BIO
Singer-songwriter Steve Slagg has self-released music since 2011, both as Youngest Son and under his own name, in addition to playing keyboards for ten years with Chicago powerpop mainstays Mooner. Slagg’s tender, funny and beautifully complex songs explore faith, queer sexuality, and the beauty of the natural world. His third album Strange Flesh is the culmination of Slagg’s life as a musician and his existence as a queer person of faith. A lot of these songs’ “I”s are really “we”s, and in their triumphs and tragedies, love and rage, excommunication and communion, they aim for truth, whether through memoir or fiction.
When choosing collaborators, Slagg chose to highlight his bonds within the Chicago music community, working with producers (and longtime friends) Lee Ketch and Kit Shields at Harlot’s Progress and engineer Dorian Gehring at Foxhall Studio (Ohmme). Contributors to the record include members of Mooner, Contorno, Dusk, and The Obleeks, as well as cellist Cathy Kuna and singer-songwriter Allison Van Liere. The song’s settings draw out the inherent camp and humor in these stories, with arrangements that pay tribute to the baroque pop singer-songwriters of the 60s and 70s, as well as queer-of-center artists from Queen to Judee Sill to Labi Siffre. Slagg’s shared the stage with artists as diverse and hip as Erin McKeown, Over the Rhine, the Flamin’ Groovies, the Vulgar Boatmen, and Aaron Lee Tasjan.
Photo: Gregg Webb
ReVieWS
“A true and fierce artist.” - @erinmckeown
“As well as adding to the indie hymnal, Youngest Son is adding to the death-haunted literature of friendship.” Eve Tushnet
“If (God forbid) I die young, someone pay @steveslagg to write a song about me.” @samuel_ernest
Performed with: Aaron Lee Tasjan, Anna McClellan, Erin McKeown, Flamin’ Groovies, Frances Luke Accord, Frontier Ruckus, James McCartney, Mooner, Over the Rhine, the Vulgar Boatmen.
Performed at: Nowhere Else Festival 2018, GCN/QCF Conference 2015, Calvin College’s Festival of Faith and Music 2013.