TAS In Session: Fyfe Dangerfield

Fyfe Dangerfield, the frontman for the Mercury Prize-nominated Guillemots, released his own critically-acclaimed solo debut, Fly Yellow Moon, in January. He recently visited The Alternate Side's studio, chatted with Alisa Ali and played two of his own tracks, "Faster Than The Setting Sun" and "She Needed Me," gymnastically using his feet and his guitar to play the piano at one point. Fyfe even, surprisingly, tackled an old Billy Joel song, "She's Always A Woman."

He also assured Alisa that despite his solo sojourn, the Guillemots are busily working on their third album, which they hope to release next year:

Alisa Ali: Why did you decide to go solo?

Fyfe Dangerfield: I really didn’t think about it that much.

Alisa: I bet the rest of the Guillemots were thinking about it.

Fyfe: Well, we haven’t broken up. We haven’t really stopped. We had a few months off, but we’ve been writing for the past year. This [solo] record was done very quickly; it just took a while to come out, but I did most of it at the end of 2008 in just five days and we just did a few more tracks in the new year. It’s not a decision to go solo. I just kind of fancied bashing some stuff out in a studio really quickly.

Alisa: Five days?

Fyfe: We got the first half of the album done in that week. I think it was because we were just treating it like we were doing demos. Not trying to perfect anything too much.

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvqkqWCAEzY]

Alisa: On your website you say that you’d done a bunch of the songs quickly and then went back and tried to pretty them up.

Fyfe: With some of them, yeah, because they just sounded rubbish. It was all about doing something simply and capturing a moment on this record. The first track, “When You Walk Into A Room,” I tried to add brass to it and all sorts of stuff but then we just ended up using the mix that we took home at Christmas which took five minutes to do. My favorite records are like that - like “On The Beach” by Neil Young. Things that sound so much like you’re in the room that you can smell cigarette ash on the floor.

Alisa: There’s some beach sounds on this album.

Fyfe: Yeah, there’s a song “High on The Tide” that’s sort of about disappearing to the seaside to get your head together. I think, to be honest, that [the sounds] were from a library. I have made a few recordings [of seasides] but they weren’t very good. So we did just cheat a little and made some stock beach sounds.

Alisa: And I thought you were going out there [on the beach].

Fyfe: I do normally! Oh, let’s just say I was.

Alisa: Okay. It's more romantic to think of you walking down the beach with your little recorder. Do you do waterfalls and crickets?

Fyfe: I’ve never done a waterfall. I should start concentrating on this thing more.

Alisa: You have some drumming friends on this album.

Fyfe: Yeah, Matt Ingram and Jamie Morrison who drummed with The Noisettes recently. I’ve done a few gigs with a little band called The Babes. But mainly I’ve just been doing gigs with two string players. But later in the year I think I’m going to do more with a band.

Alisa: Adam Noble helped you produce this record and he’s worked with you in Guillemots. Bernard Butler helped you as well.

Fyfe: I did most of it with Adam. He’s worked on Guillemots albums and is a really good friend so we definitely understand each other. And Bernard mixed two tracks. It was great to work with him because he was [the guitarist] in Suede and I was very into those first two records he did with them and a lot of other stuff he’d done.

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEMfL-aG1Mo]

Alisa: You recorded about 25 songs for the album, but only ten were released.

Fyfe: There’s bonus tracks on a special edition that came out in the UK with another ten tracks, like another album, on it. Maybe, at some point, we’ll put it out over here. I think on the American edition of the record there’s a couple of bonus tracks from those sessions. I don’t like sitting on stuff. I like getting it out there.

Alisa: Are you very prolific as a writer?

Fyfe: I’m very focused on the next Guillemots record and all of those songs were already recorded and I wouldn’t want to do them with Guillemots, they’ve been done already. But if I wait for the next solo record, I’d want to do something completely different.

Alisa: You’d be in a different place.

Fyfe: I’m in a different place already.

Alisa: Now you’re in the Bronx.

Fyfe: Yeah, well, literally. But that’s the challenge and fun of playing songs live. You have to make them work for you now and I try to play [the songs] differently all of the time, playing around with what instruments I use, what speed I play it. You can take a song a hundred different ways and I enjoy that. When did the record I wanted to make things very simple and straightforward. That’s where my head was at. Now I want to get lost in sounds again.

Alisa: What distinguishes this material from Guillemots material?

Fyfe: It’s just a bit simpler. In Guillemots we get lost in a world of sound and on this album, I wanted to bash something out that was quite traditional. I could have gone either way. I also want to do albums by myself that are quite electronic and out there.

Alisa: Don’t things always begin simply?

Fyfe: No, not really. Quite the opposite. Normally when I hear a song in my head I’ll hear it arranged or then I’ll just sort of strip it back. It depends how you write. With this record I was trying to make myself write on a guitar because I find that quite boring. I just get distracted. I’ve got a really short attention span. A piano is better. At the moment I’m writing with this looping machine because it keeps me interested. You can make it loop and play over it. I’m very fickle like that. I need to be entertained. With this record I was trying to write with an acoustic guitar because if I could get to the point where I don’t get too bored, it must be all right.

Alisa: Your album makes me think that you, my friend, might be in love.

Fyfe: Well, it’s kind of ... I’m not in the relationship I was when I was making the record. Things have changed. But that’s life.

Alisa: So it wasn’t a bad breakup?

Fyfe: Yeah, it was.

Alisa: That’s terrible! At least you got so many joyous songs out of the relationship.

Fyfe: It was definitely a record written in the middle of something. But I think these things are always a bit ... I’m always suspect of anything that’s too autobiographical. I think it needs to exist outside of being a diary entry. I wouldn’t call it a love record, but it’s definitely written from a sort of domestic, contented place. But a lot of the songs are still not all that happy. It’s a mixed bag.

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYA7nkfOgPc]

Alisa: What about a guest DJ pick? A song that you think is either the happiest or saddest song you know of.

Fyfe: If you can find this track - because no one has heard of it - there's an amazing song by Thomas Feiner. He's got this album called The Opiates and there's a track on there called "Dinah and the Beautiful Blue." If you find that, you're in for a treat. It's this incredible track with strings and him singing. He kind of sounds like a god made out of chocolate. I really like a track by Avi Buffalo too, called "What's In It For." That's a very uplifting track.

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evu_MqAZpC0]