POST-BURNOUT
After moving to Berlin in 2013, the Dubliner singer-songwriter Stephen Fanning formed his solo project A.S. Fanning, which went on to gain a lot of traction through his weaving of dark, introspective, and cerebral lyrics under an eclectic tapestry of dissonant, gothic, cinematic, and psychedelic instrumentation that, at its core, maintains a consistent focus through an anchor of folk.
“I like ambiguity,” Fanning tells Post-Burnout of his songwriting process. “I like not knowing…there’s a great quote from Tom Waits, where he says something like, ‘There are some songs that you spend a year writing, and analyse every lyric, and edit them within an inch of their lives, and, by the time you’re done with them, you’ll never want to play them again. And there’s other songs that you’ll write in fifteen minutes, and play them every night, trying to figure out what they mean.’
“I like that way of writing. My favourite songs that I’ve written are the ones that have come very quickly, and then I only realise meanings in them later on that I haven’t really considered. I write both ways; there are songs that I’ve definitely tortured into existence! [Laughs]”
Courtesy of Amplify Agency
For his fourth studio album, Take Me Back To Nowhere, which was released back in February, Fanning was inspired by a trip he took to a Berlin exhibition on post-World War II art to craft a record that explored what he describes as the “loss of faith in what seemed to be universally-held morals and values” and the “insanity of nothing making sense” in modern politics and media.
“There’s definitely political inspiration in it,” Fanning says of the album. “A big thing for me, when I was writing it, was I broke my wrist, and I was trying to write, but also spending too much time looking at social media, and there was genocide happening in Gaza, and there was the war going on in Ukraine.
“And you’re kind of scrolling through this timeline on Instagram, and you’re seeing some food recipe, and then some influencer in a bikini on a beach, and then you’re seeing the most horrific images you’ve ever seen in your life as you scroll through it. It’s a very disorienting and dystopian thing, as a way to absorb what’s going on in the world.”
Made in weeks- and month-long sessions over the course of two years between producer Robbie Moore’s Idea Farm in Bonnarp, Sweden and various studios in Berlin, Take Me Back To Nowhere was a conceptual project that avoided the zeitgeist of modern release patterns.
Courtesy of Amplify Agency
“I’m not very good at commenting on the broader trends of what’s going on,” laughs Fanning. “I think […] people probably tend to go for singles that are aimed more at getting on playlists or getting on whatever. It’s always the thing that’s trotted out as a bit of an ambassador for whatever is behind it, and maybe they don’t pay as much attention to the album. I’m not really sure. I can’t really comment on other people or on the broader trends.
“But I definitely like the process of making an album. The last couple of albums, I’ve written in quite an intense burst of writing, and just allowed myself to get immersed in it, and influenced by certain books that I was reading at the time.
“Then, when I’m piecing an album together, I realise this thread that runs through it, and a lot of the thoughts that were going around my head at the time that I was writing it, and to do a lot of what I call ‘lyric dumps,’ where I just sort of dump out whatever’s in my head and stitch things together.
“I just find that process enjoyable, to then piece it together and realise there is a thread to things that I didn’t, necessarily, consciously or preconceive as making a lot of sense, or holding together as a finished piece, but then, when I see it at the end, I realise that there is a thread there and a strange sort of sense to make out of it.”
Often the process of making an album leaves Fanning with a surplus of material. Additional recordings from the Take Me Back To Nowhere sessions will be released as a new EP, titled Unbearable Miracle, which will come out on Friday week. The EP’s lead single, “On Your Side,” was released on August 19th.
“There are remixes of a couple of the songs from the album,” Fanning says of the EP. “The song that’s in segments on the album, ‘Back to Nowhere,’ is there in full, as well as a reprise version of that, with different lyrics. So, it’s sort of a bit of a cobbling together of stuff that was left over from the album recording, as well as some new interpretations and remixes and stuff.
“This is kind of getting towards the end of the cycle of touring this album. We’ve got the Irish tour in September, and some more touring in Scandinavia and the Baltics in October. We’re kind of getting towards the end of it, so it’s nice to just release something that kind of closes the chapter.”
A week after the release of Unbearable Miracle, Fanning will embark on a four-date tour of Ireland, appearing in Ballina, Galway, Dublin, and Kinsale. This will mark his first time home since 2017. However, he wants to clarify that the near-decade wait was not intended.
“When I released my first album [2017’s Second Life], I did my release show in Dublin,” Fanning says. “And we did a few gigs around Ireland, but I was already living in Berlin. The second album [2020’s You Should Go Mad] was released during COVID, and I didn’t tour that at all until a year or two later. Then, yeah, I’ve just been more concentrating on touring around Europe and stuff.
“It kind of surprised me when I realised it was nine years. It’s strange how these things happen. We did a UK tour for the last album [2023’s Mushroom Cloud], and I remember we tried to make it happen, that we’d go over to Ireland for a week or something, and it just didn’t work out. So, this is the first time since 2017, and it’s exciting.”
A.S. Fanning’s new EP, Unbearable Miracle, is out on September 18th. You can pre-save it through his Bandcamp. You can keep up with Fanning through his website.
You can see A.S. Fanning on his return to Ireland this month at:
24th – Ballina – TheNCF Cultural Co-Op
25th – Galway – Roisin Dubh Upstairs
26th – Dublin – Upstairs at Whelan’s
28th – Kinsale – Prim’s Bookshop: Bibliotherapy
Tune into POSTBURNOUT.COM Interviews… tonight at 22:00 (IST) to hear this interview in full. Available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music Podcasts.
Aaron Kavanagh is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Post-Burnout. His writing can also be found in the Irish Daily Star, Buzz.ie, Totally Dublin, The GOO, Headstuff, New Noise Magazine, XS Noize, DSCVRD and more.