Welcome to Liam’s Neighborhood
Photo by Jimmy Humphryes (@poundingthenail)
Liam’s Neighborhood likes to think of himself as a farmer.
That all starts on a Christmas tree farm in the Oregon countryside where he grew up, out on a sprawling plot of land with his dad and 6,500 saplings. “I still don’t know why he decided to do this,” says Liam, “but I remember being around four years old, and my dad’s like, ‘Alright, we’re gonna plant some trees.’ Then, one day, I was helping him set up irrigation and weaving these basket things the saplings were growing in.”
What Liam seems to have taken away from that role is the moral that good things take time and often surprise you in how they show up. As a musician, this is an ideology he’s been trying to embrace. What starts as an idea for a song needs a little nurturing and some time left alone to become a thing worth celebrating. “It usually ends up being more meaningful that way,” Liam says. “I can’t predict what’s gonna happen, but when it comes together, it's like, ‘Oh, that’s what I was hoping for all along.’ There’s something about that happening naturally—it feels like how a garden grows.”
His latest album, Farm Wars, fully embraces this. Some of these songs, like the project's opener, “Poison In The Well At The Water Store,” and its closer, “Psalm1,” bloomed quickly. Others, like “20OrangeSky13,” took years to crop up. “What’s frustrating is like, I can hear in my head how I want a song to sound,” he says, “but for that one, it took a decade to figure out how I could make that happen. Sometimes, I’ll just let a song sit until the time comes.”
“To me, Farm Wars is my first real project,” says Liam. “Everything before that is really just me trying to figure things out, like how to…make music. That was almost like going to school and seeing what I could make sound cool. And now it’s like, ‘Let’s make it sound like something only I can make,’ which I’m really excited about.”
The music on Farm Wars honors that exploration by hopping all over the map. Even solely from an instrumental standpoint, Liam flits from a harp-heavy track to a song with the unmistakable twang of a banjo. In the end, he wraps the album with one of his strongest tracks, an acoustic stand-alone that fills three contemplative, prayer-like minutes with only a guitar and his voice.
“I play a lot of instruments at a basic level,” says Liam, “guitar, bass, drums. I mess around on saxophone and cello, but I’m terrible at them,” he jokes. “My goal is honestly just to be an old wizard someday who knows how to play everything.”
When it comes down to it, though, Liam shines most in how he pulls those instrumental pieces together. “Part of what I’ve come to at this point in my life,” he says, “is that I’m not really by any means a virtuoso on any specific instruments. I feel like production is mainly my instrument.”
Photo by Harrison Morris (@morrisvisualz)
Photo by Harrison Morris (@morrisvisualz)
While most of what he’s learned instrumentally has been either by ear or persistent tinkering, Liam tells me about a childhood hero of sorts. His name was Istvan, and he was the relentlessly cool Hungarian man who taught Liam piano during the brief period he and his family lived in Connecticut. Though Liam never retained any of the music theory this man tried to teach him, he remembers inundating Istvan with questions about how to make one thing sound like another. Eventually, Istvan gave up on the theoretical and leaned into Liam’s questions on production (how does Radiohead make their songs sound like this? ).
“He gave me an 8-track from the early 2000s for my birthday,” says Liam, still in awe of him. “I was only 12 or 13, and the older I get, the more I look back and realize that I had such a privilege to get into that world so young. I mean, I was definitely messing around on GarageBand in school during computer lab or whatever. But when I got that little machine thingy, I just went completely off the deep end.”
Liam would spend hours trying to recreate songs, learning how to puzzle things together. “I remember I tried to record ‘Because’ by The Beatles once. Like, by myself. That’s basically what I just ended up doing for the rest of my life.”
As a result, Liam’s been releasing music online since the early 2010s, but the kinds of songs he’s produced are so expansive and seemingly unrelated that they feel almost genre-averse placed next to each other. There are influences from all over. He gives me names like Nina Simone, Brandy, Prince, Jessica Pratt, Jeff Buckley, and Brian Wilson. His own songs have a touch of jazz and choral music, hyper-pop and R&B, and ambient, industrial noise that would normally feel at odds. And yet, there’s some thread of experimental pop that ties these neatly into a cohesive discography—Liam’s memorable low vocal hum aligning them to let these songs speak to one another.
“I used to be really pretentious about all of it,” Liam admits. “I’d say I make folk music. But like the folk of where I come from, because that’s basically what folk music is—the music of your own life and surroundings. But I stopped saying that because people think of Mumford & Sons,” he says, laughing. “At the end of the day, I just want to write pop songs anyway.”
Photo by Jimmy Humphryes (@poundingthenail)
Where Liam’s older releases showcased his ability to echo the music he loves, Farm Wars is evidence that Liam has grown into his voice. It perfectly encapsulates his artistic range and balances the eccentricity and quietude he bounces between. And as the album unfolds, you start seeing a story. “The past couple years of my life have been the hardest, and I think that forced me to consider, like, ok, do I want to make music just to be cool or interesting, or do I want it to feel real? And that’s where Farm Wars came from.”
But there’s a more overarching narrative here—a wrestling with both addiction and faith. Having grown up in a Christian family, he’d spent most of his teenage years distancing himself from that worldview as much as possible. “One of the biggest parts of the story I’m telling is about going through what they call a Dark Night of The Soul and coming back to a different kind of faith—one without the culture attached to it,” says Liam. “I went through a season where I was just at the end of my rope. I’d lost touch with everything that mattered to me. And a guy named Shannon reached out to me when I needed it most. He was there for me because of what he believed in, which sort of reminded me of my beliefs as a little kid. And that’s when I started to come back to a question of what I believed and ask what’s in my heart.
Of course, the path beyond that was far from straightforward. Liam’s been clean for a few years, but the ones depicted in the album were fraught. “It was a couple more years of dealing with addiction, debt, grief, some really painful things,” he says, the negotiating of which is felt through songs like “If I Fell Today” and one of the album's most distinct tracks, “Been Humbled.”
“Part of the reason it has such a specific sound is I ended up using the voice memo from when I originally wrote the song, which is also why it's kind of pitched up,” he explains. “I was like really struggling with addiction at the time, and I was high when I wrote that. There was something about how I sounded when I was actually in that moment that I couldn’t recreate. So I added a couple of things on top of it. I feel like that tells the story better than I could if I was trying to make it perfect, you know?”
The track “Sober” has a similar subject matter, but it’s also Liam’s way of prefacing for the listener. “I wanted that to be at the beginning of the album because it felt important to say that this is all coming from a sober mind now,” says Liam. “For me, it was realizing I've wasted a lot of time, and that song is dealing with the reality of that, but also looking to the future with hope.” It’s all messy, in a way, so Liam felt the song had to be a little short and allow for some awkwardness. “I remember showing one of my older friends, and she was like, ‘Why is this song about being sober when it sounds like you're in a club?’“ he says.
Not all of Farm Wars is so theme-heavy, though. Liam’s placed other personal stories within it—some planted just for him. Take “Trash,” for example, which revisits one of his earliest childhood memories of looking down into the landfill he lived down the street from. “I used the old nineties recycled bin sound as one of the progressive elements, and it's barely there. But for me, it adds to the storytelling of it. So that's what I've gotten into because I feel like even if people don't know exactly what I mean, I will. I feel like people resonate with that.”
Going forward, Liam wants to keep chasing that honesty. His upcoming single, “Say It To My Face,” comes from his unfavorable experiences within Seattle’s music scene. The talent and the communities bubbling up here (especially in the DIY scene) are exactly what Liam hoped for years ago when he moved to Seattle, but not everyone in the city’s scope is here to nurture that. “What's cool is that local artists are making incredible music here, and people are starting to pay attention. I feel like the community's there as well. We could all go so far, but we have to, like, actually hold each other up, you know?”
Building that community is essential to Liam as it is to many artists making a name for themselves here; it’s like having good soil. “You never know,” says Liam. “It’s just cool to see how everything grows a little differently, and it’s interesting to see what things become.”