A SINGER OF SONGS - Fading

A farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, in the hills of Catalonia. Silent panoramas, gusts of dry wind and a horse named “Supertramp”. That's where the new album by A Singer Of Songs was born, in the bucolic isolation of Pastallé Sound studios. “Somehow I always pictured deserted hills and cold night skies while listening to the demos of the songs”, says Lieven Scheerlinck. “So when our bassist Pau Julià told me about Pastallé studios, I immediately understood it was the only place where we could make this record the way it needed to be made. With a lot of silence around us, far from the world we know. To find the music within the silence”.

If you listen closely, you can even hear the creaking of the wooden floorboards of the old farmhouse kitchen in the background. Nature embracing the music with its warmth.

At first there were just a few words scribbled on a napkin at the café around the corner, the echo of a melody suddenly popping into your head while out doing the grocery shopping. Then, slowly, everything began to take shape. Not through the solitary path of the band's early days, but through an increasingly deep relationship with others: “Fading” is one more step in A Singer Of Songs' metamorphosis from an individual dimension to a collective one. A record by a band in every sense of the word, strengthened by the arrival of one of the standard-bearers of the historic Asturian indie-rock outfit Manta Ray, Frank Rudow: “Much to our surprise, he was immediately won over by our songs”, Scheerlinck explains, “and after meeting just once, he became not only the record's producer, but also our new drummer”.

“The only true company lies in a sad melody”: the lyrics of “Tall Dreams” sound like the perfect summary of Scheerlinck's music. The arpeggio blossoming out of a dusty tremor, the light, dreamlike pace moving toward a slow crescendo… The close bond with the previous “From Hello To Goodbye” flows into a cohesive, organic sound. The coiling bass pulls “Darker Than Dark” toward the shadowy corners of a dimly lit America, with Laura Räsänen's violin evoking the traits of a folk dance; “Not You” once again gives voice to that slightly skewed pop inclination that would have pleased Mark Linkous.

Right at the midpoint of the record, “Fading” finds its center of gravity in the melodic freshness of “Alone & Alright”, able to recount the wound of a separation with the delicacy of acoustic chamber-pop. The half-tones, in short, remain the key to the album despite everything, which proves shakier in its more pronounced shades (from the emphasis of “Disagreeing Mirrors” to the choruses of “Tall Dreams” and “Not You”).

Between the lyricism of “Sober Now” and the sparkling carpe diem of “Already Gone”, the ten tracks of “Fading” gravitate around the attempt to decipher just where one's life has arrived. “I just turned forty”, Scheerlinck reflects, “and over the past year I've found myself taking a sort of inventory. What have I done so far? What can I still do? Am I happier when I look back, or should I instead look to the future?”.

Hence the declaration of love in “I Will Be True”, leaving indecision behind in search of a new solidity, underscored too by the song's fuller arrangement: “All the sorry stages I went through/ Well, at least they led to you”. The past fades into a slow dissolve, the present already shifting into tomorrow. Scheerlinck pauses there for a moment, right in the middle, trying to recognize himself in his own reflection. “The conversation with the mirror is the hardest one I've ever had. And I'm not sure the mirror and I will ever become friends…”.

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18/10/2016