THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “I imagine myself playing these songs in a small club that is slowly burning,” says A. Savage of his second solo record, Several Songs about Fire. After more than a decade in New York, the co-frontman of Parquet Courts has left the city, marking his exit with a masterpiece of maturity and a worthy corollary to his first solo venture, 2017’s Thawing Dawn. “Fire is something you have to escape from. This album is a burning building, and these songs are things I’d leave behind to save myself.”
Produced by John Parish on a 1” 16-track in just 10 days in Bristol and studded by the support of Cate Le Bon and Jack Cooper (Modern Nature, Ultimate Painting) as well as saxophonist Euan Hinshelwood (Cate Le Bon), drummer Dylan Hadley (Kamikaze Palm Tree, White Fence), and violinist Magdalena McLean (Caroline), Savage’s outsize gifts as a lyricist and observer — a quality Parish calls “an emotional openness guarded by a laconic wit” — shine. 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.
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. The album was sculpted in the bucolic, nocturnal hush of rural England, where Savage and Cooper worked deep into the night, trying not to wake Cooper’s sleeping daughter.
The result is tantamount to psychic odyssey, with Elvis In The Army placing us in a subterranean venue where the livid, ratifying cymbal raises the room’s blood pressure and Mountain Time evoking an austere waltz playing in a desolate house, returning those listening to life. On David’s Dead — a song memorializing his longtime friend and neighbor David Lester, who was homeless and would ring his door for conversation late at night — Savage spurns the sepulchral or elegiac. Instead, the song travels on a poppy, conversational refrain and the joyous half-life of a vibraphone, a better tribute to someone who Savage remembers as having little restraint, and a better reminder that death is made of life.
“It’s a portrait of the block in New York City that I called home for over a decade, each line sort of a tally of things that had changed in that time,” Savage says. “I can tell you that David’s passing made some of those changes much more evident than they were before. I can tell you that the last time I saw David I bought him both a black coffee and a can of Crazy Stallion, and that we drank a coffee together on my stoop, but I said ‘see ya later’ when he cracked open the tallboy.”
Influenced by Sybille Baier and Townes Van Zandt, Savage joins a canon of songwriters constantly dilating aperture and perspective. In rendering the signage of laundromats and threats of debt collectors as glistering and totemic as the scope of mountains, rivers, seas, and skies, Savage finds hopes and curses in equal measure.Ú
