Luke Roberts

Luke Roberts, the indie folk and Americana singer-songwriter, grew up in East Nashville, where his early development included performances of song and dance within church settings plus saxophone instruction ahead of his turn to acoustic guitar. Adventures through the city's tougher districts, above all the former train yards, supplied the narratives and figures that populated his first album. Kyle Spence of Harvey Milk handled the recording sessions in Athens, Georgia, resulting in the 2010 release of Big Bells and Dime Songs on Ecstatic Peace!, which Thrill Jockey then reissued the following year. Once touring concluded, Roberts changed residences three times, leaving Brooklyn—the location where he had composed and tracked that debut—for Montana before settling back in his Nashville birthplace. He completed the more elaborately arranged 2012 album The Iron Gates with Marky Nevers at the Throop and Newport facilities in Nashville. During the next four years Roberts pursued his travel impulses across New York, Cambodia, Thailand, and Kenya, the last of these locales supplying the principal creative impetus for his third studio album, Sunlit Cross, which appeared in 2016.