on-air intro by Chance Solem-Pfeifer

Bodies can be a currency in popular music. Are they toned enough? Do they move the right way on stage? Do they prance, do they dance, does stature or does physical recklessness enhance the music about to come off the stage?

And while he is known for the visible passion, anguish and joy with which he moves on stage, for Nick Long of the duo Lonely Horse, the body is “just a suit that holds who we really are inside.”

It’s an idea he’s expressed to the press before about the spirituality of the folk and rock music he plays with drummer Travis Hild. It’s music that has, at times, hinged on the ideas of passing from the world. Now, that’s not to say the music and lyrics of the San Antonio duo are serene, celestial episodes with the cosmos figured out. On the contrary, their EP My Desert Son (out a year ago) is full of struggle. There’s a rooty, Southwestern musical turmoil, even during the sweetest moments of songs like “if you knew what we know” — presenting lyrics that push through the fog of family matters and wars of false holiness.

And it’s further interesting that that in addition to being part of the band’s ethos and origin story, Long’s Black Foot and Siksika heritage has become something of a genre qualifier of its own. But the influence does manifest itself musically. Percussion is central, and there are certainly moments at which Long’s lyrics become either so abstract or so mournfully blurred that the songs feel like a meditation more than an explanation. Amid images of family and desert and loss, there is some cyclical feel that the band is not merely performing songs it wrote, but that the songs are self-sustaining entities expanding themselves. In some cases, when Long is wailing over a full and solitary guitar and drummer Hild is pounding his hardest, the songs feel like they roll into each other eternally, something like the serpent involuntarily swallowing its own tail.

In September of this year, Lonely Horse will release the follow up to the My Desert Son EP. It’s called My Desert Son (part 2), an album which Long dedicates to his son and which was fittingly recorded in the kaleidoscope-esque Adobe Room of the Sonic Ranch studios.

You can see them tonight at Knickerbockers, but right now they join us on Hear Nebraska FM. Ladies and gentlemen, here is Lonely Horse.

Chance Solem-Pfeifer is the host of Hear Nebraska FM. Listen into the program next week when the live guest is AZP. Reach Chance at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.