Portrait of a Songwriter: A Lou Albert Mixtape
From 2010 to 2020 I filmed my buddy, musician Lou Albert, through his trials and tribulations as an artist. The childhood ghosts, the mid-twenties arrogance, the sizzle and fizzle, breakups, addictions and finding one self, his story has it all. His is the story of so many singer-songwriters, and it was an honour to see the price paid for true expression.
The night we met
I met Lou when I was working for a non-profit and was put in charge of making a video on a coalition for new immigrant artists in 2010. I was running around with my DSLR out to prove myself in those days.
In came Lou with drummer Raul Perez. They looked too cool for school. The kind of guys who grew up admiring Che Guevera and hadn’t outgrown the leftist rhetoric. You know the Latino stereotypes. Rebel music, social justice, all that stuff. Their name was The AK47s for Christ’s sake.
Although he was shy, Lou was very clearly the frontman. He had the look. The 1950s slicked back hair said it all. I always loved Joe Strummer. I guess you can say I lived through Lou. He was the pretty face to Raul’s dark side. From the moment we met, we were friends. They hired me to make a music video documentary on them and that was that.
The Hyphenated
Lou was raised in Nicaragua. At a young age, he and his friends used to hang out at the beach and surf. Drinking heavily was just what everyone did. This became a coping mechanism for his anxiety and self-consciousness, I believe.
As we see in his story, liquid courage is a double edged sword. What allows all that creativity to surface can also destroy you.
Chaos and energy
I always liked filming these bros jam.
The chemistry was undeniable. They had shared history and roots. All that beer and madness meant they weren’t destined to be studio rockers. It was hard to watch them bleed out all that energy in a shady basement. The asian mother in me believed they had the seedlings of commercial success in their act, but asian mothers produce doctors and lawyers, not great acts.
They knew how to produce lightning, but to capture it in a bottle to commodify and sell? Forget about it.
That requires you to fall a little bit out of love with what you do. It forces you to put a price on your energy, and that I think neither of them was willing to do.
People hire agents and managers and marketers for that sort of thing. It’s hard to see less talented people thrive, but then again, the success of mediocrity often gives people hope. Maybe it really is just about persistence.
A new gang
When The AK47s broke up, Lou tried to form a new band. Unfortunately, brotherly love and alcohol fuelled mayhem didn’t amount to much. They barely played any shows and couldn’t get their act together. Nobody said playing in a band is easy.
Apocalypse now
I look at Lou in bed staring at the ceiling with the record player on. It’s a poetic image - the artist in a funk. But the artist in this state is wracked with nervous anxiety rather than romance. They need a project. They need a mission. All artists have a bit of Captain Willard in them, the doomed protagonist in Francis Ford Coppola’s classic, Apocalypse Now.
Make' em look cool
Lou never asked me to do that. He’s too cool for that. But I always tried to pry the honesty out of him by telling him I’d do my best to do just that. I guess you can say I was playing to his self image. I learned a lot about working with friends during this project. There’s the person you know, and the person you’re creating. Film is about emotional truth, not facts.
When I showed him the film, he told me he dug it. I’ll take it.
My favourite stereotype
I’ve always loved Bob Dylan types. I think so much of my persona while travelling and writing and making movies during my twenties was inspired by this. But who am I kidding - I’ve always been more calculated than free spirited, and those who fulfill that stereotype are often imprisoned on the inside. Lou is one of those Dylan types. The bohemian life is not what it seems.
Unhappy
Like any musician, Lou takes to his craft to express the anger and frustration of his life not having panned out the way he wanted it to. He’s child of nature at heart, and Hull’s concrete jungle is bringing him down. Working for the government makes him feel like a sellout.
As we see in the film, however, on the other side of this emotional turmoil is freedom.
Low budget special-fx
I used a free app on my phone to generate the older version of Luis. This is supposed to be our man in 2050, which would make him sixty four. Back in the day sixty four would be considered old. Today it’s more like the latter stages of middle age. He may not be a young buck here, but he’s also not a geezer.
Why the jump to the older years?
This creative decision was pure instinct, but now that I look back at it, fast-forwarding to sixty four was perfect. At that age, he’s not so old that his younger self is a distant memory, and he’s not so young that he can just pick up where he quit in his youth. It’s a kind of purgatory.
At that age, he’s forced to reckon with his decisions. He didn’t become the artist he wanted to be, and he’s second guessing the effort he put into his dreams.
As we learn in life, acceptance is the way forward. We don’t need to like what’s happened to us. And while we can do our best to shape things for the better, torturing ourselves from our past decisions is a waste of time. As the crazy drummer at the conclusion of Hardcore Logo (1996) says, “In the end, it’s love.”
And by love, I mean surrender.