Featured Essay: Alt-Country First: A Conversation with Labrador’s Pat King about his latest and greatest LP, "My Version of Desire"

by Matt DeMello

Genre definitions are a child’s game, but it’s worth asking just what qualifies as “alt-country” these days anyway. Many of music’s middle-class indie rock elite have made some sort of crossover album, often obliging their previously basement fanbases to lap steel draped in arena reverb.

Tracking an ongoing debate from the last fifteen years that we’ve seen The Songwriter so ascendant as a social status that Father John Misty can’t seem to name a song anything else… is a more complicated story.

 As legacy media has waned and the importance of cultural criticism has also suddenly vanished, arguments about novelty and the distinction between clichés and traditions have disappeared. No one’s looking for a new Animal Collective so much as the next John Prine.

Looking at the critically-christened slate of goofy mopers like MJ Lenderman and his more acerbic original quintet Wednesday, there seems to be great algorithmic and word-of-mouth reward these days for trafficking in Pavement riffs with just enough genre signifiers to pass as anything else. 

Still, nay-sayers may have a point when they say – not unlike the rasp-heavy interlopers Deer Tick before them – alt-country in the new roaring ’20s can often feel like exceptional indie rock from 30 years ago with fiddle, in similarly choice words Tom Petty had for corporate radio country music in the Dubya era.

More notably, hardly any of it really clocks in above 140 beats per minute, which I guess you can thank Wilco for (queue Jeff Tweedy’s joke from Kicking Television).

But if we take country music as a collection of traditions that allows for a certain dance with well-worn cliches, then … doesn’t that make traditionalists like Paul Weller and the Jam a project with more to say than what Joe Strummer-worshippers might give them credit for? Doesn’t that allow for a few more deft arrangement choices for the sonic palette?

These are the sorts of questions that arise whilst listening to music with the ears of Pat King - Philadelphia’s full-throated evangelist for the oddly lived life. His band, monicker, whatever you want to call it, Labrador, spent the better part of the last year moonlighting as a power trio. Which, on top of the state of country music and the country itself,  is giving all the more reason for King to repost Paul Weller and company in his Instagram stories ahead of his best release yet.

My Version of Desire came out last week, punctuating a particularly lusty month of May. Pat is joining me for the vague promise of a podcast and swears he - in his words - is “California sober.” It’s more than I can say for myself since hopping on the Labrador bandwagon a few years ago. Right as the pandemic started dying down, he and fellow East Coast DIY kindred spirits and shout punk extraordinaire Perennial began poking their heads into certain Brooklyn and Philadelphia venues.

Our first official interaction was through his Twitter DMs, where I confessed to taking major inspiration for my own sobriety journey from his masterful, ballad-driven 2023 LP, Hold the Door For Strangers. 

Songs like “Guy With a Job (No One Wants)” and the title track overflowed with an empathy and isolationism that are so thoroughly intertwined, it seems exceptional for not treading on a single lick of therapyspeak - whether in lyrics or ethos. Do you know how hard it is to find music like this in 2025?

Out of the gun in his latest album cycle, Pat returns his attention to characters like me, struggling to find the same equilibrium: not just finding a better way of being yourself but also somewhat preoccupied with what to call it all. The thundering Hammond B-3 line and devil-may-care stomp of “Dry Out in June” - the album’s lead single - captures the inner guilt trip of knowing you need to clean up your act all rubbing against the inconvenient fact that the weather is just too lovely for that kind of thing?

The track also lets loose a vision for the Labrador project that scratches a musical itch deep within Pat’s ambitions for the project:

“Paul Weller is a huge untapped resource for people in America,” he tells me behind a webcam on a Wednesday afternoon in April. “I think he’s one of the most underrated songwriters. Whenever I read about the Jam, it’s similar to Ray Davies in a way. 

The subject matter is so British that it didn’t quite translate over here, as in the Kinks’ heyday. But I feel like when you hear a song like ‘That’s Entertainment’ or ‘Going Underground’ - these songs that were big social statements he had, about being working class under Thatcherism. It’s so parallel to the under-discussed class divides we have in America.” 

Truer words hardly ever spoken by a Yank even if - strictly musically speaking - “Dry Out in June” is a bit more “Town Called Malice” than “Just Who is the 5 O’clock Hero?”

To the less indie rock idiosyncratic ears - like, say, my wife, who is also quite a Labrador fan - the descriptor “power trio CCR” is a tag Pat has heard a lot lately as he’s been workshopping this lineup through lynchpin northeast DIY venues.

While determined to walk the unenviable tightrope of expressing bourgeois male disaffection with great purpose, Pat also manages to let loose a thoroughly disarming and open expression of sexuality on My Vision. 

Once you get through the 30-second Jack White opening, the title track sounds like a throatier American Morrissey trying to tap into his inner Otis Redding, confessing to a version of desire with “gospel songs about fucking / with strict instructions to the choir” – which is a hell of a way to describe the album itself.

The allusions to soul and classic R&B are hardly an accident; in fact, part and parcel with the musical traditions Labrador inherits from the Mod movement. Pat has advertised the project in the past as “maximum alt-country” - an homage to how guitarists like Pete Townshend and later Weller would see their playing as filling for a James Brown horn section rather than a distinct electric instrument unto itself.

With a title like My Version of Desire, the album still delicately avoids being unabashedly horny on main, opting instead to use sex as symbolic of living a completely lived life. It’s also a trick King has no doubt deftly translated from classic R&B, and itself represents no small feat. The fleeting reference comes and goes, but the rest of the album’s themes address Pat’s focus, which he shares openly in our conversation.

If you must know, Pat actually grew up as the child of Rolling Stones fans in a quite musical, but moreover deeply artistic, family. There’s a painter and high school art teacher father (“he loved the Rolling Stones, Tom Waits, and Phillip Glass”), a new-wave mom (“loved the Talking Heads”), and at least one bassist-jazzhead sibling among the King ranks, at least of what Pat mentions behind the microphone. He’s only relatively recently found time to dig into the Beatles discography under his father’s “contrarianism” for pop. 

That sort of balance of unpretentious listening curiosity, paired with a robust and abandoned career in music journalism, keeps Labrador both exceptionally nuanced for nerdy ears yet deceptively approachable to normies.

In his own telling on the podcast, Pat’s path to songwriting is an odyssey that starts at a high school on the Vermont/New York border, centered around a certain Deadhead art teacher’s interest in Jerry Garcia’s folk side projects. It goes on to sound like something out of Christopher Guest’s A Mighty Wind to hear him describe it. “I was the high voice,” in said ensemble, Pat giggles, which sounds like something out of early 90s Phish lore.

He goes on to detail his starts and stops in DIY’s indie rock underclass, starting with his freelance writing for “night-before” reviews for Bowery Presents in Brooklyn around a decade ago. It’s a period that serves as great inspiration for many a chemically-driven evening that populates the Labrador lyrical universe to this point. He eventually finds his “best friends” in Perennial just as COVID sets in. Our discussion of mod music and its R&B influence seems plucked straight from Perennial guitarist Chad Jewitt’s social media feeds.

“I can’t downplay how important that band is for me,” Pat says, echoing most of DIY Twitter since 2023. “I found (Perennial’s 2022 LP) In the Midnight Hour and was just obsessed with them.”

Chad is one of those people who says he’s going to do something, and he does it," Pat notes in total admiration. “You want to take notes from him.”

Pat’s recorded musical journey up to the encounter is a long and winding set of backroads, alleyways, and fence-jumping-style adventures that involve something called “destination recording.” All of which gives a lot of Pat’s ideas on My Version all the low-stakes impulses of a kid in a candy shop when he’s driving punk-adjacent arrangements, but never lets that excitement drown out the most important lessons he’s honed so far in the name of craft.

When asked if he thinks of anything he does as a gospel or spiritual music. In turn, Pat hones in on his unabashed thesis with My Version: “A big thing I was trying to write about on this record was the concept of shame as a shirking of repression, whether it’s how you navigate a society that has built systems to make you feel terrible about everything.”

 Maybe what makes My Version of Desire King’s most exciting album yet is that it is, first and foremost, a vocal — and therefore melodic — record. King’s voice has a bit of a strainer’s croon, equal parts untrained and deeply informed enough to find that small-g gospel hymn in whatever story he’s telling. Like that of Primal Scream frontman and subject of the eponymous track “Bobby Gillespie”.

When I mention this to Pat, he points to a couplet from that particular song: “This ain’t the gospel / this is Monday music.” 

He points to the line as that acceptance of the everyday slings and arrows becoming the choice we make when we wake up every morning, and where Labrador’s philosophical agenda takes central aim. If you’re into overdosing on sincerity, King’s approach to the messy places of recovery of any kind – chemical, financial, habitual, familial – may have no equal, not even among the likes of Craig Finn.

Yet much like Finn and Co. did around 2010’s Heaven is Whenever, Pat reflects deeply on reaching this point in his discography, his fifth album, from the depths of the DIY circuit: “I’ve probably made five full-lengths in my entire life. And I think when you approach it, at least for me, I want to think about a sequence. A few of the songwriters I love master that.”

Besides living long enough to make a fifth album, if there’s anything Pat shares overtly with a songwriter like John Fogerty - or even his first love, Paul Westerberg - it’s an uncanny ability to write through depression and depressing themes without ever losing his edge or pacing. Also, for sequencing at least: never letting any particular single outweigh the chemistry of songs amounting to more than the sum of their parts.

My Version of Desire stands next to Cosmo’s Factory and Pleased to Meet Me as weathered linchpins that stand for survival and consistency. Each are furtively introspective records that are asking what exactly is all this longevity even for while sparing enough time for the inevitable, and well deserved, victory lap. 

LINK: https://iono.fm/e/15645770

Matt DeMello is a composer and songwriter based in Peekskill, NY. Originally from the suburbs of Providence, RI, he grew up on a healthy diet of showtunes, hip-hop, and prog rock bands. He leads editorial content for Emerj Artificial Intelligence Research. He has hosted many a podcast in his time professionally, and can be heard hosting the ‘AI in Business’ podcast for Emerj and Captivity Scene. He is somehow best known for a 2xLP+ “stoner Christmas rock opera” about Cassandra the Red-Nosed Reindeer leading a communist revolution of the North Pole in the War on Christmas, all because the fascist dictator Santa Claus deadnamed her.  

Pat King (He/Him) is a songwriter, record nerd, publicist and reformed music writer who lives in the wonderful city of Philadelphia. To some, he is known as the leader of the Maximum Alt-Country band Labrador, whose new album ‘My Version Of Desire’ was released on May 30th, 2025 via No Way Of Knowing and Safe Suburban Home Records.