Presented by:
Triple D's
Fenne Lily
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Fenne Lily
The record started like this: a move to New York from England. An out of the blue phone break-up, on Independence Day. A month of running, not eating enough, drinking too much. A month of writing thousands of words a day, frantically, from a place of guilt. A month where it felt like this loss of self. It started out like an exorcism. But it doesn’t end that way. Because things started to shift for Fenne Lily. The blame she placed on herself dissipated. New York, her new city, started to feel like her home. A place she had some ownership; a place that now held her own memories and experiences. She drove to New England in a truck. She made music with her friends in the Hudson Valley. She spent nights running pool tables. She fell in love again. She began writing the songs to her fourth album, Win Win. And she found that as she did this, the songs she wrote were coming from a place of warmth, self discovery. Something new was emerging from inside of herself. “I wanted to make music that sounded like the sun was out,” says Fenne. Win Win is a record that sounds like the sun is out. “What do you feel like you’ve won?” asked Fenne’s father of the record’s title. She explained to him that what she won is what she did not lose. Of course, she had experienced loss: the loss of a relationship, the loss of a beloved pet dog. But she did not lose her integrity. She did not lie. Win Win is an exploration of this idea; this need for grit and conviction as a means to make art and to feel whole. The resulting album is some of Fenne’s best, most beautiful writing to date. It is a record that is honest, feels hopeful, sounds free. In retrospect, says Fenne, “Sleeping” feels like a blueprint for Win Win. A proof of concept. “I say what I mean and am a little bit mean in the process,” she says, “It’s a thoughtful rage.” The song was written in the immediate aftermath of Fenne’s breakup. She was living in an old brownstone in Bed-Stuy, and wrote the song as a container for her anger, a container to say everything she thought she couldn’t say. “‘You kept me around long enough to learn my patterns,” she sings, her voice clear, “Blamed me for returning to them, then said it’s not about me.” There’s a really gorgeous interplay between keys, guitars, and trumpet (which, crucially, is not an actual trumpet, it is a trumpet noise, from the mouth of bandmate and friend Isaac Stalling). The song is strong, searching, and triumphant. When Fenne can’t figure out the lyrics for a song, she’ll use poetry as a placeholder. She’ll figure out a song on the guitar, then set it to a poem she likes. On Win Win, some of those poets include Richard Siken, Diane Suess, and Franz Wright. While their words are no longer in Fenne’s lyrics, the record still maintains this poetic quality. “Uh Huh,” the album’s opener, is one such offering. The song is written from a roving perspective, where the “you” in question is Fenne. It’s a vantage point that creates a conversational quality in the song, where Fenne explains both her break up and her budding new relationship. The images here are clear and crisp. “Couldn’t breathe and couldn’t sleep and could’ve sworn you lost it all,” she sings, “but it all turned out to be just one year-long long-distance call.” Win Win was made over the course of a year and a half. In snowstorms, heat waves, when Fenne was in the middle of moving apartments. There were pauses in recording due to a Samba band playing outside, down the block from the studio, or an enormous blizzard that marooned a bass player in Flatbush. She recorded with her old bandmates from England, and new friends she’d made in New York. She recorded the record live, and some of it to tape. It was a challenging recording process. She’d have a little distance from a session, and found that the meaning of her songs were changing as time passed (so much so that she recorded the single “Stranger Things” four different times). “Uh Huh,” too, changed quite a bit from writing to recording. “I knew it had to have a solid groove to it, sound strong and sure of itself, and it took a couple of different band configurations to get there.” says Fenne. The secret ingredient was, as it turns out, drums from longtime friend and collaborator James Luxton. Win Win was recorded in fits and starts, but the final product is a record that is so grounded, so cohesive, so incredibly lovely from start to finish. Even (and especially) “in Life and on Planes,” the last song on the record. It is a song that was added at the very last minute, after the album had already been mixed, swapped for a different song as a final hail mary. It is a truly glorious song, raw and imperfect, hissing with tape. “I don’t belong to other people now,” Fenne sings in the song’s last moments, over and over, like a mantra. It is a moment that feels so alive, on a record that feels so alive. Win Win is alive. It is a record of self discovery. Sad but happy. Happy but sad. Written in the light.
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Sean Soloman
"Animator, musician, and onetime Moaning frontman Sean Solomon’s new solo record is a pared-back, contemplative look into the psyche of a gentle, wounded soul ... Soft and slow, the melancholic 28-minute record is caught somewhere between a lullaby and an existential crisis." - Paste "The L.A.-based musician favors disillusion over delirium, but his bummed-out, dissatisfied and wise-up narrators can’t help but carry at least a shred of what remains of their heart on their sleeve." - SPIN As a musician, animator and physical media enthusiast, a VHS deluxe edition of his debut album ‘The World Is Not Good Enough’ feels like a natural next step for Los Angeles’s Sean Solomon. “I perform live with a VHS tape that has all my backing tracks and animated videos on it,” he explained. “If I make a mistake, I have to rewind. I love that danger and uncertainty. The tape warps, my gear sometimes breaks, and every show is a little different. I wanted to capture that in the recordings for the deluxe edition of my album. We recorded the whole thing onto a VHS tape, so the final result has all the imperfections and tape hiss you might hear at one of my shows.” In anticipation of the deluxe edition’s release today Solomon has shared the VHS edition of the track “Finish Line”. Explaining the song’s origins, Solomon said: “I work in animation, and I’ve had tons of development deals where I think I’m going to create my own animated series. If they greenlight your show, suddenly you’re rich and have this awesome creative job. But every time I’ve almost had my dream job, there’s some corporate merger or layoffs and suddenly everyone I work with is fired and my dreams are squashed. That’s when I wrote the opening line “I thought I saw the finish line / but I was on a treadmill the whole time.” He continued: “The song evolved into being about something more universal. How I expected more from the world. Not just for me but the people in my life that I love and see struggling. Everyone was going through some sort of rejection, and it felt unfair that you could work just as hard or harder than anyone else and still get the short end of the stick.”