E-Mail This Article to a Friend Emoh-core Lou Barlow finds a new home for himself BY JEFF MILLER

Less than 24 hours before I first met indie-rock legend Lou Barlow, at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, his wife, Kathleen, gave birth to the couple’s first child. Hannelore Jule Barlow was named after a German artist whose exhibition Lou and Kathleen saw a few months ago — and Barlow, who’s 38, almost missed her delivery. He was in San Francisco, asleep, when his wife went into labor, so he put himself on stand-by for an early-morning flight to LA, even though his car was hours away in Long Beach. When he got in, he grabbed a cab and raced through rush-hour traffic to the hospital. He made it just an hour and a half before Hannelore was born.

"It was like a fucking movie," he says, as he says most things, with no trace of irony. I’m driving him to his house to pick up a bag of clothes for Kathleen and discuss the other major event in his life: his first real solo album. Emoh has just been released by the indie label Merge, and it stands up against Barlow’s best work. It’s unlike anything he’s done before — from the home recordings of Sentridoh to his iconic ’90s work with Sebadoh and the Folk Implosion (who netted him his only true commercial hit with "Natural One," from the soundtrack to Kids) to his early days playing bass in Dinosaur Jr. Sparsely orchestrated and mostly acoustic, it draws from the quieter side of Bakesale and Harmacy-era Sebadoh. When I mention "Willing To Wait," the lovesick Harmacy song that’s still a live favorite, as the song from Barlow’s past that I hear most in Emoh, he tells me I’m right on the money. Emoh is "Home" backwards, and it seems that on this album, he’s finally figured out what his home is.

Barlow and Kathleen moved from Boston to their nice, two-story house in the super-hip Silverlake section of LA six years ago, when, he thought, times were good and getting better. People were calling and offering collaborations, the good-time-all-the-time life, the rock-star life. There are still elements of all that in Barlow’s life, but now there are also the common centerpieces of family domesticity. The first thing I notice in the house is a brand new baby swing next to a decades-old tube guitar amp. A little further on, there’s a baby seat with CDs — including an Elvis/Little Richard split disc and Barlow label mate Richard Buckner’s Dents and Shells — atop the eating tray. On the shelves, Michael Azerrad’s indie-rock opus Our Band Could Be Your Life shares space with new issues of Child magazine.

Looking back, Barlow admits that the period before he moved to LA represented his commercial career peak. The people he moved to LA to hang out with — well, many of them — moved on when it became clear that his sales were sliding downhill. "It just ended up being horribly, completely superficial. You just realize that all these people who seem so happy are really chronically depressed."

But those sales figures weren’t entirely his fault. In fact, all three of the albums Barlow has released since he’s been in LA were doomed from the start. The Folk Implosion’s eclectic One Part Lullaby was released right when the band’s then-label, Interscope, was merging with A&M and Geffen. "All of a sudden, we were on the same label as Beck, and U2, and Sting. So the radio guys — they’re not just working at Interscope. They’re pitching Brand New Day, or whatever, from Sting." Needless to say, the Folk Implosion wasn’t their first priority.

After that came The Sebadoh, that band’s last official release; Barlow still feels it was the band’s best record, but that didn’t matter, since Sire folded immediately after the album came out. "They dropped us, and everybody else, within two weeks of the release."

You might think it couldn’t have gotten any worse for Barlow, but it did. In 2003, he released The New Folk Implosion, with an all-new band, on the start-up label iMusic. Again, the label collapsed. "That was hilarious, in a totally not hilarious way. It was like — wow, I came to LA to see my dreams die."

Somewhere in the middle of this, the Barlows ended up finding a comfortable niche. "It wasn’t all just based on career success. It became more of who we trusted and becoming a part of where we live, and . . . making this our home."

His musical life has also started to come back together. He’s been notorious for feuding with his band members, yet suddenly there he was on stage with a former nemesis, Dinosaur Jr. leader J. Mascis, at charity functions and touring under the Sebadoh name with his old band mate and long-time friend Jason Lowenstein, playing old songs with a drum machine as back-up. Without a label to release the new material he was writing, he returned to his lo-fi roots, taking out a bank loan to finance a record he knew would be miles away from the electronic production of the Folk Implosion and the major-label politics of Sebadoh’s final years. After years of grudgingly making music with other people’s money, he finally figured out a way to do it himself. "I could spend $5000 to record four songs, and then completely bag the whole thing and not explain it to anybody," he enthuses. "I took it upon myself to say, ‘That doesn’t sound good, I don’t like it, I’m not putting it out.’ Before, if I wasn’t happy, I’d have to be like, ‘Hey guys, I’m not really happy with this.’ " He goes on to mimic a conversation with a studio musician — the kind of conversation that it’s obvious he’s never been comfortable having.

When he was done with the album, he took the recordings to Merge, a very small label, mostly because he admired its integrity and the rest of its roster. "I’d rather be on a label that has artists that I personally believe in. Those are people that share my sensibilities. Now that I’m coming down from this California trip, coming into reality again, that’s what makes sense to me. That’s what made me successful in the first place, was being really realistic about everything."

That’s not to say he doesn’t want his early work to be remembered. Very, very recently, he says, J. Mascis and he were talking about putting together a proper Dinosaur Jr. reunion, news that should have record-shop clerks everywhere throwing PBR-drenched celebrations. Then, the day before his baby was born, former Sebadoh drummer Eric Gaffney showed up unannounced at Barlow’s in-store at Amoeba records in San Francisco. It was the first time Barlow had seen Gaffney in person in more than 10 years, though they’ve been in an e-mail battle for the last six months over the proper re-release of Sebadoh’s catalogue. "It’s been amazing — six months of e-mails that say things like, ‘Here’s the reason you suck.’ A decade of literally not seeing him, and he shows up that night. What was great about it was that the minute that I saw him, rather than being like, ‘You fucker,’ I was like, ‘It’s Eric! What’s up, bro?’ " Instead of hashing out their differences, they caught up over beer and pizza.

That brings up the question of Barlow’s legacy — he may be uncomfortable about discussing it, but it’s still staring him in the face. Ten years ago, Spin called Barlow "The Most Sensitive Boy in Indie Rock." Now, Conor Oberst, the Bright Eyes sensation who, like Barlow, recorded his early work at home on a four-track, has been dubbed the "indie break-up bard" by the same magazine; the article describes his songs as having "varying shades of white-knuckle sincerity," words that in an earlier era could have been used to describe any number of Barlow ballads. Kathleen hates Bright Eyes, so it’s not surprising that Lou dismisses the similarities. It doesn’t take a magnifying glass, though, to see that Barlow and Bright Eyes are on opposite sides of indie-rock’s 10-year hype loop.

All of this pressure coming at once could be too much for a different current-and-future indie-rock dad. "It could be really overwhelming," he says, "but maybe this is the time for this to happen." With a new kid, a new album, and a new beginning, Lou Barlow may have finally discovered what it means to be home.