The liner notes for Light in the Attic’s new reissue of L’Amour, the only known album by an artist known as Lewis*,* read more like a murder mystery than a making-of. In 1983, a guy named Randall Wulff showed up at Music Lab studio in Los Angeles with a white Mercedes convertible, a beautiful girlfriend, perfect hair, and a handful of ethereal synth-pop-folk tunes. Wulff then hired photographer Ed Colver, best known for documenting the West Coast punk scene, to shoot the starkly monochromatic album cover. By the time Colver realized the check had bounced, Wulff had disappeared. There were rumors that he had gone to Las Vegas or possibly Hawaii, but most likely he had returned to Alberta, Canada, where nearly twenty-five years later a vinyl collector named Jon Murphy came across a copy of L’Amour at a flea market.
Full of gently dissolving melodies and gossamer synths (credited to a guy named Philip Lees, also a mystery), the album has become crate-digger lore, as much for the backstory as for the music itself. As of this reissue, Wulff remains at large. Was he a con man, as some claim? A drug dealer, as others attest? An apparition? An alien visitor? A record collector hoax? Did he really have connections to the Duke Power fortune? Was he really involved with Christie Brinkley? How does cowboy novelist Louis L’Amour fit into the story? And where is Wulff now, if he is still around? Jack D. Fleischer, the filmmaker/historian who penned the liners and spent years looking for the artist, tracked down Wulff’s nephew, who had vivid memories of his uncle but lost touch with him many years ago. Fleischer came across another pseudonym under which Wulff recorded a few other albums, but he neglects to disclose the name. “As of this writing,” he notes, “Randall is essentially a ghost.”
The hazy story doesn’t bolster the music, but rather seems an extension of this strange and singular album. If you think of Los Angeles in the early ‘80s, you’re probably thinking New Wave synth-pop, cocaine-fueled and neon-lit—and L’Amour is anything but. Rather than sunny and hook-laden, these songs convey an ephemeral melancholy, blurred at the edges yet more potent for being somewhat indistinct. This is music of retreat, not assertion. The synths rise and ebb curiously, occasionally punctuating the songs with quiet starbursts but mostly moving with a logic of their own, often with no regard for Lewis’s vocals or piano playing. He doesn’t sing so much as he mumbles melodically, as though perpetually falling awake. The effect is quieting but too spooky to be New Agey. If Randall Wulff was an L.A. player, then Lewis was a bedroom auteur.
L’Amour sounds like double-exposed film: full of odd, unrecognizable shapes that fade and overlap seemingly at uncalculated angles. Any concrete theme must be deduced not from the lyrics—which are persistently unintelligible—but from song titles like “I Thought the World of You” and “Even Rainbows Turn Blue”, which hint at the album’s ruminative mood. Lewis intimates romantic longing on a cellular level, and even the reveries implied by “Let’s Fall in Love Tonight” and “Romance for Two” (dedicated to Brinkley) sound more like memories of bliss than promises of future happiness. Yet, despite the album cover's implication, Lewis is no weepy miserability; rather, these songs project a world-weary dignity. “Love Showered Me” ripples with sci-fi synth burbles, as Lewis testifies tenderly, his voice fading from a relatively assertive croon to a hollowed-out whisper. It’s a peculiar performance, yet powerful.
The jauntiest tune here is “Cool Night in Paris”, which mixes vague chanson with what sounds like acoustic blues picking. Lewis’s voice is all cooed vowels, as though you’re overhearing a passerby speaking a strange language, yet he nimbly punctuates his sweet nothings with a sharp, decisive guitar lick, which may be the most straightforward thing on the entire album. It’s the Seine glimpsed in a half-remembered dream, referring not to a particular place but to the idea of that place. Likewise, the subtle allusions to "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You" on "Romance for "Two" and to "Funny How Time Slips Away" on "Things Just Happen That Way" are inscrutable, especially because Lewis doesn't seem to inhabit the same world as Frankie Valli or Willie Nelson.
Did Wulff intend those specific references? Or are the resemblances merely in the imagination of the listener trying to make sense of the music? It’s impossible to tell with this Rorschach of an album. These songs work by insinuation: the way the synths sidle up to the piano on “Like to See You Again”, the way Lewis’s illegible vocals imply indecipherable meaning, the way the album ultimately invades your imagination. It can be weirdly addictive, with each subsequent listen promising to reveal some essential secret or shed light on the man on the album cover. Instead, somehow L’Amour sounds less there with each spin, beckoning you into its hazy world even as it dissolves into gray. The mystery is so perfect that it’d be a tragedy to solve it.
