The Art of Longevity

In this episode, Fenner Pearson chats to Neil Arthur about his writing process and how he works on the Blancmange albums, with Benge acting as his foil and producer, and his collaborations with Fader and Near Future. Arthur touches on the number of ideas “buzzing and fizzing” around his head that has led to him recording sixteen albums in eight years. This in turn provides an interesting insight into the whole process of releasing an album in 2022 compared with 1982!Perhaps what comes across most clearly is Arthur’s creative energy, from the studio where he records and develops his ideas, through the time spent working with Benge in the latter’s studio, right up to his enduring enjoyment of playing live, including his current tour where he performs with the enthusiasm and energy of someone who obviously relishes performing their music to an audience. And there is no sense that Neil is slowing down: he is in the process of mixing completed albums with Near Future and a covers album with Vince Clarke, as well a new collaboration with Liam Hutton and Finlay Shakespeare as The Remainder, and a new Fader album. On top of that, he will be performing at a number of festivals next year. It’s an inspirational interview, in which Neil Arthur illustrates and exemplifies how a passion for music and a relentless creative energy has directly resulted in his artistic longevity and joyous cascade of albums from Blancmange and his many other projects.Support the showGet more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/

After fading from view in the UK after "Strange And Beautiful" (a top 10 hit in 2002), Aqualung was hardly consigned to the legend of the one hit wonder. Instead Matt Hales went to make his name and build his career in the USA - much of it through hard, steady touring - the opposite of his “instant success” in the UK. Aqualung bucked the trend for under-achieving British acts through the naughties, selling several hundred thousand albums and becoming darlings of the cool celebrity crowd, from appearances on Jay Leno's Tonight show to Grammy nominations and cool celebrities attending his shows. Matt Hales became what he calls “inadvertently cool”. How did that happen? By not compromising for one thing. “I tried compromising at one stage, by writing hits and giving the A&R guy what he wanted, but it made me unhappy. So I made the quietest music I could, my Idagio, my quieter version of Pet Sounds. That turned out to be successful anyway!”Hales also established a parallel music career by becoming a successful, sought after writer-producer: collaborating with Lianne La Havas (he produced her superb debut album), Bat for Lashes, Tom Chaplin, Mika, Paloma Faith, Disclosure and many others. This has set Matt free from the curse of every commercial musician out there i.e. not attached to having a hit. Still, despite being a collaborator for hire, Hales has released no less than seven albums as Aqualung. The most recent, Dead Letters, is something truly special. When I heard it I immediately invited Matt on the show to get the inside story on his rather unusual career journey. Hales is often compared with the great & the good, from Radiohead & Coldplay, to Elton John and Talk Talk. It makes sense when you listen to Dead Letters, an album in which he has let all of these influences come to the surface:“This is a record where I am paying homage to the record collection that I was raised on. There is Elton, Stevie Wonder, Bread, Toto - Pet Sounds of course, that’s the muesli I was raised on”. And if you thought the key change is dead in pop music, then Matt Hales is out to prove you wrong on Dead Letters. As he mentions in our conversation, he can literally “do anything he wants”.Perhaps that’s the very definition of musical longevity.Support the showGet more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/

Suede (or, The London Suede for our friends in the USA) has reached 30 years in the business (well, minus the seven years the band was officially split in 2003). As singer Brett Anderson hits mid-50s, you cannot accuse him, or the band, of being boring. The energy and vitality of Suede’s 9th studio album Autofiction is striking, as are the band's recent live performances. More than that however, the album is Suede’s strongest batch of rock songs since, well, perhaps since ever. This is all the more remarkable in a sense, coming off the back of The Blue Hour (2018), which was also a superb record, albeit very different to Autofiction, with lush production, strings and field recordings. It suggests Suede is a band reborn, on top of their game. I spoke to Brett on the eve of the release of Autofiction and found him in fine fettle, excited at the prospect of promoting the record (how refreshing is that!) and discovering how it would land with both critics and fans. Not least because in a sense, it is a full-circle record that harks back to Suede’s beginnings 30 years ago (that first EP The Drowners in 1992) but at the same time comes across fresh, confident and modern.This isn’t just another episode of The Art of Longevity but one in which Brett and I discuss the whole concept of the show (which he inspired) - the career arc of rock & pop bands - a process that has "all the inevitability of the lifecycle of a frog”. The way Brett put it himself in the second part of his autobiography, Afternoons With The Blinds Drawn, is thus:“Every band follows the same sort of career arc with the same points plotted grimly along the way like the Stations of the Cross: struggle, success, success, excess, disintegration and if you’re lucky - enlightenment”. Having assessed the careers of many other artists that have guested on the show using ‘Brett’s Curve’ (sic) as a benchmark, how would Brett reflect on Suede’s career with hindsight and the objectivity of wisdom along with freedom from the attachments of the bands earlier career?The answer might surprise you...See the website for the full article and artwork: https://www.songsommelier.com/Support the showGet more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/

How to characterise an American indie band over almost three decades and 10 albums, each with a subtly different flavour? One recent review I read described Death Cab For Cutie as “masters of dreamy, emo-tinged Americana” and while that’s rather simplistic, their previous two albums have had a ‘dreamy’ feel, a softer production and reflective almost gentle character (or as Ben Gibbard described one of their earlier records, “Prozac happiness”). The band's new LP Asphalt Meadows has something more vital and varied going for it however, with the band capturing a combination of post-pandemic zest for life with a state of self-reflection. There’s a depth and a mystery to the record that somehow seems fitting with the band’s current standing – one of a handful of longevous indie Americana bands that can make exactly the music they want to make with no interference. Not even from a major label such as Atlantic Records. Ben Gibbard confirms:“Atlantic Records have never once stepped in to change something or baulked at a creative decision we’ve made. It’s been the exact opposite of the horror story narrative that you hear about all the time”. Indeed. The music industry’s elephant’s graveyard of indie bands that signed to major labels but could not make it work may be large, but it does not and will not see the likes of Death Cab For Cutie. Over almost 18 years with Atlantic Records, you’ve made things work - what has been the secret to that?Nick Harmer:“It is a symbiotic relationship. Atlantic has brought stability and worked steadily and have become a dependable band from their perspective. There have been so many elements of luck to it but we’ve both worked really hard on every record”.While Nick is impressed at how many new bands seen to arrive 'fully formed', like all bands of longevity, Ben Gibbard struggles with the idea of being in a position to advise bands now as to how to forge that path, especially in today’s more competitive and less forgiving circumstances.  “The stakes for saying something uncouth in an interview or having a bad show, for fucking up – are so much higher now than when we started. It’s important to remember to have fun. We’ve always gone in with the singular focus of making music that we’re proud of and that says something about our lives”.Death Cab are not always immediately associated with fun, the abstract themes in their songs often coming across more thoughtful and cerebral. But they have arrived in a place where they can enjoy their longevity and let the music go where they want it. Something tells me their fans will be equally happy with the place they are in today. Support the showGet more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/

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!Support the showGet more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/

Having helped pave the way, Alela remains at the heart of a very strong current movement for female troubadours - a scene driven by the success of the likes of Sharon Van Etten, Angel Oslen, Julien Baker and even Phoebe Bridgers - but harking back to Joni Mitchell. It was Cat Power that proved an inspiration to Alela herself when she first started out making The Pirate’s Gospel, then aged 19. It’s taken almost five years for Alela to create another record since Cusp. Between raising her two young daughters (making a lot of snacks), renovating her Portland home and like all of us - getting through the global pandemic - it has taken time, graft and discipline to craft songs to a standard she has set for herself. But once she got into the studio (not just any studio but Tucker Martine’s ‘Flora’ in Northeast Portland, Oregon) the songs were recorded quickly. The new album Looking Glass processes the themes of domesticity, love & loss and how to face these dark times. In Alela’s words the record is about:“Feeling the lightness and the darkness of the world at large. How do you get through your day-to-day life? How do we create a sweet, peaceful world for your children when there’s a lot of chaos out there”.No doubt the record will act as a tonic to the blurry gloom outside your window. I would highly recommend you drink it down. Find the longer article at https://www.songsommelier.com/Support the showGet more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/

Interpol have honed their craft over 20 years since they ‘blasted’ onto the scene in 2002 with Turn On The Bright Lights - another one of those infamous overnight successes (actually the culmination of five years of hard graft). The album received a 9.5 Pitchfork review, with music journalist Eric Carr expressing unobjective fandom with some pretty colourful adjectives:“Interpol's debut full-length is wrought with emotional disconnection and faded glory, epic sweep and intimate catharsis.”Indeed. Yet this band, somewhat badged over the years as art-rock, gloom-rock and what have you - has changed over 25 years - to the extent that The Other Side Of Make Believe surprised their immediate circle of friends, management, label, publishers. Interpol has seen almost every longevity trend this podcast has discovered: the much hyped yet long-in-coming debut, the adventure with major labels and global stardom (and then being dropped), the madness of the rock & roll lifestyle, the loss of a founding member (bassist Carlos Dengler left in 2009) and the realisation that the industry they are part of isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Since Interpol came on the scene, everything about the music industry has changed, yet Interpol has built on a distinctive and sturdy brand.  There is a sense of the collective unit about everything they do. As Daniel puts it: “I would bet on Paul and Sam as creative forces every time.”There are extended write-ups for all episodes at https://www.songsommelier.com/Support the showGet more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/

“I’ve recognised that music is sort of like an inner voice that is telling me what to do. When I was younger it was telling me what to sound like. As I became more sophisticated as a writer and performer, the instruction became more original. I just learned to be receptive to that. I’ve chosen to make my life like that”. By listening to that inner voice, Mike Scott has given the world a lot of pleasure. From celebs to fellow musicians to fans of all generations, The Waterboys have written a whole bunch of those songs one might describe as “life affirming”. Love songs, folk songs, protest songs and brilliant pop songs have come through Mike Scott with remarkable (and if you’re another songwriter, enviable) consistency. In recent times, Scott has been nothing if not prolific. Recent album All Souls Hill came off the back of a trilogy of albums: 2017’s Out of All This Blue, 2019’s Where the Action Is, and 2020’s Good Luck, Seeker. The Waterboys had their fans wondering what direction they would go this time, musically speaking, but it looks like they will be left waiting another year or so before the next true phase of the band is revealed.“I want to wait a bit longer before we release this next album. There’s a strong theme to it, and some interesting collaborators. It even opens with a song not sung by me”.I noticed in listening to these later records that spoken-word numbers have become more of a thing for Mike Scott, and that many of his songs are also increasingly biographical - essentially documenting the life & times of Mike Scott (check out London Mick, Ladbroke Grove, In My Dreams and even recent single Glastonbury Fayre, wrote in celebration of the band’s recent 11th appearance at Glastonbury 2022). Both these song styles are bang on trend, not that Scott has noticed. How would he? One simple secret to The Waterboys’ longevity is having no distractions. Mike doesn’t have a TV, never listens to the radio and uses socials in a pretty pointed, functional way. It’s a lifestyle that has given him the space to not just be productive, but prolific in recent years. "Artists need space, not just to listen to what’s going on in your head, but also to feel what’s in your gut. If the idea in my head isn’t confirmed by my gut I don’t do it. But I need quiet to hear that”.Maybe it’s having that sense of perspective. And no distractions. Whatever it is that makes the miracle happen. The Waterboys seem as fresh and relevant as ever. Support the showGet more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/

The music journalist Paul Lester described Everything Everything as “a riot in a melody factory”, a perfect description for a band positively clattering with ideas, yet on the new album Raw Data Feel, I get the sense that the band has learned the craft of what to leave out. Judge for yourself but do apply the usual rule - listen three times first!On longevity, singer and co-writer Jonathan Higgs felt that Everything Everything crossed the rubicon on the band’s third album Get To Heaven (2015) after which “we can probably stop worrying about being in a band as a job, that we’ve woken enough people up to us that we could probably sustain. We always approached the band as a long-term thing but we see our longevity as a lasting cult rather than a big band that once had a few big hits”.Indeed, Everything Everything is one of those bands that have carved out a fruitful, lasting existence without ever having ‘a hit’. The band's following is diverse, from ‘prog dads’ to teenage girls to electronic music fans. With four top five albums and two Mercury Prize nominations, the band has earned its place on the cultural landscape. However, it was telling that the day after my conversation with Jonathan, the Everything Everything was due to sit down with their management for a ‘brand strategy meeting’ in which the main topic on the agenda was “how are we doing as a band, because it’s really difficult to tell”. Somehow, I feel like Raw Data Feel has the potential to move the band up a notch or two, even if it is hard to know exactly what that means these days. Support the showGet more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/

After her second album Fires (2005) Nerina Pallot was hot property. She kissed the frog that is ‘fame’ in the music industry, with a BRIT nomination, Ivors nomination and even an appearance on Top Of The Pops. Never quite comfortable with that, her third album The Graduate (2009) was an uneven affair that failed to keep the spotlight shining Nerina’s way. That turned out for the better…When I heard her new record, the ironically titled I Don’t Know What I’m Doing, I found myself instantly liking it but sensing that the record would grow on me as well - an album that will keep on revealing new depths. In that respect, I wasn’t surprised to hear that the inspiration behind it was the ‘proper pop’ tunes of the 70s: Kate Bush, Stevie Wonder, ABBA, Barry Gibb, Judie Tzuke, Leo Sayer, Carole King and Elkie Brooks! The album is awash in 70s style keyboards and real tunes. If only that Late Night Taxi Ride radio show of mine would ever get off the ground, Nerina’s brand of grown-up pop would feature rather more prominently than it currently does on the UK radio! Or even USA radio for that matter. “I got flown out tons of times by American labels who thought that Everybody’s Gone To War would be a big radio record, but how do you sell an album that is nothing like the single? I’m not a straightforward sell. I never have been. But that’s where I’m happy”. Her relatively low profile these days is more a frustration for her fans than Nerina herself, however. Like so many other artists of longevity, Pallot has long since eschewed the attachment to such industry accolades, but her connection to the fan base seems unbreakable:“I have a strong contract with my audience. The fans are a big part of my records - I want them to feel like at least 3 or 4 songs connect with them - the rest is gravy”. It’s been a circuitous route each time to get my records made, so I don’t want to let them down”. That frame of mind is what  makes a Nerina Pallot album such a treat, and her live shows the best kept secret in town. Good for those lucky, loyal fans. Support the showGet more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/