Visual artist and Parquet Courts co-frontman, A. Savage, recently played SF’s Rickshaw Stop in support of his latest solo project and Rare Earth was there to get the latest. Tune in on Monday, May 6th @ 1pm to hear their conversation.
Recorded in the same session as his recent solo album Several Songs About Fire, “Black Holes, the Stars and You” has been a long-time coming from A. Savage. With production by John Parish and propelled by an infectious groove, A. Savage’s lyrical poetry is on full display here as he examines the cognitive dissonance between the way we see ourselves and the way we see other people.
Several Songs About Fire is bolstered by the support of Jack Cooper (Modern Nature, Ultimate Painting) and Cate Le Bon, as well as members of Kamikaze Palm Tree & caroline. The end result is tantamount to psychic odyssey, containing a singular irreverence which is stitched together by Savage’s outsize gifts as a lyricist and observer, a quality Parish calls “an emotional openness guarded by a laconic wit.” Worrying questions of wealth and poverty, self and other, Savage displays the poet’s gift of knowing when to narrate and when to vanish, leaving the listener to their own emotional privacy rather than instructing them how to feel through vertiginous inversions of instrumentation and lyrics.
Several Songs About Fire stands as an act of nearly libidinal rebellion against a moment when so much of life is the blue light of screens. This is an album whose topic is no less than the sublime: the moments in which a sensory experience becomes a holiness or possession of its own, and the self floats above it.
Photo Credit: Vince McClelland
