Youngest Son is singer-songwriter Steve Slagg, who grew up playing Debussy and Charles Wesley on an upright piano in Missouri and now plays his “melodic, narrative, melancholic and hopeful” indie-folk songs on a keyboard in Chicago—sometimes alone, sometimes with collaborators Allison Van Liere (multi-instrumentalist), Lee Ketch (guitars / bass) and Cathy Kuna (cello).

Youngest Son’s most recent album All Saints’ Day (2012) and its companion EP All Souls’ Day (2014) together make a lushly orchestrated indie-folk memoir about grief and prayer. Slagg’s demo reel, Pigshit & Glowing (2011), is full of 3-ish minute piano-and-voice vignettes about the Catholic church, obsessive sexuality, and an extinct volcano in Idaho. All three records can be streamed—along with fully interactive liner notes including lyrics, backstories, and artwork—on the Youngest Son website. In 2012 Youngest Son appeared alongside Kimya Dawson and Andrew Jackson Jihad on the Mountain Goats tribute album Tallahassee Turns Ten.

Currently, Steve is working on a new batch of songs about growing up gay in the evangelical church. You can’t hear them online, but you can hear them in person if you catch a Youngest Son show in Chicago. We’re pretty sure he wishes he were the godson of Randy Newman and Fiona Apple. Does the world need that? We don’t know if the world needs that. We hope the world needs that.
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