L.T. Creacher inducts himself into the Hall of Fame with debut album release

Amidst the chaos of early COVID, a unique opportunity presented itself to a friend of local musician Lukas Truckenbrod. Seeking respite from the unfolding madness in New York City, he found himself “housesitting” a hotel in Lawrenceville, a gig arranged through a mutual acquaintance.

“Nobody was staying there, and nobody was working at the hotel, complete lockdown,” Truckenbrod tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “But somebody needed to keep an eye on the place to make sure that, you know, the pipes didn't leak. So that was his job. He was all alone in the hotel and he brought his drums, and he set the drums up in one of the hallways.”

Then the friend started recording. And those recordings became the drums heard on Hall of Fame, an ’80s college-rock, REM, and Neil Young-influenced LP that is Truckenbrod’s debut full-length release under the name L.T. Creacher.

“Which landed a specific sound to the way that the drums are on the record,” says Truckenbrod. “It has a big, hall-like sound on the drums themselves, which contributes to just the sonic characteristics of the record.”

Truckenbrod appears on Sat., May 25 at Brillobox for an album release show that includes performances from Zinnia's Garden and ACCABACCA.

A slight echoing, a slight eeriness — Hall of Fame is an album written and recorded during the initial pandemic, capturing the distinctive feel of those early days of COVID: isolation, uncertainty, looking inward, and learning to do more things by and with yourself. “And when else could you be inside an empty hotel other than during COVID lockdown?” says Truckenbrod.

Song titles like “Bummer Proof,” “Is There Anything Else,” and “Time is Precious” show that Truckenbrod, who tends to write more observational songs about what’s going on around him, was going through a period of introspection.

“This was an opportunity to look more inward and be more confessional with some of the feelings that I was having,” says Truckenbrod.

In “Time is Precious," for example, Truckenbrod sings “'Cause I'm living loudly / Write my story / The critics would hate me if they even knew me.”

“[That line] references the insecurities somebody can feel while going through the entire process of releasing music,” he explains. “There were many questions I faced in the early days of COVID. ‘Is this important right now?’ ‘Does anyone care?’ ‘Who will listen to any of this?’”

Ultimately, Truckenbrod says he kept reminding himself that “art and music are absolutely important and my songwriting is an attempt to connect with people on an emotional level; whether that provides an escape or projection of your own feelings is totally up to the listener.”

Truckenbrod started releasing music in 2012 with his college band, Whiskey Holler, an alt-country psychedelic experience that played regular house shows around Oakland, at the former Howlers in Bloomfield, and Club Cafe. That project dissolved when Truckenbrod moved to Austin, Texas, where he became a solo artist under the moniker Lukas Read.

But Pittsburgh called him back. Truckenbrod returned in 2015 and started the ’90s-influenced, guitar-centric indie rock band SLUGSS. They released two albums, Appeal and Live at Monster Mansion, before COVID hit.

“If I have a band that I'm playing with, my musical output is determined by the band that I'm in, but sometimes I write songs that don't fit that same calculation,” says Truckenbrod. “Those end up being more of what I would put under my solo name. In the past, I've used Lukas Reed, which is my first name and middle name, but this time around I wanted to come up with a more ambiguous name to perform under. That's what [made] L.T. Creacher.”

L.T. for his initials, and Creacher as a play on the word “creature.”

“The mystique of a band name is something that enables people to imagine a greater world behind the music,” Truckenbrod explains. “It's also something for me as an artist to do the same thing, where I can imagine a more creative persona and embody a kind of persona that has an alternative storyline. That isn't so rooted in reality, where I can be more experimental in terms of how I present the image and the sound to the audience.”

The album title, Hall of Fame, is also a play on words. It refers to the literal “hall” it was recorded in, but as Truckenbrod’s first release under a new name, it’s “a kind of a tongue-in-cheek reference to the vanities of being a performing artist,” he says.

Most of the instruments on the record are performed by Truckenbrod — featured guest musicians include Read Connolly, who now tours with country star Zach Bryan; Ricky Petraglia, who played drums and toured with Michael Glabicki of Rusted Root and Anand Wilder of Yeasayer; and Colin Bates of SLUGSS — and it’s the first time he mixed an entire project on his own.

He adds that, between recording over COVID and the album release in 2024, the “majority of the time was spent learning how to mix the album.”

“Which was kind of an experiment to see if that's something I can do and if I can do it if I like doing that,” says Truckenbrod. “Something I learned for sure is that there's so much more for me to learn, which was a humbling experience, but at the same time, I felt that it was a necessary step to take in my journey as an artist.”

He adds, "I feel grateful [because] I was able to finish this record on my own [and] because I think so many great songs are written without being captured and shared with an audience.”

---

L.T. Creacher with Zinnia's Garden and ACCABACCA. 8 p.m. Sat., May 25. Brillobox. 4104 Penn Ave., Bloomfield. brilloboxpgh.com