STACK #142 Aug 2016

FEATURE MUSIC

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 "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." 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.

MUSIC

hopefully the thousandth time maybe, [something else] will manifest itself as the important line,” he says. “That happens for me with Beatles

It's all mixed up in a big spaghetti, but that's kind of the way life is

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.”

how they’ve impacted me down the years. Some

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

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

• 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.

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