Inside North Wollywood’s Masonic Lodge, Lukas Frank – better known under his moniker Storefront Church – is preaching to the converted. To a full crowd, the LA musician’s melodramatic, layered soundscapes echo and soar. He comes equipped, playing songs from his captivating new record, Ink & Oil. Released this June, the album sees Lukas explore his surreal experiences with memories and nightmares through his signature sweeping, crescendoing sound.

A few months prior, Frank was on stage in London at Brixton Windmill, playing drums for Esmé Creed-Miles’ debut full-band gig. An actor by trade (you’ll see her in Hanna, The Doll Factory, Silver Haze), Creed-Miles is expanding her voice towards a raw and emotive sound. For this feature, the two friends and artists reconnected from LA to London for a chat with many topics.

Esmé Creed-Miles: We should talk about how we know each other and why we worked together.
Lukas Frank: We were working on your live set together. I came over to London to help you rehearse and I played drums for a couple of shows. Now you don’t even need me anymore. Now you can fly free. You’re an autonomous rock artist.

ECM: I can fish on my own.
LF: What’s next in terms of how you want the set to evolve?

ECM: I’ve been thinking a lot about theatre and the arc of something when you’re performing. Not just having it be like a tracklist, but having it be really intentional in terms of the shape of the journey you want to bring people on. To that end, the set could benefit from some more intimate, pared-back songs that I don’t have recorded yet. That’s what I’m internally focusing on.
LF: It’s cool how when you have a set of your own songs and you’re like, “OK, this is what’s missing.” Then you write towards that or evolve the set in a way towards it.

ECM: Have you felt that with all your songs being… Well, not all of them, I guess, but a lot of them are very big or they end very big – they build.
LF: Yes, when I first started playing shows, I was like, “Fuck all my songs have big endings and I need to write some songs that don’t do that.” For sure. I felt that I had to write some of what I call ‘cruisers’, they just kind of cruise all the way through, you know?

ECM: Yeah, I need a cruiser or two.
LF: I feel like you have you have one or two.

ECM: For the readers, you should talk about the orange.
LF: The orange story? I can talk about the orange story. There’s one song on the album called Words in the Rind. And when I was five or six, my Great Uncle Roger, disappeared from prison in Arizona and all that was left in his cell was an orange. My family used to joke that he’d turned into an orange. But as a kid, I overheard my parents talking about this and I immediately started to have nightmares about my Great Uncle Roger coming to visit me in the middle of the night. And he couldn’t really speak, it seemed like his mouth wasn’t working. He was holding an orange and he peeled back the skin and something was written in the rind. But I was always way too terrified to read whatever the fuck he had written. That was a recurring nightmare for years until it stopped abruptly and I sort of forgot about it through my adolescence. Then during pandemic time, there were a bunch of fires in Los Angeles and when the smoke covered the sun it looked like a big glowing orange. Suddenly all the dreams hit me like a ton of bricks and started to recur, only this time in an evolved way, where I felt like I was seeing more and more of my Uncle’s story. I felt like all the dreams were from his point of view. I would see him walking around his prison and it’d be filled with birds, or he’d be sitting down to have lunch and everyone would be covered in birds. I guess it would feel like I was having lunch. I’d look around and everyone would have birds on them but no one would acknowledge it. In one of the dreams I opened the door and birds flew straight into my eyes, all sorts of crazy imagery.

ECM: Quite biblical.
LF: It was a little biblical. I was really afraid of going to sleep, and so I became nocturnal for a while – I’d be awake at night and sleep during the day. That didn’t solve the problem, I really kind of lost it during that period of time. I was on the East Coast alone and I started feeling like I was seeing things during the day, but I was probably just sleep-deprived. I thought I saw birds in the grocery store and I would get these weird phone calls where it would be an unknown number but they’d talk to me as though they they knew me. I got really paranoid about that.

 ECM: You were actually getting those phone calls?
LF: Yeah, I got really weird phone calls during that time.

ECM: Were you sober at the time?
LF: I was stone cold sober, which was even more concerning. I felt like I was having hallucinations. I wasn’t on prescription meds. I’d been sober for four years at this point. I was really losing it. And I was in the middle of a woods on the East Coast in the middle of writing this record.

ECM: Your whole experience is so filmic. I hadn’t put this together, but your artwork is all super surreal and dreamlike.
LF: A lot of the album became about collections of experiences like that throughout my life. There’s a song on the album called Burn the Roses, which is about this person who came up to me when I was on tour and started talking to me like they knew me. They were like, “You and I, we have a bond and it’s a one-sided bond.” They said that they could see what was going to happen and feel what was going to happen. But they sort of described what the next couple of years in my life were going to look like and that he and I were going to be together in some way, not romantically, but that we have a one-sided bond. So that song is loosely about that. The album sort became a collection of surreal experiences that I embellished.

ECM: Do you believe that you can manifest friendships, creatively, or professionally or romantically, people coming into and out of your life? Because it feels like you’re manifesting a…
LF: A lot of quite weird experiences.

ECM: Strange people being drawn to you. Like, you don’t seem that batshit to me, you’re actually quite well-adjusted for an artist. [Lukas laughs] It feels like you’re a filter for these things that pass through you a little bit. 
LF: I think people put out weird energy that we can’t really pick up on. One of my good friends, Margaret, has a great story where she got into a really big fight with her dad over the phone on her way to a veterinary hospital, and when she got there the person working at the counter said, “Did you just get in a fight with your dad?” And she’s like, “What?” And the person is like, “You should forgive him.” And she burst into tears. This person working in the vet just somehow knew.

“I was in the middle of a woods on the East Coast in the middle of writing this record.”

ECM: Have you seen that video of Erykah Badu being like, “I’m really pissed that the aliens haven’t abducted me”? [both laugh] Like, “I’m so perfect for them, please come and abduct me. I’m ready. I want to know.” She’s right, if I was an alien, the first human specimen I would want to study would be Erykah Badu.
LF: I’m reading a book about alien abduction. It’s called Dawn by Octavia E. Butler.

ECM: I’m familiar.
LF: I would recommend it to any sci-fi heads out there.

ECM: Do you believe?
LF: No, should I? Do you?

ECM: I don’t know.
LF: You’re trying to manifest one?

ECM: I actually had a phobia of aliens when I was a kid…
LF: I need to ask you questions. You have some finished songs? What’s the plan for the music? I feel like you haven’t publicly spoken about it much outside of social media.

ECM: That’s true. I’m still filming The Sandman. I’ve been filming it for the past year – I’m now publicly allowed to say. I’m playing Delirium who’s really iconic apparently.
LF: Are you going to become like a Comic Con girly?

ECM: Babes, I’m going to be like Comic Con’ing it out.
LF: So sick. I’ve somehow never read Sandman and I am kind of a Comic Con girly myself.

ECM: Well, you should. This season I’ve been blown away by what they’ve been doing. They’ve just upped their game. Even being on set, it’s unreal. The sets they’re building are like nothing I’ve ever seen. But there’s no plan with regard to my music currently. I’m just waiting until I finish filming so I can then start to fully invest my time and do more shows and things like that.
LF: I have some rapid-fire questions for you. What’s my worst song?

ECM: OK, wait I have to go on your Spotify. I don’t know if I have a worst one, I definitely have some ones that I listen to all the time and then some that didn’t move me in the same way.
LF: What’s a skipper?

ECM: OK, a skipper for me. This is going to be so rude – I wasn’t that into the covers…
LF: Pick one. You’re not going to break my heart.

“In one of the dreams I opened the door and birds flew straight into my eyes, all sorts of crazy imagery.”

ECM: Can I tell you which ones I really liked?
LF: No, that’s the opposite of the question.

ECM: But isn’t that good for publicity?
LF: Sure, you can you can say which ones you really like. You can shit-sandwich it.

ECM: From the OG record, Us Against Us and Fraction from Under the Grove are two favourites. And from the new record, I think Tapping On The Glass is probably my favourite.
LF: OK, marry, fuck, kill The Beatles.

ECM: That’s such a good question. OK, I’d marry Paul because he’s such marriage material. Maybe George… I love George so much. I don’t want to fuck with John. I mean obviously he’s one of my favorite artists of all time…
LF: I think you kill John just to keep the timeline the same.

ECM: OK, I kill John – and then poor Ringo…
LF: You’re going to pity fuck Ringo?

ECM: I’m going to pity fuck Ringo. [both laugh] Honestly, he’s a really good drummer, but that’s like a fourth option, that’s on the side.
LF: OK. Is John Mayer actually kind of good now?

ECM: I can’t name you a single John Mayer song.
LF: What is your last Google search?

ECM: How do you find out what your last Google search is?
LF: You go to your history?

ECM: ‘Larry Eyler serial killer.’
LF: Crushed ice or cubed ice?

ECM: …Cubed ice.
LF: I want the record to reflect that you took a long time to think about that. Should people stop getting tattoos?

ECM: Kind of yeah, honestly.
LF: Is dance the worst art form? That’s a leading question…

ECM: Dance is the most superior art form that exists, in my opinion.
LF: What’s your favourite joke?

ECM: I have one. What do you call a fly with no wings?
LF: What?

ECM: A walk.
LF: Damn, that was good. Do you believe in God?

ECM: Undecided.
LF: Do you have a party trick?

ECM: No, but I fart a lot in public, it’s really embarrassing.
LF: Cool, I’m glad that’s on record. Why aren’t I famous yet?

ECM: Because you don’t have that ‘it’ factor.
LF: That’s what it is. Alright, that’s the interview. Thank you for indulging me in this, it’s always a pleasure. This is off-the-record by the way. I don’t want anyone to know that it’s always a pleasure chatting with you.

ECM: I’d love to be able to say the same about you, Lukas. [both laugh] Did you Google those questions?
LF: No, I came up with them.

ECM: That’s really impressive.
LF: You know, I used to have an interview show.

ECM: Did you?
LF: Yeah, me and Cole [Zachary Smith, DIIV], we had a Magic: The Gathering-themed interview show.

ECM: Wow, is it on YouTube?
LF: It is, it’s called ThoughtSeize Interviews. It’s named after an iconic Magic card.

ECM: It doesn’t really roll off the tongue…
LF: I know. [laughs] Thank you for doing this.

Follow Storefront Church on Instagram.
Follow Esmé Creed-Miles on Instagram.