FROM DUSK ‘TIL DAWN
While BERNARD FANNING’s
new album stems from a feeling of unease, it blooms as one of the songwriter’s
strongest releases. He talks to SAMUEL J. FELL
It’s
a Monday afternoon. Late autumn and sunny. It’s crystal clear and the air is sharp,
cool in the shade courtesy of a light breeze but warm in the sun, brightening
the scene; makes the grass seem greener and the surrounding shrubs livelier
despite the fact there’s been no rain for a month or so.
Bernard
Fanning sits on a day bed, leaning against the wall of his small studio, up on
a hill above Byron Bay. You can see it down below, spread along the coastline
in among the trees against the water’s edge. Out in the bay itself is Julian
Rocks. It’s so clear you can see the whitewater breaking around their base. The
lighthouse sits atop Cape Byron, slightly to the south, the sunlight glinting
off its tall, white walls, standing guard over the most easterly point in
Australia.
Fanning
sits taking it all in. It is, as I’d mentioned to him when I’d first arrived, a
view you’d not get sick of. He agrees and during the couple of hours we spend
sitting out here, we both periodically gaze out over it all. It’s calming.
Serene. Seems to me to be a perfect place to put together a record.
Fanning,
in light blue jeans and black jacket, hair hanging down to his shoulders,
flipping across his face, grey stubble, pale skin, is in good spirits. He
smiles a lot and his laugh rings out across the green, sloping garden,
occasionally startling lorikeets playing in the trees hanging over the driveway
to the side. I’m always wary prior to speaking to prominent rock stars, well aware
they could be completely consumed by an inflated sense of self-importance,
nothing more than preening posers.
But
Bernard Fanning’s not like that. Sure, he’s a prominent rock star, he fronted
one of the most iconic Australian bands of all time in Powderfinger. His solo
debut, Tea & Sympathy, was
incredibly successful, five-times platinum. But he’s just a guy with a wife and
kids, sitting here having a chat about music, about the state of the world,
life in general. Just shooting the breeze like any of us.
Inside
the studio, producer Nick DiDia is tinkering. Occasionally, music drifts out
from the open door around the corner, soundtracking certain parts of our
conversation. “It’s shit, isn’t it,” Fanning says at one point as he looks out
across the Pacific. He laughs again. I do too as I follow his gaze. “Yeah,” I
say. “Terrible.”
***
Bernard
Fanning’s new album, his third solo effort, is Civil Dusk. It’s the first in a two-part series, the next being Brutal Dawn, slated for release sometime
next year. Civil Dusk was written in
part in Kingscliff, a small coastal village a little further north, and partly
in Madrid, Spain, where his wife is from. It was all recorded here, aside from
the demos, in this little space on top of a hill overlooking Byron.
“Civil Dusk, the term actually comes from
civil twilight, which is a photography term,” he tells me. “It’s when the sun
has gone down beneath the horizon. Scientifically, I think it’s when the sun is
six degrees below the horizon. But pretty much everything is still visible, but
not in direct light. And it looks different. So that idea, that metaphor…”
He
trails off at the end of that sentence and switches focus to the term brutal dawn,
which we both agree is the perfect name for an album by a Norwegian death metal
band, but the sentiment is clear. Civil
Dusk is about things not being quite as they seem, or quite as you remember
them, and they’re about to change. Perhaps to be revealed once more, in a
different light later on, under a brutal dawn.
I
ask him if, as a person, he’s a worrier, if he’s prone to anxiety. “Oh yeah,
totally, I’m a real worrier,” he says candidly. The reason I ask this is
because in the bio that accompanies the new record, he’s quoted as saying,
“Each day, I wake with a feeling of unease.” It’s a line which ties in with the
idea behind the record, the civil dusk preceding a brutal dawn.
“Yeah,
doesn’t everyone?” he asks with a laugh when I read that quote back to him. “It
sounds a little too depressing. I don’t mean… it’s unease, it’s not full-blown
anxiety. It’s more like, I’ve got shit to do, lots to do. As an artist and a
human being. Firstly as a dad, the basic stuff of making breakfast, getting
school lunches ready, you know. Making sure everyone’s got two shoes on when
they leave.
“[But]
it’s a combination of everything. When I’m writing, I don’t sleep very much. I
wake up a lot of times at night, and often with the last idea I had before I
went to bed, kinda ringing in my head. And it’s pretty annoying, and pretty
annoying for my wife. It’s hard to shake when you have an idea that you haven’t
abandoned yet, that you haven’t managed to go, ‘I’m not gonna keep going’.
“And
what I mean by that, that’s a completed song as well. It’s not like, ‘That
song’s finished’, it’s ‘I’m not working on that anymore’. Because inevitably, a
few months later, you’re gonna find holes in that idea and go, ‘Fuck, I wish
I’d done that’.”
I
venture that this is the lot of the artist, that no matter what you do, you’ll
never really be satisfied. Or at least you’ll think you’re satisfied, only to
realise a little while later that you no longer are. “Yeah, that’s exactly
right. You have this momentary satisfaction,” he says. “Anyway, the anxiety
thing, I don’t want to play that up too much… it’s more because I usually get
up first in the house, at around 4:30, and I read the paper. And that usually
starts that feeling of unease, just reading about the state of the world.
“And
that impacts a lot on the way that I write.”
Despite
this assertion, Civil Dusk isn’t a
record populated with songs dealing with literal world events. It’s not an
album that bemoans the state of the world, not in a direct sense anyway – Bernard
Fanning, who in the past has been very vocal about, and supportive of, a number
of pertinent social issues, isn’t setting out to preach to a world he sees as
wrong, or broken. Civil Dusk seems to
be more about a feeling and a state of being, as opposed to presenting like a
list of injustices, set to song.
As
well, these feelings are framed through a series of love songs, whether happy
or sad, disguised somewhat – the meanings are visible, but not in direct light,
the songs civil dusks in themselves.
Another
strong thematic vein that runs through the record is the idea of decisions and
their resulting consequences. “I guess that’s another symptom of age and being
forty-something,” he muses. “Looking at decisions I made when I was in my 20s
and things that I thought were a great idea at the time. I mean, I’m in the
unfortunate position… of having a lot of the things I’ve said, recorded, when I
was in my 20s and maybe not at my smartest.”
He
laughs again. “So, things like that. But also looking at that in the wider
sense, how are things like, even on a personal basis especially, Powderfinger
breaking up, how that has impacted on me and other people around me, stuff like
that.”
“I
don’t really want to be drilling down into the detail of what the songs are
about, because I don’t really like doing that,” he then says, changing position
on the day bed. “I want people to have their own discovery of songs, they have
that thing where they… it’s what I do, put myself in the position of the
author, pretty much all the time, when I’m listening to music.
“If
I can really relate to it, then I can sing that song with a real kind of verve,
it resonates with me. Otherwise, it doesn’t really impact… I like people having
the opportunity to do that themselves, without it being all explained and spelt
out to them. I mean, you don’t really need to do it anyway.”
“The future's suffocating on
an echo from the past.” A line from ‘Belly Of
The Beast’, the final song on Civil Dusk.
One could interpret that in myriad different ways. It’s a strong line though,
one of the strongest on the album. It sums up the civil dusk, the decisions and
resulting consequence. It’s powerful.
Fanning
laughs again, and I sip from my cup of coffee which is cold now, and light a
cigarette, moving over to a sunny patch on the grass. We both look out over the
ocean and we’re silent for a bit.
***
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