“All my words, now they’re letting me down,” sings Grian Chatten on “Last Time Every Time Forever,” his voice over that gorgeous, slightly off-beam instrumentation that Leonardo in the electronic age Under the direction of Leonard Cohen, this instrument might light a fire. .
We’ve never heard the singer, he’s better suited to deliver a muscular post-punk style with his band Fontaine District, as before.exist chaos of flies (now available through Partisan), his first solo record, he’s looking for something and is often unsure of where he stands. He’s surrounded by people in his shoes, from gamblers looking for a break from reality in a seedy waterfront casino to loved ones taking their first steps toward the other side.
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chaos of flies is a marvel of odd character work and rich, surprising melodies, with live production provided by longtime collaborator Dan Carey. An ominous sense of power that drives much of Fontaine’s music is pushed aside in favor of isolated, vulnerable songs that place their authors in unfamiliar circumstances. “It’s weird getting to know yourself so deeply,” he said.
when you announce chaos of flies, You said you wanted to bring out “some exaggerated aspects of my soul”. What exactly do you mean by that?
Well, I’m not sure what caused it, but I do have a very dramatic, fantastical lifestyle. I used to get really extreme about things and then nothing at all. I went from being numb to believing everything was an emotional cartoon. Many songs are written in the latter state. Some songs make me feel like I’ve come so far that I’m almost embarrassed. I almost flinched when I heard their voices.
How did that feeling influence the decision not to bring those songs to the band?
It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. I’m not so sure that the idea of doing a solo record came before self-indulgence. For a song like “All of the People,” I feel like if I were to play with Fontaines DC, I might be a little worried that it would be like the Grian show.
It’s funny because I feel like, from the outside, keeping them out of these songs is out of respect for them as creative people. They come from you, and the Fontaines DC material doesn’t get to that point yet.
I don’t want to deprive myself of the chemistry we had when we stumbled upon a five-piece idea, you know? Songwriting is easy when you’re doing everything, everything you’re good at. You can knock them out. But we have a really magical relationship where people bring nothing into the room and leave with everything. Why would I lie to myself, bring the whole album and say “it’s done”? That was so fucking scary.
It’s a solo record written mostly on acoustic guitar, but it’s not redundant. Horns, keys, and strings are all sounds as important as your own.
There are several tracks with fully formed arrangements, such as “Bob’s Casino” and “Last Time Every Time Forever”. Those songs wouldn’t exist without those strings and those horns, and then I think we’d open up other songs to that instrumentation in order to have some cohesion.
Your own presence is also interesting here. These are some of the most overtly poetic lyrics we’ve heard from you, but I think you’ve disproved that by focusing so much on the melody. You haven’t taken the obvious way of standing over a piano or something and saying them.
Maybe I believe I’m better at melodies than people think. But I don’t necessarily want to turn Fontaine District into that. I guess I want to exercise those muscles that keep going, rather than committing it to a somewhat sacred operation that I can do in the relative shadow of my own personal project.
You wrote “Fairlies” between Jerez, Spain, and Los Angeles, while other songs are deeply rooted closer to home, like the east coast of Ireland, or the four walls during the pandemic. Are you someone who is generally inspired by a sense of place?
I like the feeling of being dwarfed, not because of tall buildings, but because of history. I’m very nostalgic.This is a bad reference, but sometimes I feel like Owen Wilson midnight in paris. I could easily be picked up in a wagon full of dead writers, you know?
Do you want to put yourself into that world?
Maybe I’m running from my own smallness.
