Combine Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn for vulnerability and adventurous spirit, then add Melville’s Ishmael for introspection, humanity, and narrative skill.  Blend in Woody Guthrie, Chuck Berry, Old Crow Medicine Show, and  provide echos of Neil Young.  Further, give your artist a Conservatory of Music (Purchase College) education and an innate way of making audiences friends. Now, name him for a small town in which he grew up outside Philadelphia, and you might have Langhorne Slim. A small Tuesday night crowd at Virginia Beach’s progressive music venue Elevation 27 were initiated to Langhorne Slim’s aura at a September 27 performance that proved to be a guide to a recent crucible of retreat and reemergence he’s made as a singer-songwriter.

Born Sean Scolnick in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, he  one of independent roots rock music’s best-known and most-popular artists. Before touring with artists from The Avett Brothers and Grace Potter to The Violent Femmes, he spent six years touring in The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. Early on, his song “Electric Love letter” made it to #5 on Rolling Stone’s Top 10 Picks and was used in the movie, “Waitress,” and his fame continued to grow. He is currently touring with long-time collaborators Paul DiFiglia on upright and electric bass, keyboards, percussion, and vocals and Mat Davidson on pedal steel, fiddle, electric guitar, keyboards, banjo, percussion, and vocals. The three display a tightness born of their long-lived musical bond, and his partners are key to his distinctive rootsy sound.

Langhorne Slim performed numerous tunes from his latest album “Strawberry Fields,” the title referencing a working-class neighborhood in Philadelphia where both his beloved grandfathers grew up. It’s a bulging 19-song collection wherein he’s gone even deeper into what have always been very personal lyrics. The new songs are edgy from some recent raw emotional struggles he’s experienced but also feature the funky, rootsy, upbeat folk-rock style he’s known for.

Surviving a fire that destroyed his beloved East Nashville home during the March, 2020 tornadoes, the worst seen in Tennessee since those  that ravaged Nashville in April, 2011, he entered a period of personal exile from Music City in order to regain perspective. However, he then developed an addiction to prescribed drugs after seven years of hard-earned abstinence from drugs and alcohol.

These experiences shape many of his new songs. “I called a healthcare professional,” he sings in “Panic Attack, “Wanna speak to someone confidentially / Don’t know how I’m feelin’/ But I’m feelin’ feelings exponentially,” Later in the song, the female analyst advised him, “… I swear that life’s worth living. It’s the only thing worth living for.”

In “House on Fire,” he crooned, “Some folks don’t believe nothin’ till it’s in the palm of their hand/ Some folks don’t believe nothin’ till it’s in the palm of their hand/ Till their own house is on fire, some folks will never understand.” “Baby’s cryin’,” he continued,  “flames are flyin’ through the air/ Baby’s cryin, flames are flyin’ through the air/ House on fire/ Nobody seems to care.” Slim did this as a country blues, sounding as if he grew up in that tradition. “If you don’t love your neighbor, ain’t sure that God’s lovin’ you,” he sand, hen finger picked a bluegrass bridge of quiet flames.

Shortly after the Nashville fire came the emotional and physical claustrophobia and fears of the Pandemic. Slim’s new songs  were produced within that shadow and his emergence from it. It encompasses conflict and contradiction, both internal and external, against a backdrop of redemption and rebirth. Conflict both dominates and unites the songs.

In an early song of the Virginia Beach set, “Changes,” Langhorne sings, “Things could be stranger, but I don’t know how/ I’m going through changes now.” In a bittersweet voice, like day-old burgundy wine, shifting slightly from low to higher range he sang, “Could spend a lifetime just trying to figure it out (lower), I’m going through changes now.” (higher)

In “House of my Soul,” the lyric goes, “You light the rooms to the house of my soul/ But there’s a pain in my heart and I’m dyin’ to get there/ … You light the house of my soul.” The melody is folk-y and upbeat, the mood unknown but promising. It’s a reprieve from the panic attacks. Slim said in an interview in “The Bluegrass Situation,” “I’ve been a sensitive boy my whole life, so what I’m trying to do is to not let every feeling take me over or guide my next step, because if I’m not looking for it, a certain kind of thought can manifest itself into an intense feeling very quickly.”

Later he sang in “Morning Prayer,  “…  Love, it is the door, and faith’s the key/ Nothing is deserved nor guaranteed/ I offer myself to thee”  in full-throated bluegrass harmony, looking inward, then outward, directly into the eyes of his audience. He treated the show as if he were playing Red Rocks Amphitheater instead a small club. Asked about it afterwards, he quietly said “that’s what you have to do!”

His concerns are not entirely new but are in part a continuation of earlier work. In 2017, in “No Depression” we quoted Slim from a wide-ranging dinner conversation as follows. “It’s important that those of us who are creative do what we love, there is a need, a need sometimes otherwise filled with alcohol and drugs, you got to pursue your desire.”

Later, reviewing his album “Lost at Last, Vol. 1,” in “jambands.com,” we surmised that “lost” in the title meant “lost in your creativity, making yourself new each day.” Slim had been working on “Lost at Last, Vol. 2,” when his recent sequence of trials began.

Near the close of the show, he shifted to the more upbeat and humorous “Red Bird, “Red bird singing in my window this morning/ Telephone ringin’, nobody on it/ All this living is death defying/ You gotta laugh to keep from crying/ Have ya ever heard the story about the man in a room/ Full of horseshit, and the man had a broom/ He laughed as he swept, and they asked him why?/ He said underneath this shit, there must be a horse to ride.”

He followed with one of his most popular tunes, “The World Is Crazy, and People Are Insane,” which is both title and refrain. While Langhorne continued to played, he left the stage and walked to the center of his enthusiastic audience, then raised his guitar above their heads as he continued to perform. His Elevation 27 crowd was an attentive one, as listening replaced chatter that evening.

Although many of the songs derived from grief, Langhorne Slim’s music somehow managed to feel uplifting and rocking for much of the journey. It was clear how “The Guardian”enthused that his is “one of the greatest live acts” and “The New Yorker” proclaimed that Langhorne has “Ledbelly’s gift for storytelling and Dylan’s ability to captivate audiences.” It also exhibits why his tunes have been used in TV shows, commercials, movies, and movie trailers. And, it explains why “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” host and comic Conan O’Brien, after having him on his show, said that he had become “an instant, almost obsessive fan” of Langhorne and, as a sometimes musician himself, went on to perform Slim at times.  And, after the Virginia Beach set that had revealed so much introspection and search, grief and relief that night, the audience still left smiling.

Opening for Langhorne Slim was Charlotte Rose Benjamin featuring tunes from her new album “Dreamtina.” In an article in “Glamour,” not, about her music, surprisingly, but about her skin-care regimen, she does note that her album: “Dreamtina is … this effortless, cool girl that I never felt I was. The album is trying to figure out my identity in relation to relationships with other people, and romantic relationships, and just trying to navigate that. In her songs that night, she led each song with her warm, rich vocals, followed by rocking electric jams by her guitarist.