The Art of Longevity

Let’s face it, there is a patchy record for solo artists that began in popular 90s bands. Some crossed the rubicon to a credible solo career and some didn’t. While Gaz Coombes enjoyed the full glare of the spotlight of the second half of the 90s with Supergrass, his solo work has surpassed those years in many ways. 2018’s World’s Strongest Man felt like a step forward in this third phase of Coombe’s music career (he has been making music in commercial bands since the age of 15, so let’s call Supergrass his second phase).Gaz hasn’t felt the need to rush things. Since Supergrass split in 2010 (they came together for a resplendent but brief reunion live tour in 2022) he has released four solo albums, each one a steady progression on the one before. But none of his solo work sounds like the band that first made him a famous face and voice. What’s been cool about doing these last few solo records is building up this entirely new fan base, not just expecting people to have come over from Supergrass”.The path to a viable, successful solo career is a pretty precarious one, but it feels like Gaz has found his way on that path. His new album Turn The Car Around continues in the same vein as World’s Strongest Man, showcasing the variety of tricks Coombe’s has in the bag, from classic melancholic songs to nagging grooves and dirty guitar sounds. From this point onwards, he’s pushing himself further. “I’ve called this album the last one of a trilogy, just to force myself to look at my career in a different way from now on. I’ve known where I wanted to take it before but this time I’m not sure. I want to do something different, so it’ll be jazz metal”. Support the showGet more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/

Rumer’s arrival struck a similar chord to that of Norah Jones some six years earlier i.e. refreshingly out of time. Those singles Slow, Aretha and their host album Seasons of My Soul arrived so fully formed although (as with Norah Jones) Rumer was another case of ‘overnight success 10 years in the making’.“It was planes, trains and automobiles, that was my journey to getting a record deal and in those days you had to have a record deal. I couldn’t imagine doing a self-release – I didn’t have the knowhow, team or energy. But getting a record deal seemed to be as likely as winning the lottery. I was just a girl working three jobs and trying to survive”. This went on for years and years – almost a decade – of doing low-key circuits, song-writing between jobs and with very little hope of ever getting a music career off the ground - even with that voice. After all, we don’t live in a world where talent rises naturally to the top. Then all of a sudden, at the last roll of the dice, everything happened all at once. Signed by Atlantic Records, Rumer was thrust to the top of the pedestal - signing dinners, showcases, chart success, radio play, then mixing with pop royalty and even invitations to the White House. What followed was an all too familiar tale, a most typical music industry story. Rumer became an exemplar of everything the music industry machine can do. As she puts it on The Art of Longevity:I was like a rabbit in the headlights, just spinning. I didn’t really enjoy it but I was shaming myself for not enjoying it because it was what I had wanted”. Everything goes so fast, you can’t think – you need other people to think for you – and at that point you become vulnerable. Your energy, magic and sparkle is drained from you”.Yet perhaps, she played the right card at the right time. To follow-up her phenomenal debut Rumer released a covers album Boys Don’t Cry, in 2014. She encountered some resistance to that, but she stuck to her guns and got her way. And that album was also a major success. She became something of an expert at interpretation of others’ songs, some of them long forgotten gems. One of the secrets to longevity we’ve discovered on The Art of Longevity is “have the confidence to disrupt yourself before the industry disrupts you”.Rumer did just that and survived to tell the tale.  It's a fascinating journey. Support the showGet more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/

The Delines’ world is a sprawling, blue collar soap opera. Flawed characters, aimless drifters, chancers and grifters, barroom fights, beat-up cars, parking lots, convenience store robberies, messed up relationships and broken dreams…the characters are never far off disaster - indeed they are predestined. It’s so romantic, it is magnificent.As a recording band, The Delines are meticulous in rendering that world so perfectly. Their three full-length studio albums are full of the stories that make up this wider soap opera, and with 2022’s The Sea Drift, there is the added context of these stories based in the state of Texas and the Gulf Coast of Mexico. As a concept album you’ll be hard pushed to find anything as immersive. Visual, novelistic writing, music economically played purely as a vessel for the songs, each musician plays with an exquisite restraint. Leading all this is Amy Boone’s voice, so occupying its subjects as to put you the listener into each and every tragic scene. As Vlautin admits The Delines are “a small time band”, just like a music industry equivalent of the small time characters they write, sing and play about. Yet, as we discuss on the Art of Longevity - they are really occupying the same space, metaphorically and musically speaking - as Springsteen or Lana Del Rey. I wouldn’t say either of those artists aren’t the real deal, everyone knows they are. Yet if it’s real music you want, then may we humbly introduce you to what might become your favourite new band. The Delines really are as real as the characters they sing about. Support the showGet more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/

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/