Langhorne Slim has an enviable live performance reputation, but a film soundtrack shows him in a new light.  LAURA BARTON reports

'THIS IS NOT a sob story," says Langhorne Slim, shuffling a little in his seat, "because in the end it really worked out well. But I got a call one day saying, 'Really sorry to tell you this, but the album's not gonna come out'." That was two years ago. When the now-defunct label V2 delivered this bad news, Langhorne found himself in the strange position of having a devoted fanbase, an enviable reputation as a live performer, a much-loved debut LP ( When the Sun's Gone Down), and the masters for a new album that he would now have to tout around town. The record finally emerged this year, somewhat burlier and more athletic than his first, with banjo and guitar giving way to a riot of tubas, trombones and piano.

Slim was born Sean Scolnick, and grew up in a "quiet, boring suburb" of Philadelphia, dreaming of becoming a musician and moving to New York - egged on by an older cousin who lived in the city, and who introduced him to the music of Pavement and the Butthole Surfers. Slim started playing music "as a way to express myself. I had problems in school. I wasn't a great student. I never was really good at taking direction. They asked me to leave. It was tough on my mom." Slim was duly enrolled at "a small hippy school", where things that would have previously got him into trouble were met with the words: "Oh, you're artistic!"

Each month, he was able to play a show to his fellow students. In his final year, he announced to his mother that he had no intention of going to college: "She said, 'Well you can either go to college and I'll pay for it or you can get a job at a gas station again.' And I said, 'All right, I'll go to New York and try to get into school'." He found a place on a sound engineering course at New York's Purchase College, despite having little idea how to read or write music. "I made friends with a professor who was into the same kind of music I was, which is how I got into the programme," he says. "But if I'd had to pass a test to get in, I probably wouldn't have." In New York, he began playing open-mic nights at well-known venues such as the Sidewalk Cafe, putting out an EP and touring with the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players.

But after seven years, the bustle of New York began to pall. "I felt really restricted and a little down," he says. "I moved to northern California - which is quiet but not boring at all, and extremely beautiful." He is unsure whether the change of scenery has influenced his music. "It sounds maybe a little corny, but the best place is wherever you can feel good enough to let whatever you got inside out."

In 2007, as Slim waited to see what might happen to his unreleased album, a song from his debut, named Electric Love Letter, turned up on the soundtrack of the movie Waitress, a romantic comedy. This was as unexpected as it was exciting. "It turned out the label licensed the song, and they didn't exactly mention it to me or anything like that . . ." He looks peeved.

The first time I saw Slim play was a couple of years back, when he was 26, at the Pickathon Bluegrass festival on a farm in Oregon. On the day we meet, he has just played the 12 Bar Club, a pleasingly dank London venue. Although venues and audiences couldn't be more different, both times he struck me as one of the best live performers I have ever seen: a great raw boom of a voice, and a genuineness that is hard to communicate on record. I wonder if it is on stage that he feels most at home. "Performing for me . . . " he begins, then flounders. "Well," he smiles, "in life, communicating can be a little awkward for me. You can feel self-conscious and you question yourself. Like right now I'm thinking, 'What am I going to say now?' But up there, you're not doing that. When you're up there on stage and it's working well, you're not really thinking. The best nights are when I get off and I have just no idea what just happened." - GuardianService

The album Langhorne Slim is out now on Kemado