“Big Picture extrapolates ‘love at its temporary best,’ and it proves lasting. You might be rubbed emotionally raw by this quietly candid record, but you’ll be comfortable lovestruck too.” — Bust Magazine
Today, Fenne Lily presents her new single/video, ‘In My Own Time,’ from Big Picture, her forthcoming album out April 14th on Dead Oceans. One of Big Picture’s more delicate moments, the achingly introspective ‘In My Own Time’ paints a scene of insulated intimacy tinged with a fear that life is passing by all too quickly. With lines like “sometimes I feel like I’m just killing time here // or maybe it’s killing me,” Fenne moves through the myriad frames of mind associated with a fading or changing identity. As tender harmonies by Katy Kirby accompany lush guitar lines, Fenne reflects on a period of being “simultaneously sheltered from and crushed by a fear of the future,” examining her conflicted feelings about a smaller, slower life. Every song on Big Picture feels like an ode to two people helping each other survive, but none more than this.
‘In My Own Time’ started as a guitar lick Fenne couldn’t find a home for, and became the album track that took the longest to write. She picked away at it over the summer, working from journal entries on the roof of her flat, singing whatever words felt the least embarrassing to verbalize. The song’s first demo, recorded at home with her band, is almost identical to the final version. With no drum kit at home, Fenne’s drummer, James Luxton, built percussion from things in her kitchen – herb jar shakers, spatulas on a notebook, finger tapping on a pan. That percussion ended up being added to the studio version of the song alongside the real drums.
The accompanying video, directed by Fenne and Jim Larson, sees Fenne and her backing band in a raucous bar, performing and interacting with various patrons and ventriloquist doppelgangers. It’s the brainchild of Fenne and my roommate, Zander (Sharp), cooking up a risotto over a bottle (or two) of wine and talking about making an overly-cinematic, borderline violent visual companion for, ultimately, a love song. Fenne elaborates on ‘In My Own Time,’ “This song’s about the weight of stasis — about time moving too quickly and too slowly and every mistake feeling both permanent and inconsequential. When it came to writing this video concept, I wanted it to reflect the twisted aspects of a love that’s found in the midst of chaos and the subsequent feeling of being inanimate in your own story. All that, in the style of Terminator 2.”
From the first line to the last, Big Picture finds Fenne seeking clarity in the uncertain; comfort in the uncomfortable. It’s a gorgeous portrait of Fenne’s last two years, tracked live in co-producer Brad Cook’s North Carolina studio. Throughout, the album delineates the phases of love and becomes a map of comfort vs. claustrophobia. Each song provides insight into Fenne’s ever-changing view of love and, ultimately, its redefinition — love as a process, not something to be lost and found. “These songs explore worry and doubt and letting go, but those themes are framed brightly,” Fenne comments. “Writing this album was my attempt at bringing some kind of order to the disaster that was 2020. By documenting the most vulnerable parts of that time, I felt like I reclaimed some kind of autonomy.”
Big Picture’s cover art, constructed on a miniature scale by the artist Thomas Doyle, shows the collapse of a home confined within a bell jar and features several inch-high models of Fenne in various places throughout. This physical representation of a self-contained disaster is a reminder that we are small in the grand scheme of things which, for Fenne, is a relief: “We only really know the one world we find ourselves in at any given time” Fenne expands. “It’s only when that world changes or collapses that we realize there are other narratives available — that we’ve known only one of many possible ways to exist.”
Watch the “Lights Light Up” Video
