type of name that gets you beat up and relieved of your lunch money as a kid in the school yard. Or, on a completely unrelated downside, it gets you mistaken for a character in a children's fable.
Point being: It is decidedly not the type of name to light up a marquee. Yet as displayed by a solid if less than spectacular album simply titled LP, Nashville native Pigg has risen above his unfortunate name and is forging the way ahead to proving himself at the most a rock star and at the least a pop heartthrob in the making.
Released in 2006 by RCA, LP is laced with mellow sounds and sad, melancholy lyrics sung in a high, but to his credit, not whiny voice. On his website he notes a spectrum of musical influences from the soulful David Mead and Rufus Wainwright, to Radiohead, Zeppelin, and even the Beatles.
Last week Pigg performed for an intimate crowd at Skylight studios in New York at an event for Rolling Stone and Johnny Walker. The rainbow of labels had been enjoyed by attendees for an hour when a long haired Pigg took the stage looking somewhat like the middle Hanson brother, complete with boyish good looks and a striped cardigan.
Pigg took off crooning into the microphone with emotion, his head occasionally turning completely sideways with his eyes closed and a pained expression on his face. The emotion was palpable in the timbre of his voice and the crowd stood three deep, bobbing their heads in unison for the first song. Yet at the end of the night, the crowd dissipated, acknowledging that "yes, it was a good show," but not something worth staying out past midnight on a weekday.
The reason is that while Pigg's music is good, a good deal of it sounds very similar. The melodies are safe and somewhat predictable. Lyrics are undoubtedly the driving point of the record and tend to run the spectrum from truly great to downright generic.
Article comments
1 - JB
I was at this concert too. I paid zero attention. Catherine McPhee was in the front row dancing around and looking beautiful. The room was silent for every man in there.