Louie Blue is Alec Moborg is a singer, writer and musician from Turku, Finland who is half Finnish and half Italian. He has been creating his own songs since attending music classes in secondary school.
He has no connection with American band Blue Louie (yes, there really is one) and I won’t even mention Bonnie Blue.
Now 23, Louie is returning from a four-year long hiatus, since the early career attraction of major labels such as Warner, Universal and Sony to his debut single ‘Confused’, followed by two albums and then an abandoned one as he began to question his own creative process. With ‘Blood & Bones’ he is confident that it is something “unapologetically me”.
For greater authenticity he turned to vintage recording methods, putting analog over digital to emphasise the warmth of imperfection rather than the chill of technical flawlessness.
For the sample track we’ve selected what was advised to us as the “stand out” one, ‘Alone in my World’ which delivers a meditation on identity dissolution, a popular talking point, but specifically within the context of ‘ego-death’ a term used to describe loss of identity which could be drug induced or because you’ve become so spaced out through meditation that you’ve lost all recognition of who you are.
It goes much deeper than that but this isn’t really the organ for a detailed dissection.
I’ll just say that I was a little put off to discover that was the subject matter but once ‘Alone in my World’ got going I quickly got into it.
It is a lot more than the 80s retrospective it’s promoted to be, embracing multiple genres in depth that include alt-pop, rock and R&B. You don’t have to listen that hard to hear the work of artists like Sade and Sting but what really surprised me was the depth of the prog rock in it. This track in particular could be an off-cut from the Phil Collins Genesis era mixed with the early 1990s Real World arrangements of Peter Gabriel… and a song written on a cigarette packet by Bryan Ferry.
Then in the middle it unexpectedly packs a powerful bluesy guitar solo.
This is music that his father listened to that he considered “too corny or cheesy,” but which he now recognises as foundational to his artistic identity.
As he explores his identity, the “need to understand who I am” and why he prefers to be alone in his own world the repetitive lyrics can grate a little but they are more than made up by little gems like the opening lines, “The day I died/my soul came alive”
‘Blood & Bones’ is available across all streaming platforms.
Find him on:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/louieblu.e/
