“Savage’s punctuated songwriting is on full display” — Paste
Savage’s “sharp writing and voice are distinctive enough that you could recognize them from outer space” – Stereogum
Today, the Parquet Courts frontman presents his new single/visualizer, ‘David’s Dead,’ from Several Songs About Fire, his highly anticipated new album out this Friday on Rough Trade. On ‘David’s Dead’ — a song memorializing his long time friend and neighbour David Lester, who was homeless and would ring his door for conversation late at night — Savage spurns the sepulchral or elegiac. Instead, the song travels on a poppy, conversational refrain and the joyous half-life of a vibraphone, a better tribute to someone who Savage remembers as having little restraint, and a better reminder that death is made of life.
Of ‘David’s Dead,’ Savage says: “What can I say about the song ‘David’s Dead?’ Well I can tell you that it’s a portrait of the block in New York City that I called home for over a decade, each line sort of a tally of things that had changed in that time. I can tell you that David’s passing made some of those changes much more evident than they were before. I can tell you that the last time I saw David I bought him both a black coffee and a can of Crazy Stallion, and that we drank a coffee together on my stoop, but I said ‘see ya later’ when he cracked open the tallboy.”
‘David’s Dead’ follows a thoughtful stream of singles — “Elvis In The Army,” which was praised by FLOOD for “Savage’s signature sardonic delivery,” and “Thanksgiving Prayer,” praised by Paste for “trac[ing] a poetic rabbit-hole through an ever-shifting universe” — and is accompanied by a stunning visualizer. Later this month, Savage will embark on a North American tour. A full list of dates is below and tickets are on sale now.
WATCH A. SAVAGE’S “DAVID’S DEAD” LYRIC VIDEO
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, containing a singular irreverence which 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.
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. Produced by Parish on a 1” 16-track, the album was partially sculpted in the bucolic, nocturnal hush of rural England. 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.
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.
WATCH THE “THANKSGIVING PRAYER” VIDEO
WATCH THE “ELVIS IN THE ARMY” VIDEO
Portions of the above text are pulled from Several Songs About Fire bio by novelist Kathleen Alcott. Read the full bio here.
PRE-ORDER SEVERAL SONGS ABOUT FIRE
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