Lane 8 watched his kids make things and wrote an album about it

Daniel Goldstein makes deep house under the name Lane 8, runs the label he releases it on, and has been influential enough at both that you can’t help reading the title of his new album as a statement of intent. ‘Childish’ arrives on 27 September through This Never Happened. Ten tracks.

The title was floating around as an idea and nothing more until he watched his own children making crafts one Sunday morning. The record grew out of that. It’s built on the joy and the confidence he’d watched them building over a few years while he kept himself out of the way. As parents, Goldstein says, they’ve tried to hand over the materials and the space and then step back, letting the kids be themselves and concentrate without anyone interfering.

The sharper half of what he says has nothing to do with parenting. When you make a living from your art, Goldstein points out, people need to like what you make or the whole thing doesn’t work. That’s a producer with a label, a touring show and a large audience saying out loud that the audience is a constraint on the work. Set it next to a kid at a kitchen table on a Sunday, making something for nobody, with no idea whether it’s any good and no particular reason to care either way. Goldstein says that thinking about all of it made him realise his own approach to art has shifted a lot over the years.

‘Childish’ opens the album, soft and built from layered synths, and it’s an invitation to put the constraints down for a while. ‘The Choice’ brings back Arctic Lake, whose voice has lifted his records before and it’s doing it again here. It’s the gentlest thing Goldstein has ever opened a record with.