Twin Shadow Heads to 'The Bottom' After Motorcycle Crash With 'Confess'
Credit two vehicles -- a tour bus and a motorcycle -- with leading George Lewis Jr., aka Twin Shadow, to make the sophomore album he did.
The former imposed a kind of musical isolation, Lewis tells Spinner, chatting one recent sunny morning in the restaurant that sits atop New York City's Gramercy Park Hotel.
Before heading to L.A. to record Confess, released this week on 4AD, Lewis spent months on the road, separated from his record collection. If the new album plays like perfect summation of his influences -- everything from Sade and the Smiths to George Michael and Boys II Men -- it's a testament to just how thoroughly the Dominican-born, Florida-raised, Brooklyn-based artist has internalized those sounds.
"You'd think being on tour, you'd listen to a lot of music, but when you have a lot of different people in the band, and a lot of different tastes, you rarely listen to music as a group," Lewis says. "And you rarely listen to music by yourself, too. I get nauseous listening to music on the headphones in the car."
Then, Lewis is more of a bike guy. He's been riding motorcycles for about eight years, and it was a desire to feel the wind whip through his famously stylish duds -- on the day of the Spinner interview, his look might be described as Prince chilling with Depeche Mode in South Beach circa '89 -- that convinced him to record in California.
"I knew I had to make my record in November or December," Lewis says. "I knew that I couldn't ride a motorcycle in New York in those months, and I had just bought a motorcycle. So i quickly shifted to L.A. and decided that's where I would make the record, simply so I could ride."
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