21-year-old Joshua Slone is something of an enigma. Songwriters, Nashville heavyweights, and celebrities have all taken notice, yet he stays humble and largely shies away from the spotlight. Maybe that’s the hallmark of a true “tortured artist.”
Either way, it’s working. Slone captures the most relatable corners of heartbreak, and he’s nailed the formula for deeply personal, sad love songs, with mostly just him and bare-bones instrumentation. Whether or not you knew his name before, it’s clear the artist is still wrestling with the same questions he was last year, and time hasn’t brought him any closer to answers. History isn’t the past for the Kentucky native. It’s a present-tense re-run, driving him closer to insanity than closure.
SEE MORE: Joshua Slone, “Thinking Too Much” – Album Review
Throughout this EP, Slone never plainly discloses why love slips away. Instead, listeners witness the longing for what’s lost and what could have been. After one listen to “Are We Ever Gonna Work Out Baby?”, you can connect the dots: an anxious mind that creates irreparable distance, even while loving in a way that feels unmatched and irreplaceable.
Growth and ingenuity are usually needed to strengthen an artist from one record to the next, but I can’t help but disagree when it comes to Slone. So what if red wine comes up twice on this EP, and the concept of getting high runs through the whole discography? The descriptors haven’t grown tiresome yet, and I’d argue Long Life Living for a Lover Boy shows growth in a different light: we meet a much sadder Slone (as if that were possible).
Emotional heaviness is guided by flickers of mellotron and pedal steel that glide through a few tracks, while his upper register is finally let loose. There’s less build and movement in each song, but that gives the writing room to breathe and lets the storytelling land clearly. The exception is “Indebted,” which balances a quirky, shaker-laced melody before building into an acoustic-synth pairing and sharp lyricism.
It’s home to lines like “Honey I’d run, just to get back, even if it makes me nothing” and “Tell me, what’s the point of our time, if heaven is a place we can’t find?” Those lines are doing double duty: poetic and devastating, yet easy to absorb right off the bat. He proves it again throughout “Morehead State.”
That said, if you’re new to Slone, this EP may not sweep you off your feet, especially as tracks four and five creep in. It’s deeply personal and soaked in haunting despair, while missing the light-hearted embellishments that once disguised the same somberness underlying nearly all of the previous record.
Slower songs on his debut, like “Hate It” and “Somehow I Got You, You Got Me,” were magnetic in a way “Be My Guest” and “Long Life Living for a Lover Boy” aren’t. Sitting through these slow, near-endless tracks feels like practicing forced patience, because melody loses the battle to stripped-down storytelling. An enticing melody beneath such gloomy writing, much like “Wanting More,” might have served him better. Still, the vulnerability in ‘Be My Guest’ is tragically beautiful.
In this latest venture, Slone speaks to the romantics, the loverboys, and the Beth Marches of the world. He reaches those drawn to poetic simplicity and honest testimony, and those who live with depression or anxiety and replay life’s moments as unanswered questions. This is the most vulnerable version of the writer to date, and with so much of the EP impossible to shake off, it promises another chilly season of signature Slone sadness.
