Todd Lipscomb didn’t deliberate very hard or very long in conceiving the concept around the second album from his locally based band The Kentucky Struts. Like most great ideas, it was a flash of illumination in a contemplative moment.
“Last December, I was eating a bowl of cereal for breakfast and it just hit,” the vocalist/guitarist says from a control room at Sound Images, where bandmate Adam Pleiman is employed. “We all have these multi-tiered lives with music and family and friends, and mine is kind of intense with those things because I’m ADD and a creative spirit. So I was trying to come up with something that would literally involve my wife, who’s a horse lover and an advocate of animal rights.”
The umbrella idea was fairly basic — take the 12 songs that had been recorded for the Roots/Rock band’s sophomore album and reworked after splitting from its previous label, and offer them for download through the Struts’ website, one track a month throughout 2011. Then at year’s end, release a physical album.
Seems simple, until you factor in the other parameters that Lipscomb incorporated into the plan — finding 12 artists to design graphic images depicting a horse at least marginally inspired by one of the songs. Fittingly titled The Year of the Horse, the album would also benefit area horse rescue organization Speak Up for Horses, which will receive 50 percent of the album’s proceeds.
The Kentucky Struts celebrate their new release Saturday at the Southgate House with The Sundresses. Go here to read Brian Baker's full interview.
