Easy listening for anxious times, torch songs for a world on fire, orchestral pop for the algorithm age: this is the twilit milieu of L.C. Franke, whose debut album Still In Bloom, releasing July 19, builds a bridge between twentieth-century nostalgia and our modern alienation. Across ten tracks of pure mood-indigo music, inspired by the jazz-club savoir faire of artists like Frank Sinatra, Scott Walker, and Ella Fitzgerald, Franke’s barstool croon smolders against a backdrop of woodwind trills and string quartet swells. It’s a musical tonic that pairs equally well with gin and general malaise—light on the ears, heavy on the heart. 

In a previous life, L.C. Franke was known as Jeff Klein, an Austin-by-way-of-New York indie-rocker who spent the better part of his youth garnering widespread acclaim as a solo artist, as a collaborator with countless other songwriters, and as the frontman of the Southern gothic soul outfit My Jerusalem. But by 2017, he had hit a wall. After a demoralizing experience with his then record label he was feeling lost and jaded, his mental health teetering. He’d given so much of his life to music, with so little to show for it. He decided to take a year off and reassess. Then, along came the pandemic. 

That hiatus turned indefinite, and he found himself suddenly isolated and adrift, unsure whether would ever get back to who he was. Then he realized: Maybe he didn’t want to. The opportunity for reinvention presented itself when his friend, the Bessie-winning dancer Melissa Toogood, asked the artist to compose the score for her performance with the Boston Ballet. Franke bought a Mellotron, started noodling around with the sounds of flutes, clarinets, and strings. He reached out to John Mills, a professor of jazz studies who’s worked with the likes of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles, to help him turn his “horrible caveman arrangements” into something a 65-piece orchestra could play.

Somewhere in there, Franke sat down at the piano and wrote the song that would become both the lead single and lodestar for Still In Bloom, “You and Me and Us Against the World” (releasing March 5). It’s a moonlit waltz across melancholy clarinets and brushed snares, a heartfelt promise that he himself needed to hear.  “I was ready to give up on everything,” he says. “So I wrote a song to give myself hope—to remind myself and my friends that, no matter how much they get you down, you can still rise above it.” 

The music brought him back to his roots—all those Brooklyn and Fort Lauderdale summers he’d spent with his grandmother, Elsie Frank, losing himself in her dusty record collection filled with golden greats like Glen Miller, Blossom Dearie, and Jimmy Durante. It reminded him of when he was just a little kid in New York, singing Neil Diamond and Barry Manilow songs at the VFW Hall. “It really made me fall in love with music again,” he says. “I’ve always been sort of sentimental.” There was comfort and empowerment in those old songs, rendered all the more meaningful amid the uncertainty that was clouding his own life and the world outside. In this music of his past, he saw a future. Borrowing inspiration from his grandmother’s records, and paying homage to her with his name, L.C. Franke was born.

Still In Bloom is the sound of midlife crisis turned spiritual rebirth. Recorded live in the room with an actual orchestra, and completed over just three weekend sessions, it’s both musically rich and emotionally direct. On “You’re Not Alone,” Franke takes your hand and leads you from a shadowy alley, toward a shimmering skyline that’s swirling with flutes and the simple reassurance, “Worst case / It’ll pass.” The mood takes a slightly more sinister turn on “Wish the World,”  a sardonic tango about a soured relationship that’s underscored by spy-movie violins and vibraphone. And the album finds its bruised thematic heart on the title track, “Still In Bloom,” where a pensive piano melody and wintry strings provide the stripped-down bed for Franke’s late-night ruminations on the everyday struggle to find resilience amid the ruins. 

These are spellbinding, smoke-gets-in-your-eyes songs, rendered as sharp as a custom-cut suit, evoking lonely subway rides past abandoned automats, and those halcyon days before the Brill Building housed a CVS. Becoming L.C. Franke has been the gateway to finding his truest self, allowing him to hang up the well-worn rocker persona and let the sophisticated songsmith that was always within him move at last to center stage. “I take out the contacts, put on the glasses, and it’s like a reverse Clark Kent,” he says. Powerful stuff, this sincerity. Let Still In Bloom and L.C. Franke visit you in your own darkened corners, and guide you back into the light.