On a blustery Spring day in Nashville, songwriter and artist Landon Pigg is drinking tea on a dusty porch, looking out over a front lawn alive with new grass encircling an old house. He looks utterly at home. Only, the porch isn’t his. Neither is the house it’s attached to. He doesn’t even own the cup he’s drinking from. The whole scene belongs to someone else, new friends who let him crash on their couch. It’s a familiar scenario for almost any musician who has ever jumped in a van but the thing is, Landon lives here. Not here in this house, but here in this state of mind. He’s a modern nomad who calls Nashville home but who lives wherever the wind blows – Seattle, New York, Los Angeles... just him and his acoustic guitar, which one assumes must be fashioned out of divining rods pointing him to the next source of inspiration.
 
“I don’t have a car so that makes it less of a choice for me to be nomadic,” laughs Landon who admits to packing socks and boxers before going out because he never knows where he might end up. “Luckily, Nashville’s a great place to do that because everyone is very hospitable and kind.”

It is this sense of wanderlust and openness to experience which has led him through an unlikely and adventurous year, packed with everything from songwriting success to a silver screen debut, all culminating in the creation of his sophomore album, The Boy Who Never, a real time tale of a man in motion.
“I think the thing I’m most excited about is that for the first time there is a direct correlation chronologically to the things that I’ve been feeling and the things I’m saying on my record,” reports Landon. “I think that would probably be the theme - the sense of now.”
Signed to a record deal by RCA when he was only 19, Landon released his major label debut, LP, in 2006. While it certainly holds its own LP too often polished Landon’s rough edges until there wasn’t anything left to hold. But behind that slick sheen were some seriously good songs. Songs that were soon to have a second life thanks to the success of a diamond in the rough tune that found its home in an unlikely setting.
During the Holiday season of 2007-08, Landon’s unreleased ode to an unrequited coffee shop crush was chosen as the soundtrack to the “A Diamond Is Forever” commercial campaign. It was a simple song with a simple lyric “I think that possibly, maybe I’ve fallen for you” with a melody and message that moved millions. “Coffeeshop” soon racked up hundreds of thousands of iTunes downloads, pushing Landon to not only issue an EP centered around the song but to revisit some of his older material with a more stripped down sound. He set out on the road, touring with labelmate Gavin DeGraw, to explore his reworked materials and try out some new songs.
“I think that you get to see the heart of a person up close and personal when there’s less decoration involved,” explains Landon, discussing the difference in audience reaction from LP to Coffeeshop. “After not really thinking about the music ‘business’ for several months, I had a song that I just decided to record with a couple of friends here in Nashville. For no particular reason. Not thinking that it would ever get heard by anyone other than a few of my friends and that song ended up being ‘Coffeeshop.’ I feel like you hear a lot of stories like that, right? The moment you stop trying is the moment there’s a natural energy. That’s when something happens for you.”
“Coffeeshop” eventually landed in another major ad campaign a year later for AT&T and helped reacquaint everyone with Landon before the release of The Boy Who Never. Thanks to “Coffeeshop” the nomadic troubadour had finally found direction and entered the studio to follow up his sudden success, but the next turn his life took would require direction of a different sort.
One day during the initial recording of The Boy Who Never Landon’s management asked him about a proposal which had come their way via his MySpace page – Would he like to try out for a new Hollywood film called Whip It? It seems the producers wanted a real musician for the role of the musician in the movie and oh-by-the-way, “that girl from Juno was gonna be in it.”
“I was thinking ‘That was a pretty popular movie and this is a pretty weird question to be asked,’” Landon recalls with a smile. “Usually I take a really long time to make decisions but I just stalled for probably like 30 seconds and I said ‘Yeah, I’ll try out.’”
Only days later he was in L.A. sitting (in what Landon describes as the “interrogation chair”) across from director Drew Barrymore and Producer Barry Mendel (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums) reciting the same lines he had just rehearsed with his managers in a dingy 70’s basement for his DIY camcorder screen test. Little more than a month after that Landon found himself filming scenes around Detroit with established stars such as Jimmy Fallon and Ellen Page. Even though the entire experience would eventually provide inspiration for much of The Boy Who Never, it was initially overwhelming.
“Taking in this flood, this tsunami, of new information was difficult. It was like a sponge trying to dry up a swimming pool,” Landon reveals. “I couldn’t sleep at night; my nerves were up too much. It was non-relaxing but I was ok with that because I would choose stimulation over relaxation any day.”
That stimulation soon turned to inspiration, and the album making process, which had been halted back in Nashville for this movie-making hiatus, continued “on location.” “I wrote a lot while I was there. I wrote on hotel pianos every day,” Landon reports.
“I came back from Detroit with this sense of ‘Ok here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna have a rhythm section that is really influenced by Motown and Jackson 5.’ Then let’s mix that with this heartfelt singer songwriter thing,” Landon explains.
When he finally resumed recording, that’s exactly what he did, crafting most of The Boy Who Never with a set group of musicians assembled by Producer Jacquire King (Kings of Leon, Modest Mouse, Tom Waits). King and the “band” pulled the pop out of Landon’s placid tunes while retaining that impish element which marks the artist’s character and his unpredictable live shows on tracks like “Speak to the Keys,” a sprightly song inspired by his purchase of a thrift store organ in Portland, Oregon.
King and company also helped Landon on the title track, “The Boy Who Never”, (his gentle ode to a soul purposefully stuck in neutral) by mixing percussion, strings and acoustic guitar to create a sound that Landon refers to as an “Underwater Ballet.”
Often Landon’s velvet touch hides some sterner stuff. Take the deceptively dark “Blue Skies” where Landon coolly recounts the kind of painful kiss-off only experienced by songwriters “When my heart broke did you like the sound of it?/You said ‘At least a song will come out if it’” and answers back with the witty weapons at his disposal “That’s what you told your mother didn’t you?/Well, this is a song for you.”
In another standout, “Ghost,” Landon lilts and sways in self-reflection about his untouchable object of affection with pleasant piano rolls and Ringo-like drum dashes. But he breaks the soft-sell to speak directly to this frustrating figure on the second chorus when he repeats, this time with marked intensity, the original refrain “Am I believing in a ghost?” Landon may ooze the kind of effortless cool most people spend hours and dollars trying to recreate, but he also exhibits that slow boil of unanswered passion which sparks so many songwriters to craft their turmoil into tunes. Though Landon rarely lets that turmoil translate into musical upheaval. Ultimately the songs he’s most passionate about, and the ones that seem to draw the most attention, are his ballads.
“The thing that comes the most naturally and the songs that are most poignant happen to be the ones with the slower tempo because,” Landon appropriately pauses before finishing his thought, “I think it’s because I take a long time to process things. I think it is more indigenous to my personality. I can tell my stories more thoroughly when the tempo is slower because that is the speed at which I operate.”
These songs, like “Coffeshop” and the touching album closer “If I’m Saying Nothing,” are a reflection and an extension of the way he lives his life and are appropriately the cornerstones of an ascending career. His medium and his message are inextricably linked. Landon’s music is languid but alive. He may always be a nomad at heart, but now he is one with a newly sharpened sense of direction.