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LOGAN LYNN INTERVIEWED ABOUT HIS DEPARTURE FROM MUSIC IN THIS WEEK’S ISSUE OF JUST OUT — DIGITAL VERSION HERE!

Last week I sat down with the editor of Portland Newsweekly Just Out (Amanda Schurr) to chat about my announced departure from my current life in Musicworld. A man has his reasons. If you care to know more, pick up a copy or keep reading below. To read the online version CLICK HERE or to download the PDF version of the 2 page ordeal, click the following two links: Page 34Page 35

I love how Just Out never twists my words or calls me fat and ugly. BEST. GAY. PAPER. EVER.

From Just Out: (8/6/2010)

Will Work for Good : Portland pop dynamo Logan Lynn quits music, for now…

Logan Lynn just wants a new hoodie. Sitting outside a North Portland cafe, blue hood yanked over a navy baseball hat, he points to a missing zipper pull—and later, more tellingly, to letters on the hoodie’s front, “F-R-E-D.”

“It just needs to say ‘not what I thought it was gonna be,’” he says, half joking.

It’s been that kind of decade for the Portland musician, who took to his website Thursday, July 29 to announce his self-proclaimed “career suicide,” an indefinite hiatus from the music business. With characteristic candor, Lynn wrote: “As I near the 10-year-anniversary of my debut record,… I have come to some conclusions not only about the journey I’ve been on since then musically and in my personal life, but also the journey I intend to be on moving forward with both.

One thing that is painfully clear to me and everyone who knows me in real life is that I AM MISERABLE. I have been for some time. I’m sick of being broke, mismanaged, overworked, screwed over by the folks who are supposed to be looking out for me … you know, all the hits.”

A few days later over iced coffee, Lynn pulls even fewer punches, with himself and others. “The more time I have to think it over, the more comfortable I am with the whole idea,” he says, in what begins a conversation about demons, downloads and the decision to withdraw from what he admits is an enviable, even courted spotlight—at least from the outside.

“I’m sure there’s at least a thousand bands in this town that I know that would be like, ‘Dude, you’re super blowing it. I have no idea what you’re talking about,’” concedes Lynn, fresh off a West Coast Pride tour with his band The Gentry, and fresh out of a single-album contract with the Dandy Warhols’ Beat the World label. “And I feel that way too. I get that.”

What he hasn’t gotten, however, has been time to deal with issues a decade in the making, from the end of a long-term relationship to the “slimy” clingers-on to his well-publicized battle with substance abuse. “I just really don’t see myself being in a good place a year from now if I keep on this path,” Lynn shares. “This might be me being a fucking dramatic Libra, but I do have a tendency to be all or nothing about stuff. I feel like the only way to stop it at this point is to just break it. Break everything, stop doing the whole thing, kinda come clean.”

Lynn has been clean of cocaine and alcohol since 2007, about the time he signed with Beat the World and began production on his third full-length solo record, From Pillar to Post, a polished electro-pop confessional. The disc debuted to critical acclaim—the video for his single “Feed Me to the Wolves” landed among the Logo Network’s “Top 10 of 2008”—and by Lynn’s online tallies, 18,000 downloads. “For a while, I was able to see that as dollar signs,” he says. “If Billboard cared about that, if my label cared about that, then I’m a huge success. But that’s not how the industry is set up. … It’s still very much record sales. Something’s going to have to change there eventually or else everybody’s going to quit doing it, professionally at least.”

Life on the road didn’t help the financial, or psychological, bottom line. Lynn says the tipping point came earlier this year “when I was selling my furniture to pay for the van to go on tour.” Reaction to his louder, aggressive Gentry-fied sound was mixed (“There’s some video out there of this summer that’s not pretty,” he says), especially as a gay artist on the Pride circuit and in contrast with his solo, more upbeat fare. “Everybody’s dancing and they don’t necessarily want me to get up there and be sad,” he says. “And I don’t like do Shakira covers!”

Lynn considers his time with the Gentry, with whom he joined forces in December 2009, among the highlights of his career. Still, he adds, they’re not his “babysitters,” and he’s all-too-aware of the temptations—“torture,” he calls it—the road presents. “I am going to have a relapse,” he says. “Unless I can get myself to a place where it’s safe for me to be in bars and hotel rooms and away from everyone that knows me, I can’t be doing that.”

In retrospect, Lynn admits he may not have done himself any favors by being so forthcoming with his personal struggles. “I don’t think people start out by going, ‘I just got out of rehab, I’m a huge junkie, you would not believe what happened.’ That in and of itself wasn’t me intentionally poking holes in the boat, but I do think it did poke holes in it,” he says. “It is my history, and I own it.”

Nor does he want to sound ungrateful. For Lynn, his retreat from the music business is more a “mental health” decision than anything. “The good part about it is that I really have made a connection with people and I do have the feeling that I’m not really alone, which I have had that for forever. … I’ll still have that connection with people but I’ve gotta figure out a way to do that in my life where there’s not this other oppressive side. I think right now my plan, my loose plan, is to help the queers—not to sing for the queers.”

Lynn says the desire to “do something that matters”—“some good for the world”—is leading him directly to volunteer work at Q Center. (“My heart belongs to queer Portland full-time at the center,” he emails later.) “I’ve gotta stop talking about my feelings all the time, stop having everything and everyone around me revolving around me,” he laughs. “I know that people everywhere are probably like, ‘Yeah, right,’ ‘cause I’m notoriously attention-seeking, but the motivation for that has changed.”

That’s not to say music doesn’t matter anymore to Lynn. “I’m just going to turn it into a hobby. … I was happier when it was a hobby,” he says, adding that, short of plans for the proverbial day job, the only plans he has in place are what he’s choosing not to do. “I’ve never lived a normal life without being a junkie, so I’m kind of excited for that.

“I’ve gotta step back for a minute and assess how weird it is and how weird I am and whether I can deal with the weirdness,” shrugs Lynn, fiddling with that pull-less zipper. “Is that weird?”

Logan Lynn and The Gentry give their “farewell” performance at 9 p.m. Friday, August 20 at Mississippi Studios (3939 N. Mississippi). Matrimony and DJ Girlfriends support. Tickets are $8. To listen to Lynn’s new, unfinished album, I Killed Tomorrow Yesterday, visit loganlynnmusic.com. Visit blogout.justout.com for the full interview with Just Out.”

Category: Emotional Bullshit, Interviews, life, Music, New Releases, News, Parties and Events, Press, Reviews, Shows, Unbelievable Stuff, Uncategorized, Unreleased Material

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