| | | |  | London based musician and producer Daniel Lea is enchanted by the forgotten narratives of yesterday. Trawling the past for visual and lyrical inspiration, gathering snippets from forgotten histories, By The Fireside is his music box and storytelling vehicle....
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| Interview | By The Fireside: Hey! How are you doing?
Access All Areas.net.au: I'm very well thank you, how are you?
By The Fireside: Yeah, pretty good, I'm not too bad..
Access All Areas.net.au: Why do you chose not to operate under your name, but under the pseudonym, 'By the Fireside'?
By The Fireside: Because I normally work with a few different musicians, whenever I record a record. It all depends, I mean with the record that I've made so far, including the two EPs I did before this, most of them use a lot of different musicians, sometimes never the same ones twice so it doesn't really feel like a solo project.
Access All Areas.net.au: So it's more like an ensemble thing?
By The Fireside: Well, it's kind of like.. It's mostly me, but then I always work for a lot of different people, so I don't know? Perhaps my name isn't interesting enough either..
Access All Areas.net.au: How did you discover the story of the Great Hartford Circus Fire, and why did you decide to create a concept album around it?
By The Fireside: It kind of happened naturally, it wasn't like a decision I was going to make a concept album. I just found myself drawn to a lot of old movies I was watching, which were a lot to do with the dark stuff, and I realised I was starting to watch a load of these circus movies, like 'Nightmare Alley', which was a 50s film and 'Estrada', a Salinni film and then I started doing some research on circuses and I wanted to find some old imagery of circuses, and that's when I found the book, the Circus Fire documentary. Then I read the book and was kind of blown away by the story and all the imagery within the story, you know? And the guy that was accused of starting the fire, he had the delusions and the halucinations, and there was so much to draw from the story, that it just kind of went that way; it wasn't like a concious decision that I was going to do that, it just kind of happened by itself really.
Access All Areas.net.au: What are you hoping peoples reaction to the Great Hartford Fire will be?
By The Fireside: Well, it's my first record so I hope, you know, that people will like it and I've read a few reviews so far which have been really great, and everyone's liked it and said good things about it, so it's great that people are enjoying it and getting something out of it. I just hope that people like it, and that people can sort of listen to a song and understand the whole story behind it, and actually read into it rather then treating it as an album song for song. And that they listen to a whole piece of work, becuase that's what it is. It's like a whole album that fits together, that's the reason why I do albums in that way, to be listened from start to finish. I still love albums, I still buy cds, albums and vinyl. So yeah, that's kind of why I did it aswell because I love to listen to the whole piece of work and I'm most inspired when I'm writing about something that I can really get lost in - lost in a world of a.... you know! All that kind of stuff..
Access All Areas.net.au: What does the album mean for you?
By The Fireside: What does it mean for me? I suppose it's just, it's the biggest thing that I've done so far; I've done two EPs before, so it's kind of special as it's my first album and I'm quite pleased with the fact that it works as a whole, and that there's.. you know that it's, it's, it's.. um.. it kind of.. I think it's a good, a good um.. Ergh! I can't spit it out! As far as the Great Hartford Fire, it focuses a lot on the guy that got accused of starting the fire. I just wanted to make this album that there's a lot of imagery, and that you could hear in the words, and in the music, and a lot of sound that make you think of the circus, and things within the circus. So my main was lyrically very - it had a lot of imagery when you read the words and it was largely like a lot of picture frames. The most important thing for me when I did this album was that I told an interesting story, something that was true to a story but something that was creating it's own world, and something that was interesting, rather then writing just standard songs that are about things that people have written about time and time again, that you find kind of easy to write basically. I just wanted to really do an album that I was really pleased with, and that fit together as a whole piece and so I've felt like I achieved that.. But, I don't know, it's a difficult question that one!
Access All Areas.net.au: Can you tell me about In Flowing and Happy Curses? I think it's really beautiful and it's one of my favourites of the record, what's the story or idea behind it?
By The Fireside: In Flowing and Happy Curses was a film I made during college, that was more of a collage of lots of images put together. It really didn't - I mean when I showed it to people in college they didn't really know what to think, what it was? They wanted a beginning, a middle, and an end, and there wasn't. And I always liked the title so I had this song that I used to sing those words to and it fit together with that. A lot of the album is.. Half the songs are songs I was writing after I read the book, and some of them are just a lot of words strung togehter; some of them are just a lot of different images in one song, so you can't really describe them as a whole song, becuase they're just sort of... 'blaah'. Like, the Great Hartford Fire has got an actual story, an actual prose and that one is just more of a collage of words really. It started in a lot of different ways, and it ended up being recorded in a lot of different ways, and I ended up doing it in that way with the bass and drums really locked in, kind of a break beat drum beat. It's one of my favourite songs on the record too.. so thanks!
Access All Areas.net.au: How would you describe your music to somebody who hasn't heard it before?
By The Fireside: Uh, this is it....uh? Oh I hate it!
Access All Areas.net.au: You hate this question?
By The Fireside: Uh.. yeah..! It's just really difficult describing your own music, you know? Um, well.. I don't know, it's a hard one because I mean each time your music is different, you grow up and you don't like to do the same thing. For example, my first record was really slow and this record, there is some slow stuff, but some of it is really up tempo and so, each record is different. But if I were to describe this record, we're big Sonic Youth fans so some of the guitars are influenced by them, and I was listening to the Beatles a lot.
Access All Areas.net.au: I noticed that actually, it came through a lot when I listened to it.
By The Fireside: Really? I only really discovered the Beatles recently, when I was working on this record really and that's kind of where the pop element comes from with that, and then there's also some stuff on there like Moonlake, and In Flowing and Happy Curses which is almost like Shoegazer, and I don't know where that comes from either so, it's a bit sort of like Sonic Youth meets the Beatles, something like that? Or early Pavement meets the Beatles! But then there's also a lot of imagery within the music, and within the sounds of the music. I kind of wanted it to be like a movie, like the whole thing as the album, where you can see the imagery within the words and music, so it's like a movie and then all the words I did were the script, and then it's sort of like a little film score. All my inspiration is mainly from film, so I suppose some of it's quite cinematic in the music, yeah..
Access All Areas.net.au: How are you liking working from your own studio? [Golden Hum Studios]
By The Fireside: Oh I love being in my studio, it's fucking great. I mean I'm recording a record in there at the moment, for this band releasing on an experimental label that does electronic stuff and they're starting to release more bands and Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth did it, which set the record for them I think, and they're called Dark Captain, Light Captain and I'm producing their record at the moment, which, is really been amazing. I mostly record my own music in the studio, and as for producing records that I really like. I also recorded M Crafts record a while ago - the one that's out there at the moment. I love working from my studio, everytime I do an album or record people, you learn a lot more from your studio and it pushes you more each time, and it also pushes you to do different things each time when you work with different people there's lots of things that you learn. That's the reason why I do music really, I just love having a studio, I don't think I could not have a studio.
Access All Areas.net.au: What does the future hold for you?
By The Fireside: I hope to go on recording albums and releasing albums; I'm kind of planning a new one at the moment, you know just kind of thinking about it after this one's been on for a few months. I just basically want to be able to do my own music on a small level and be producing really good albums. And hopefully to be doing film score work one day because one of my main things is film, I love film and so working with film and directors that I love would be amazing. Just producing great records and producing my own records, which will all be a lot different each time they're done, becuase I don't want to do the same record ever, ever, ever twice! I want to keep pushing it each time, to do different things and I just want to build up my studio, Golden Hum, and get a name for that, and that's it really.
Access All Areas.net.au: Who is/are the main artist/s that you draw your inspiration from?
By The Fireside: Most of my inspiration come from a lot of 50s movies, like a lot of old film noirs, like 'Night of the Hunter', and a lot of Terrance Mallick movies like 'Days of Heaven', and 'Bad Lands'. 'Nightmare Aly' which is a circus movie, Sallini Strada movies, and a lot of film soundtracks and a lot of like Birdman films. And musically I love like Sonic Youth, Silver Mountain Lion, Godspeed, Fleetwood Mac, and the Beatles. I work in a film shop part time so a lot of the inspiration, for me, comes from film.. Yeah.
By The Fireside's new album, 'The Great Hartford Fire', is out 26th January on Rogue through Inertia. For more info, visit www.inertia-music.com.
Interview by Daniella Gopsill |
| Biography | London based musician and producer Daniel Lea is enchanted by the forgotten narratives of yesterday. Trawling the past for visual and lyrical inspiration, gathering snippets from forgotten histories, By The Fireside is his music box and storytelling vehicle. Rogue Records is extremely proud to present his breathtaking debut ‘‘The Great Hartford Fire’’
Heavily influenced by film, dialogue and imagery from old noir classics, world cinema and the silent era Daniel Lea found a unique way to weld these influences into his music. Lea’s first EP, ‘Battles That Add Up To None’, drew heavily from his grandfather’s time in the air force in WW2, the inspiration for his haunting duet ‘’Battlefields’’, which quickly caught the attention of the folks down at Rough Trade Records. Championing and rating it amongst the top releases of 2005, “Mixing lo fi loops with homemade ramshackle folk to create intimate tunes that hint a lot more to come’’. It wasn’t long before words like these spread like fire.
Having recently built his own studio he buries himself in inspiration amid his stoke Newington hive of creativity - Golden Hum Studios, Daniel decided to take a break from his own music and turn his hand toward producing. He spent 4 months recording ex Sidewinder’s Martin Craft’s album ‘’Silver and Fire’’ for 679 Recordings (The Earlies, Polyphonic Spree, Death From Above 1979 etc) and also features on tracks "Love Knows How To Fight", "Nobodys Waiting" and "The Soldier" Daniel has also produced an album for Dark Captain Light Captain on Loaf / Lo Recordings (Aphex Twin, Susumu Yakota, Thurston Moore). Also Yo Zushi released on Pointy Records (The Clientele, Ladybug Transistor etc)
Daniel now returns his focus back on By The Fireside with the release of his debut full-length The Great Hartford Fire.
By The Fireside's new album, 'The Great Hartford Fire', is out 26th January on Rogue through Inertia. For more info, visit www.inertia-music.com. |
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