Lovedrug: Medication for the soul

Michael Shepherd knows how to save a life.

As the lead singer and pianist for atmospheric… Michael Shepherd knows how to save a life.

As the lead singer and pianist for atmospheric post-rock quartet Lovedrug, Shepherd creates the type of music that has, as recently as a week ago, convinced fans not to, in this case, drive off a cliff.

Needless to say, this is powerful stuff.

But long before he was drafting life-altering rock songs, Shepherd needed to be saved himself — musically, that is.

“My previous band just fell apart — I was tired of the whole scene and tired of working with people who were dishonest and didn’t have the determination to see things through,” Shepherd told The Pitt News in a recent interview. “I went home, sold all my equipment and said, ‘To hell with it. I’m done.'”

Luckily for us, Shepherd couldn’t stay away from music.

“It’s just something I couldn’t escape. You have a love for something and it drags you back, whether you deny it or not.”

Quickly after this musical rebirth, Lovedrug was born. And tonight, Shepherd’s crew will take the stage at Mr. Small’s for the first stop of their first headlining tour. Come ready to be saved.

So are these guys religious? Well, no, but they’ve got spirituality to spare. Shepherd speaks with a soft, almost fragile voice, oozing with a solemnity — especially when theorizing about music and life — that would be hard to fake. This guy has spent some sleepless nights contemplating life’s biggest questions and has been led toward only one conclusion: Music heals everything.

“If you’re talking about God and the Devil, man, that’s a whole other ball game. But music is a very spiritual experience. You’re pulling from some emotion and desire to create [something] that’s not mechanical. If it is, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons — unless you work at GM or something,” Shepherd said slyly, with a stifled laugh.

Lovedrug came together in the summer of 2002 after Shepherd returned home to Canton, Ohio, after realizing that the members of his previous band just weren’t as devoted to music as he was. He then spent upwards of four months in a single apartment teaching himself piano, alone, except for a near-life supply of Ramen Noodles — they’re not just for college kids! — building a new repertoire from scratch. After some lonely months, the tracks for Lovedrug’s debut album, Pretend You’re Alive, were more than mere ideas.

Shepherd quickly called some old friends and assembled the troops of Lovedrug. Before long, the album was released on indie label The Militia Group. Pretend You’re Alive, the title of which comes from what Shepherd was supposedly doing while writing alone in his apartment, is full of epic, outer-space rock anthems darker than most emo junk, and twice as catchy. It’s the record Radiohead would have released in 1995 if Thom Yorke had spent a few months living on a healthy diet of Death Cab for Cutie and Muse (had those bands existed in mainstream culture at the time), and had recently gotten his heart torn from his chest.

The songs manage to feel more than epic, with lyrics like, “And sometimes in a silver hell you’ve got to search for gold/And in the right light we’re all just angels with enemies.” Shepherd’s soaring choruses mixed with the band’s music, which transitions from apocalyptic, wall-of-sound explosions to meditative piano tunes, creates a sound that would feel just as at home playing during the end of the world as it would in the headphones of some heartbroken kid curled up in a corner.

While writing Pretend You’re Alive helped Shepherd exorcise his demons, touring behind the album put him in another emotional place entirely.

“When you play, you’ve got all these glowing souls stuck together in a room and you’ve got to do something with their desire to be there. Producing something and giving it to them so they can experience it with you, that’s beyond music. When you’re touching people, it just reaches this other plane,” he said.

After two and a half years on the road, Shepherd and the boys of Lovedrug returned to Canton for album No. 2. Rehearsing in “a warehouse with lamps, candles and seances,” the band recently completed tracks for its upcoming album, Everything Starts Where it Ends, to be released this February.

“Going into the studio this time felt like I’d spent the last two years in a desert or a field collecting these stones. Each of the stones equals a different song,” he explained, as I, unsuccessfully, tried to follow.

“It’s like I went out to harvest these songs, then in the studio I put them out on the floor to make sense of it all and turn it into something that people can appreciate the way we do. That translated well, because the theme of the record is a journey.”

Though it may be hard to believe after an explanation like that, Shepherd said the band’s sophomore effort is poignant and straightforward, more so than Pretend You’re Alive, which he called metaphorical and broad.

So if your glowing soul needs some musical salvation and you’d like to watch a rock show quite unlike any other in the process, Lovedrug will appear tonight at Mr. Small’s with The Myriad, Chalk Outline Party and School of Athens.