Photo by Daniel López Pérez
Rarely does an artist in his prime withdraw seemingly at once from the work that defines him. But when Colin Lake stepped away from performing at the end of 2017, that is exactly what the singer / songwriter had done. After two albums, many hundreds of shows and nearly a decade of life in New Orleans, Lake and his wife decided to buy a sailboat, sell their house and pursue a completely different dream than the one they had been fortunate enough to share up to that point. The pair were no strangers to leaps of faith - after meeting serendipitously at Louis Armstrong International Airport nine years earlier, they wasted little time shacking up and beginning a life together.
In the years that followed, Lake plied his craft as a songwriter, performer and bandleader. The release of 2011’s The Ones I Love planted him firmly in the colorful ecosystem of New Orleans music, introducing him to an audience who welcomed his soulful delivery and refreshing approach to songwriting and lap-steel guitar. Lake’s powerful voice became a familiar sound at local festivals and clubs and he began touring more widely with the release of One Thing That’s for Sure in 2015. Over the years, his strength as a performer landed him opening sets for artists as varied as Dr. John and Richard Thompson, Gary Clark Jr. and Railroad Earth. Lake’s knack for delivering well crafted original tunes with a deep groove translated nicely to the big stage and propelled he and his band to slots at festivals like the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, Austin City Limits Music Festival and the Telluride Blues & Brews Festival.
But by 2017 a change in the national mood coincided with the unexpected end of a chapter in Lake’s story. The year was marked by the death of his longtime keyboard player and friend Marc Adams. It also saw the loss of Harris Rea, the man who signed him to his first record deal two years earlier. At the same time that he was writing and performing his best material yet, Lake found himself facing severe headwinds and lots of uncertainty. From Christmas to Mardi Gras, the question loomed; what next? The answer, as it turns out, was floating on the Ortega River in Jacksonville, FL.
She was a stout, old American-made sailboat that Lake and his wife purchased and named Wavelength after their favorite Van Morrison record. The ensuing months would bring a series of changes in such rapid succession that the two could barely keep up. They raced back and forth on Interstate 10, preparing the boat for her voyage, their house to be sold and themselves for a life-changing transition from the familiar to the unknown. They lost a car in a freak flood that August. Weeks later, Hurricane Irma nearly brought their plans and their boat itself to an untimely end. Mother nature seemed to be exerting herself more vividly than ever as the two prepared for a new life at her mercy.
As 2018 began and the pair drifted south through the Bahamas and then plied the waters of Cuba, Mexico and Belize, the life they’d left faded deep into the background behind daily boat responsibilities and the surreal blue and green backdrop of the western Caribbean. The sounds of Taj Mahal’s Mo Roots and Jimmy Cliff’s Struggling Man filled the air as time took on a different meaning. All plans depended on each morning’s short-wave weather forecast and were always subject to change. Long days at anchor allowed for swimming and fishing while calm overnight passages permitted Lake time to stargaze and contemplate the forces that seemed to be acting on him, his boat and a world in the midst of its most tumultuous period since he’d come into it.
While his perspective was fresh, this type of reflection was nothing new for the 39 year old songwriter. In the years before casting off, Lake had been grappling with some of the most salient themes of our volatile times. He wrote the song Cross Over the River in a motel in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, sometime during 2015’s renewed and long overdue calls to dispatch with the Confederate flag monuments. Another tune called Last Days of the Dark Age proved a powerful meditation on the pain of a society crippled by fear, violence and injustice. A few times that year, Lake put his headphones and listened with new ears to rough mixes of these songs and others that sat in a state of suspension - unfinished, unreleased and unheard.
Throughout the chaotic year that preceded his departure, Lake had quietly been slipping in and out of a non-descript recording studio in Uptown New Orleans, laying tracks for an album that he wasn’t sure would ever see release. At the controls was producer Eric Heigle who decided they should take a completely different approach than they had taken for their previous project together. This time, they would build most of the songs one track at a time, usually beginning with a vocal and guitar track, followed by Heigle’s drum tracks and so on. By the time Lake shoved off, they had nearly completed an eight song set that represented a high-water mark for the artist, both in terms of song craft and execution.
In early 2019, Lake and his wife set sail once again, this time passing between the steep, green canyon walls of Guatemala’s Rio Dulce on their way back out to the Caribbean Sea. For a week that February in Belize, they were joined onboard Wavelength by their good friend Shaun Brennan and his wife. While aboard, Shaun caught wind of the unreleased songs and between snorkeling sessions and over rum drinks, they listened to unmixed tracks and talked loosely about one day releasing the album on Brennan’s Houston-based record label, Splice Records.
More time passed. Wavelength and her crew forged deeper into uncharted waters and encountered some of the most dramatic seas they had yet experienced as they worked their way along Cuba’s remote southern Coast and down to the Cayman Islands before landing for several months in the reef-lined Bay Islands of Honduras. Eventually returning to Guatemala in late 2019 and after some ten straight months in the Caribbean, the Lakes headed for the mountains to regain their land legs and enjoy some cool air.
Once in Antigua, Guatemala, Colin found the change in atmosphere inspiring and picked up a few gigs around town. While dusting off his catalog, he gleaned new and deeper meaning in the lines and melodies of his own songs, rediscovering them as though they were not his own. Some tunes, like Stars and the hypnotic, Van-inspired Siren’s Song had foreshadowed his time at sea, while others like the rollicking Extraordinary Times had only grown more prescient in the two years that they laid dormant. Affirmed that the work he was revisiting was his very best to date, the time felt right to release the material to the world. He called up Brennan in Houston and Heigle in New Orleans to set the wheels in motion. The album’s title track would be Forces of Nature - a high energy, blue-eyed soul number draped in shimmering electric guitar and melodic piano riffs and ladened with earthly metaphors for the cosmic connection shared by Lake and his wife for so many years. And what could be more apropos than a nod to the very forces that had so literally impacted their lives over the past several years and those creating such drastic changes to the world they had been observing so viscerally. At once timeless and timely, the album’s eight songs deliver a dose of prescriptive optimism for these uncertain times and the beaming exaltation of a love affair for the ages.
Produced by Grammy winner Eric Heigle and slated for release in the Fall of 2020 on Houston-based label Splice Records, Forces of Nature features eight original, previously unreleased tracks, ripened to perfection.