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FEATURE
MUSIC
MUSIC
with Fanning’s manager and label honcho they
decided to go with two records. But it wasn’t
about grouping the tracks by style: “We were
thinking, should we go for a folky side and a
rock side? But it worked better to… almost have
a lyrical thread.”
Thematically, the two records ended
up following a parable of decision and
consequence – and it wasn’t intentional, in
the beginning. “These were just the things
that were starting to come up,” says Fanning.
“Generally, most things I’ve written about
throughout my life have happened to me,
personally. But with these [new tracks], I’ve
used the same voice – the same vehicle – but
they’re not necessarily things that’ve happened
to me personally. They’re more things that I’ve
witnessed. The initial idea was of being in my
forties now, and looking back at decisions I’ve
made maybe as a teenager, then in my 20s, and
how they’ve impacted
me down the years. Some
of them were big decisions that had very little
impact, and there were others that were small
decisions that had massive impacts. It’s how
those things manifest themselves,” he says.
“Your everyday life, your internal life – it’s both.
It’s all mixed up in a big spaghetti. But that’s
kind of the way life is.”
That’s the subtle pasta puzzle of
Civil Dusk
:
that there are unexpected connections between
songs and within songs (and there’ll likely be
plenty more to discover with the release of
Brutal Dawn
), and it’s more rewarding the more
you listen. Fanning speaks about track four,
Restless
, and the line that’s most important
to him – “Can you explain?” – rather than the
most obvious lyrical hook, “How could you be
so reckless?” He feels the most pertinent lyric
is the protagonist’s need to hear the antagonist
explain the reasoning behind their behaviour,
rather than just rhetorically castigating the
action. “When you write something and you put
it out there, you think that there’s a key thing
in there that is actually the thing that unlocks
the whole story, right. I think the secret to
writing records where you can keep getting
value out of them as a listener over time, is
that maybe what someone hears the first
time… well, after the hundredth time, or
hopefully the thousandth time maybe,
[something else] will manifest itself
as the important line,” he says.
“That happens for me with Beatles
songs. A lot of the time when
you know a song so well, like
Strawberry Fields Forever
, you don’t
even listen to the words, you’re just
singing along wishing you were John
Lennon. But then something pops out
at you. That’s one of the fantastic things
about The Beatles; it’s kind of like the golf
of music, you can never get to the end of it.
You’ll never beat it. Like ‘Oh, I’m finished now
– Beatles are done. I’ll move on to The Kinks.’
You’ll never have ‘done’ The Beatles.”
It's all mixed up in
a big spaghetti, but
that's kind of the
way life is
•
Civil Dusk
is out
August 5 via Dew Process/
Universal.
Brutal Dawn
is
out February 10, 2017, and is
available for pre-order now
on the JB Hi-Fi website.
LET IT GO
The pull to spend time unnecessarily perfecting
something still messes with Fanning
–
even at this
late stage before release. But he can evoke an Italian
Master and the most expensive rock album ever
produced to explain how he lets things go.
"It’s the da Vinci thing of like, 'Art is never finished,
it’s only abandoned', which is so f-cking true. When
do you stop? Even now
–
we got the masters back
probably a month ago... and I just listened to it again
yesterday when I was packing my bag and there was
already things, like – could’ve done that better. But
you just have to commit. It'd be like f-cking [Guns N'
Roses']
Chinese Democracy
! That’s what it’d turn into:
a 13-year album that is actually a stinker anyway.
So it’s just a matter of accepting the fact that there’s
nothing perfect in a record; it’s the best it can be at the
time. If you mean it, even if it’s sh-t and you mean it,
it’s better than just throwing it away."