London’s Frank Lloyd Wleft journeys across the U.S.A with sprawling new single ‘The Actual Kids in Actual America’
Frank Lloyd Wleft image via Lucas Edwards
Ahead of a special headline show at Hackney’s Paper Dress Vintage to coincide with American Independence Day (4th July), London singer/songwriter Frank Lloyd Wleft journeys across the United States with his epic new single ‘The Actual Kids in Actual America.’
Channeling a passion for nostalgic American art forms—Beat Poetry, classic Country & Western, Rock ‘n’ Roll—with all the gnarled bite of a thrashing London post-punk band, Frank Lloyd Wleft’s latest cut delivers a sprawling panorama of United States culture as it reveals itself to a young, 20-something Brit.
Inspired by a solo two-month trip undertaken across the US in 2022, ‘The Actual Kids In The Actual America’ delivers a 6-minute epic that’s as restless, diverse, and unpredictable as the storied country itself. Flitting from jangle-pop, bluegrass fiddles, a cappella chant-a-longs, and Lou Reed-style swaggering punk rock, the track concludes with an urgent slice of isolated spoken word poetry and a cascade of cultural references: from Bob Dylan to Allen Ginsberg; from Wordle to Walthamstow.
Explaining more about the track, Frank Lloyd Wleft says:
“‘The Actual Kids in Actual America’ was written to soundtrack my two-month journey across the US in 2022, with lyrical details emerging along the way. Inspired by Beat Generation poetry, Pop Art, and the writings of the likes of Jean Baudrillard and Rebecca Solnit, the song blends a lot of what I saw and imagined, everything presented as equally enchanting and equally banal.
“Musically, it draws on a number of classically American influences, too, celebrating the electric guitar as well as country idiom in the lap steel and fiddle parts and the Appalachian-style a capella singalong, before exploding to leave only the Fall of America poem.”
‘The Actual Kids in Actual America’ is out now.
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