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MANSFIELD — He takes a deep breath and begins to sing. He stops abruptly.
Perhaps the energy isn’t right. Maybe it sounds too breathy or it isn’t breathy enough.
“Let’s redo that,” he says.
He starts again and reaches the chorus. He pauses. He closes his eyes.
“Let me listen to that.”
Luke Adkins is in a spare bedroom stuffed with recording equipment, book shelves, and musical instruments. He is standing in front of a microphone inside of Gus Cadle’s home.
It’s a familiar place. Adkins has been recording with his friend since 2008. If walls could talk, these would tell decade-old stories of shoddy recordings made with karaoke mics and grunge metal music. But tonight, the two friends are putting forth their best effort.
Adkins, a self-proclaimed recluse, has promised himself and anyone who will listen he won’t be shy any longer.
These new recordings are meant to go on a new project, What Will Follow, though whether the project is an EP or full-length album has yet to be decided.
“It really comes down to who will listen to the whole album,” said Cadle, a founding member of Magnum Opus Music Group.
He and Adkins started the group to help support musicians across the nation. The dozen-member group has people on both sides of the country and often collaborate via the Internet with each other’s projects.
“We are competing with attention spans on the Internet,” Cadle continued, sitting in front of a computer full of recorded tracks. “If you have six songs, the last song is more likely to get listened to than on a 12-song record.”
Adkins took up the guitar at 10-years-old.
“I never got lessons. I’ve learned it all by ear. When it comes to music theory, I’m blind to that stuff,” he said. “I probably know five chord names, but I’ve been playing for 13 years now.”
By the time he was 12, he found a liking to metal music.
“I slayed, man. I slayed, man.” he said laughing. “It was teenage angst, but then I stopped being pissed at the world. I just wanted something to be pissed about.”
At 15, he discovered metal wasn’t for him. His mother had a conversation with him. The information wasn’t new. It was something he knew already; he just needed someone else to say it.
“This music isn’t you,” she told him, “you need to come back to your roots.”
The Adkins clan are country music fans hailing from West Virginia and Kentucky.
“I despised that,” he said. “I hated country music, so I ran from that for a while.”
Finally, a friend showed him new musicians like John Mayer and bluegrass players. He found new favorite musicians, and new styles to add to his musical repertoire.
“That opened my eyes to a different type of music,” Adkins said. “I did a complete 180 from where I was.”
When he turned 20-years-old, Adkins created a band with buddies. He said he wrote nearly 90 songs.
“We had a catolog of songs I don’t think about anymore or play anymore,” he said. “There are recordings on YouTube. They are just bad. It breaks my heart to listen to. My voice is so whiney.”
It’s good to look back on progress. Adkins believes artists should show their growth to their audience, an idea which proves challenging for him.
“I think that’s part of me being a recluse,” he said. “I don’t want to come and bring something unless it’s perfect. That kind of works against you.”
His band played shows around the Mansfield-area. In the end, it wasn’t working out.
“I kind of started doing my own thing,” Adkins said. “But I had stage fright. Even still, I get this uneasy feeling. But when I get on the stage, I’m comfortable.”
But the comfort ended there. Adkins said he never felt comfortable in the Mansfield music scene.
“I don’t want to say it was jealousy of people having a hub I wasn’t a part of,” he said. “It was my mentality, my stubbornness of, ‘Oh I only play this.'”
Adkins has played with a handful of musicians around town. He’s written songs with Chase Beaire. He and Brady Jacquin have formed a few side projects. But he still never felt like he was part of the Mansfield music scene.
“As for the recluse thing, I don’t have an excuse,” Adkins said. “I’ve not inserted myself into a hub. I feel it’s so well established and everyone knows each other. There’s that human side of me that doesn’t want to walk up to them.”
Now, he wants to change.
“This year, I want to play more. I’m going to be popping up all over,” he said confidently.
So here he is, on Spayer Road, crammed in a small room with his Magnum Opus partner leering at record tracks that build his new master pieces.
His previous album, There Will Be Blood, took three years for him to release. The record was a batch of songs he wrote when he was 18- to 21-years-old.
But the recordings never felt right.
“I wanted it to be better and better and better. It was three years of me saying, ‘Well, let’s keep working on it,'” he said. “There are so many takes on that album, and I think that’s where I went wrong. I over thought it. I should have just released it.”
Now, Adkins is working against his own will. Learning to let minor things go on What Will Follow. He wants to have the album finished and released this summer.
“We’re at a good spot of where most of (the initial part) is down,” he said. “We’re trying to find session musicians. I think it’s going to be something special.”
Adkins walks away from the computer after Selecting a portion of the vocal track to rerecord. He places his headphones back over his ears and goes back to work.
