Ears Wide Open: King Leg

Kevin Bronson on December 4th, 2017

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King Leg is the latest guitar-slinging whiz kid to make everything old sound new again — the kind of guy you imagine absorbed “Only the Lonely” on repeat while still in his mother’s womb only to have the whole oeuvre resurface later when he was in his 20s. King Leg is the nom de tune of Bryan Joyce. Think of him as all of the Traveling Wilburys wrapped up into one mod, bespectacled 31-year-old. With one skinny-jeaned leg in the first two decades of rock ’n’ roll and the other in the present, the Nebraska native was living in Nashville (there’s a Smiths cover band in Joyce’s timeline somewhere) when he caught the ear of veteran exec Lenny Waronker, who then tipped off Sire Records co-founder Seymour Stein. Upon hearing “Great Outdoors” — the first song on the album “Meet King Leg,” released in October — Stein was reported to have invoked the time-honored executive endorsement: “It sounds like a hit to me.”

After making L.A. his home base, King Leg recorded the album at Capitol Studios with producers Dwight Yoakam (Joyce has sung backing vocals for him) and Chris Lord-Alge. And while Stein’s assessment of “Great Outdoors” is a good place to start, the album’s 11 tracks offer other calling cards: “Cloud City,” which sounds like dream-pop if that term would have existed in the ’60s; the string-accented suite “Comfy Chair / A Dream That Never Ends;” the back-to-back churn of “Loneliness” and “Seeing You Tonight,” which are about one degree of twang short of old country songs; and the closing track, a cover of Roy Orbison’s “Running Scared,” for thrills and chills. It’s all heartbreak and love, which is what got the ball rolling anyhow, and “Meet King Leg” quavers with emotions that will ring familiar to babies and Baby Boomers alike.

||| Watch: The videos for “Great Outdoors” and “Comfy Chair / A Dream That Never Ends”