The Art of Longevity The Art of Longevity Season 5, Episode 5: Embrace, with Danny McNamara
Before I spoke with Danny McNamara, he’d emailed me to say how much he loved Brett Anderson’s quote - the one we’ve set out to make famous on The Art of Longevity. Not only did he recognise it as capturing the band’s career but Embrace have been through the cycle at least twice - the struggle (1990-’96), stratospheric rise (their debut The Good Will Out), the crash to the bottom (that first time dropped by their label) and enlightenment (Out Of Nothing). And then all over again.
Consider - the band had been on a three year break from 2007-2010 and then holed up creating a new record for all of four years - setting out nobly to better their debut. Meanwhile, the music industry changed beyond all recognition. Spotify had launched, and was into hyper-growth by 2014 - destroying the CD and threatening to make the album concept redundant. As such, the band’s most experimental and sonically ambitious record (and my personal favourite), the self-titled Embrace, was a commercial disappointment at a time when it became difficult to even assess what commercial success was for any album.
Still, Embrace served its purpose, setting the band on course for a creative renaissance after they had been burnt out by album number five This New Day in 2006). We spoke as the band released album number eight, the outstanding and humbly titled How To Be A Person Like Other People.
As a recently self-diagnosed introvert and medically diagnosed as OCD, McNamara has ridden the music industry rollercoaster and done rather well to stay sane. In recent times, marriage and fatherhood have further set Danny and his bandmates on a stable course, to not only carry on making music for as long as they want to (nobody can drop them or stop them) but to make their music. Embrace’s brand of emotionally charged and sometimes swaggering pop-rock is a humanistic joy - if you simply surrender to it. A sort of pop music version of freediving.
There’s a good heart within Embrace and the ambition to keep getting better still beats strongly.
"What Embrace are, is really special and what we should be doing with our energy is mining that, not ploughing the field wide but digging down and see what there is in the ground. Then we will be honouring what we’ve been given as a group and that way, we can get better".
Danny's take on the band's longevity is reflective, funny and contains more humility than you'll get from those 'hedge fund gangsters' and tech billionaires that run the business he and his band have survived for 32 years. They should mark his words!
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