“It’s a sonnet and an instruction manual on living all at once, one Savage centers around a cheeky recognition of his favorite holiday.” — Paste on “Thanksgiving Prayer”
Today, A. Savage, of the rock band Parquet Courts, announces his second solo album, Several Songs About Fire, out October 6th on Rough Trade Records. He also presents its lead single/video, ‘Elvis in the Army,’ and expands his forthcoming tour. Produced by John Parish in Bristol, Several Songs About Fire is bolstered by the support of Jack Cooper (Modern Nature, Ultimate Painting) and Cate Le Bon, as well as members of Kamikaze Palm Tree & caroline. The end result is tantamount to psychic odyssey, with lead single ‘Elvis in the Army’ placing us in a subterranean venue where the livid, ratifying cymbal raises the room’s blood pressure. ‘Elvis in the Army’ follows the previously-shared ‘Thanksgiving Prayer’ — “an intimate and intricate composition” (Consequence) — and is accompanied by a rousing music video shot in Paris and directed by Emile Moutaud.
Of the track, Savage adds: “We often describe ourselves in geographic terms. American, New Yorker — two terms that I’ve used to identify myself that have to do with being from or of a certain place. So ‘Elvis in the Army’ is a bit of an inventory of those labels. They have less to do with geography than we realize. Really we’re just talking about ourselves, then framing certain characteristics geographically. No matter where I live I’ll have an American psyche until the day I die, for better or for worse. I’ll always be of America. And I can’t imagine a time where New York doesn’t feel like home. But despite that, I’d rather not be associated with a place, at least for now.”
WATCH A. SAVAGE’S “ELVIS IN THE ARMY” VIDEO
Novelist Kathleen Alcott on Several Songs About Fire
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“I imagine myself playing these songs in a small club that is slowly burning,” Savage says of his new record. After more than a decade in New York, Savage left the city and the United States, marking his exit with a masterpiece of maturity and a worthy corollary to his first solo venture, 2017’s Thawing Dawn. “Fire is something you have to escape from, and in a way this album is about escaping from something. This album is a burning building, and these songs are things I’d leave behind to save myself.”
In its recording, too, Several Songs about Fire became as urgent and intuitive as a response to disaster. Produced by Parish on a 1” 16-track, the album was partially sculpted in the bucolic, nocturnal hush of rural England, where Savage and Cooper worked deep into the night, trying not to wake Cooper’s sleeping daughter. The intimacy of these tracks are refracted by the presence of some of Savage’s closest friends — among them Cate Le Bon — who listened to Savage work on what would become the album during a US tour in 2022. Featuring additional contributions from saxophonist Euan Hinshelwood (Cate Le Bon’s band), drummer Dylan Hadley (Kamikaze Palm Tree, White Fence), and violinist Magdalena McLean. (caroline), Several Songs about Fire is a devotional study in tradition — and something all Savage’s own. “It was really special to see them come into existence and to then be in the studio working on them with him,” explains Le Bon of working toward Savage’s vision, rather than within a band. “The beautiful friction of shoulder to shoulder was replaced by something else.”
The record’s singular irreverence is stitched together by Savage’s outsize gifts as a lyricist and observer, a quality Parish calls “an emotional openness guarded by a laconic wit.” Worrying questions of wealth and poverty, self and other, Savage displays the poet’s gift of knowing when to narrate and when to vanish, leaving the listener to their own emotional privacy rather than instructing them how to feel through vertiginous inversions of instrumentation and lyrics. Influenced by the disparate vantage points of Sybille Baier and Townes Van Zandt, Savage joins a canon of songwriters whose project is a constantly dilating aperture and perspective.
In rendering the signage of laundromats and threats of debt collectors as glistering and totemic as the scope of mountains, rivers, seas, and skies, Savage finds hopes and curses in equal measure — inviting the listener to consider a life in which attention is a religion, and the body is the divine text. Like the survivor of exodus, Savage says: “I don’t really remember the process of writing. I just see the evidence of it when I reopen a notebook.” Several Songs About Fire stands as an act of nearly libidinal rebellion against a moment when so much of life is the blue light of screens. This is an album whose topic is no less than the sublime: the moments in which a sensory experience becomes a holiness or possession of its own, and the self floats above it.
PRE-ORDER SEVERAL SONGS ABOUT FIRE
WATCH THE “THANKSGIVING PRAYER” VIDEO
SEVERAL SONGS ABOUT FIRE TRACKLIST
- Hurtin’ or Healed
- Elvis in the Army
- Le Grande Balloon
- My my, My Dear
- Riding Cobbles
- Mountain Time
- David’s Dead
- Thanksgiving Prayer
- My New Green Coat
- Out Of Focus
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