Tour details: noahandthewhale.The Metaverse Insider had the privilege of interviewing Charlie Fink – the hero who pitched the original concept of The Lion King. A four-week Sunday night residency at the Palace theatre, London, continues until 19 May. Heart of Nowhere is released on Mercury tomorrow. It's absolutely crazy what's happened since." It was amazing that it all happened and I'm proud to be part of it. I know some people now making music in London and there's nothing like that, no community in that way. "We were just a bunch of friends hanging out. Their contemporaries have risen further still – Marling is the reigning queen of young British folk Mumford & Sons – one of whose members was an early touring partner of Fink – have become one of the world's biggest bands. But what I've realised is how it connects with the audience is something pretty amazing, so when you do play that song and you get that reaction, it has an energy that makes it enjoyable." He adds, a few moments later: "When you're touring, you're an entertainer. He says, carefully: "I feel I've learned so much about songwriting that it's strange to revisit something that came from a point where I was learning.
Noah and the Whale perform a song from their third album in 2011. The crowd, politely respectful through the unfamiliar songs, suddenly erupted, while Fink stood with the look of a boy told he can't have his trifle until he's eaten his sprouts. And there was the odd moment, when the band debuted their new sound at Bush Hall in London early in 2011, when they played 5 Years Time. The change meant Noah and the Whale suddenly had fans who liked the old songs and didn't care about the new ones, and vice versa. It was watching that, hearing the way he talks about songwriting, the way they're a band, and this gang – I loved that. "Our guitarist Fred – a big Tom Petty fan – lent me the Peter Bogdanovich documentary Runnin' Down a Dream, and that is outstanding. And that style itself came from happenstance, from a viewing of a DVD, not from some carefully thought-out strategy. Fink says the main reason for the continuation is that after 18 months of touring that style, it felt like the natural way to play. I also wonder if Fink now being settled explains why Heart of Nowhere is the first Noah album to sound as though it was made by the same band as the one before, for here again is the sleek, machine-tooled MOR rock of Last Night on Earth. It's a nice house, tastefully decorated and furnished (a friend's girlfriend, studying interior design, did it for him), and I wonder if all the advertising deals for 5 Years Time – cars, crisps, cereal, all around the globe – have paid for it. Sitting in Fink's new home in a leafy inner-London suburb, it's hard not to think that maybe contentment has befallen him. I'd take out the booklet and write songs for those lyrics, not listening to the CD – I'd find the melody for them. They were covered in masking tape, so you wouldn't know what was in there. "When I first started writing," he says, "I'd buy packs of 10 CDs for £5. Mind you, its gaucheness is perhaps unsurprising, given that Fink has been a lyrical autodidact: he'd listen to melodies first, lyrics coming a distant second. Noah's breakthrough hit, 5 Years Time, opened with desperately unpromising lyrics: "Oh well, in five years' time we could be walking round a zoo/ With the sun shining down over me and you/ And there'll be love in the bodies of the elephants, too." Ahem. In a way that's a good thing, because once you've made a personal record, people trust you a bit more, which I think is important."įink would once have been surprised himself at the idea he would deal with themes. The third, Last Night on Earth, told short stories in song, a deliberate move away from autobiography. The second Noah and the Whale album, The First Days of Spring, dealt with his heartbreak at the end of his relationship with Laura Marling (who had sung on its predecessor, 2008's Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down).
"Themes" have been Fink's big thing over the last few years. It starts off with a first song that's a melodramatic story of a kid wanting to break away from his family, basically, to acceptance of your family and who you are and who you want to be as a man." "One of the main themes, beyond nostalgia and the end of adolescence, is acceptance. And so the transition to adulthood – with marriage as one of the final tollbooths – became the central conceit of the album. Charlie Fink performs material from the new album as well as old favourites in a special live session.
0 kommentar(er)
