Coming off his breakout single, “God Needs the Devil,” Jonah Kagen is preparing to release his debut full-length album, Sunflowers and Leather. As Kagen tells ABC Audio, the upcoming effort was written and recorded in an Airstream trailer that he’d turned into a mobile studio.
“It was all just out on the road with my dog,” Kagen shares. “We went across the country a couple different times, and it was almost like a documentation of that year that I spent in the Airstream.”
Sunflowers and Leather does not include “God Needs the Devil,” which hit #1 on the Billboard Alternative Airplay chart in May, for the simple reason that it wasn’t one of the songs Kagen created in the Airstream.
“I don’t like piecing together stuff, like, where you have a bunch of different songs that you made over the last however many years or sessions or whatever,” Kagen says. “I wanted to be really intentional with this one.”
He continues, “So ‘God Needs the Devil,’ while I love that song, of course, and I’m proud of it and I produced it and it was all very much still honest and me, it was not done in this context.”
Moreover, the language and metaphors Kagen uses on Sunflowers and Leather are a lot more grounded in reality than “God Needs the Devil,” which represents a relationship as an epic battle between good and evil.
“What I wanted this album to be is just as human as I could make it,” Kagen says. “I think you can hear that through everything. You can hear that in the lyrics and the way that it was recorded, the engineering, the vocal performance, the guitar.”
Sunflowers and Leather drops Friday. Kagen will launch a tour supporting Vance Joy Wednesday in Portland, Maine.
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