| Developing his art of fiction: Jeremy Warmsley |
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| "If I notice a trend going through a number of songs my reaction is to try and break the trend" |
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CMU ALBUMS OF 2006: 'The Arts Of Fiction'
released 9 Oct on Transgressive Records
Whenever I write about artists we love I always seem to find myself saying "this artist's music is very hard to classify" - which either means I'm pretty bad at classifying music, or that if you want to appear in a CMU favourite artists list you need to make music that doesn't fit into any pre-defined genre. Either way, Jeremy Warmsley is another artist whose music is hard to classify - certainly you couldn't say his songs are like those you would probably expect if the words 'singer' and 'songwriter' were used to prefix his name without any further clarification. On his MySpace Warmsley himself says "I write songs in my head and then make them come out of a computer", but when we chatted about his album he admitted even that isn't a particularly good description, because when you talk about computers you expect some kind of thumping electro music, which Warmsley definitely does not make. Of course that's why MySpace has become a very useful tool (well, when the player function works, which I find is less and less since they 'improved' it), because rather than me rambling in this inane fashion you can go and listen to Jeremy's music for yourself. To be honest, his quirky and eclectic songs probably won't be to everyone's taste, but we love them. And having enjoyed tracks from his early EP in 2005, and the subsequent singles, and having enjoyed even more a Borderline gig earlier this year, it was with a considerable degree of delight that we opened the jiffy bag containing a copy of his debut long player, 'The Art Of Fiction', back in September. Bringing together many of those tracks we had grown to love, and a few more too, it confirmed why we really rate Jeremy Warmsley. It's a truly innovative collection of songs, demonstrating a kind of lyrical and musical imagination and experimentation that makes Warmsley not only one of the UK's best contemporary singer songwriters, but also so much more than just a singer songwriter. Which is why we wanted to spend some quality chatting time with him. And why 'The Art Of Fiction' is CMU's next favourite album of 2006. |
You don’t have to be a MySpace friend of CMU in order for your album releases to make it on our end of year favourites list, though by coincidence the first three all have been. Of the three, it is probably Jeremy Warmsley who has benefited most from Rupert Murdoch’s internet empire in terms of keeping me up to date with his musical adventures. That’s not to say I first discovered him through the social networking phenomenon. I first stumbled across Warmsley’s ‘5 Interesting Lies’ EP in November 2005, and if we’re being honest, (and as hard as it is to believe) most of us in the UK didn’t really catch on to MySpace until this year (though, as it happens, I think Jeremy did; I, however, did not). But it is through Jeremy’s more-active-than-most MySpace page that I was able to keep up to date with his gigs and songs in the run up to the release of his wonderful debut album – ‘The Art Of Fiction’ - back in October. Though if you, like me, have been following the Jeremy Warmsley MySpace for much of the last year, as he went through the motions of releasing his early singles for Warner’s Transgressive label in the run up to the aforementioned album release, playing many a gig and building up quite a dedicated following along the way, you might have thought things have happened quite quickly for Warmsley. But the MySpace has only been tracking the most recent chapter in his musical career.
“My parents both played musical instruments” he explains, starting very much at the start, “so music was all around me when I was growing up, but to be honest I didn’t have any real interest in it. That came later. Partly when I started listening to music more seriously after discovering bands like Belle & Sebastian and Mogwai. The Beatles even. I found myself thinking more and more about how they did what they did, trying to play along on guitar. But partly also, I think, when I read Iain Banks’ book ‘Espedair Street’, which is about this fictional rock star called Dan Weir. It’s a real escapist novel, and it really gave you the sense that anyone could do the music thing – pick up a guitar and write songs. It was after that, that I started to realise I enjoyed playing music as much as listening to it”.
While Jeremy was starting to enjoy playing music, and soon found a passion for writing and creating music, it took much longer for him to adapt to performing it in public, meaning that many of his early songs were written for other people, with Jeremy himself providing just the backing vocals. “I started singing when I was 20,” he says, “and it took five years to get good. To be honest, for the first two years my voice wasn’t great, and my performance skills were a bit shoddy. But I think that’s normal. If you listen to some of the early tapes of, say, Jeff Buckley, his singing isn’t great. I think you have to learn about your voice, work out what works, and then develop it accordingly”.
Even as Jeremy started to sing more, he was initially a little nervous of performing his own work. “When I used to sing with my friends around I’d always do cover versions. That way you can make them funny, and entertain people that way. You’re not risking as much”.
But fortunately for us, Jeremy slowly overcame his various fears, and so the makings of a great new singer songwriter were put into place. Not that Jeremy was completely happy with the songs he was writing. “I had an album worth of stuff recorded two years ago – songs I had started playing my friends. But it was mainly guitar based middle of the road stuff. It wasn’t very interesting. So I started incorporating other stuff, to make it a bit different. The funny thing is all my friends hated the new stuff, but by that stage I knew that’s what I wanted to do”.
And rightly so, because it’s the “other stuff” that makes Warmsley stand out from many of the other singer songwriters streaming music via MySpace. For a solo artist Warmsley has more of a band sound – sometimes because he ropes in friends to collaborate on his songs, other times because he layers his own multiple instrumentations onto his laptop to create his music.
“I have massive problems describing my music” he admits, talking about the distinctive yet eclectic sound he has developed in the last two years. “If I notice a trend going through a number of songs my reaction is to try and break the trend. So it’s hard to say my songs are this kind of music or that kind of music”. On the aforementioned MySpace he describes himself by saying “I write songs and make them come out of a computer”, but he admits “even that’s not 100% right – because it doesn’t really sound like you’d expect it to when you hear a computer is involved. There are other singer songwriters who use an acoustic guitar and a laptop, and some people would say that that’s what I do, but I’m not sure that’s right either. I use the studio more compositionally than that – the production is more integral. I like to think my approach is more like that of, say, Tom Waits, or Bjork”.
Warmsley’s approach also makes his live shows more of a challenge because when you’re one of those artists who plays multiple instruments when you record a track you can’t just repeat what you did in the studio on stage. “That’s been my biggest problem”, Jeremy admits, “because you could use a backing track and sing on top, but that feels a bit too like karaoke. I’ve done it in different ways. Originally I used a guitar with lots of effect peddles, which had a certain ‘what the fuck’ impact. But now I tend to use a small band, for some of the songs anyway. It is a bit like doing cover versions of your own songs. Sometimes it works, sometimes you need to change the song a bit to make it work live. Take ‘I Believe In The Way You Move’. That just didn’t work when we did it live, but eventually we decided to slow it down, and it started to sound really good. So much so we recorded the single like the live version – it was so much better”.
Clearly Jeremy’s music, live and recorded, has developed organically over time, and it is richer for that. More importantly, because the development has seen the music change rather than get more and more honed, the end product is well made and well produced, yet still has that wonderful fresh feel that some well made, well produced music loses in the development process. As a result ‘The Art Of Fiction’ really stands out from the debut albums of many of Warmsley’s contemporary singer songwriters – sounding both mature and youthful at the same time.
Which is probably why acclaim for Warmsley’s works has really started to gain momentum now that the debut album has been released, though, as you’d expect given what we’ve heard so far, Jeremy remains quite modest about the whole thing. On finally having an debut album out there he observes “It's nice when you're at the dentist or at the doctor or something, and they ask you what you do, and you say ‘I'm a musician’, and they always go ‘Oh... how's that working out for you?’ or something equally cynical, because then you can come back with ‘Oh, well my album's been out for two months and I'm going on tour tomorrow, actually’ all nonchalant like”.
In among all the touring Jeremy has already started work on album number two, and needless to say, his music is developing once more. “I'm already well into recording the next album, “ he concludes, “it’s very much in the early stages but I think the plan is to move on with some new material asap. The new material is much more extreme than the first album in a way - there's much poppier bits and also much more abstract bits”. Which is exactly what we want.
Jeremy’s favourite artists of 2006:
“The Knife and Joanna Newsom, without a doubt. Plus new discoveries like Laura Groves (the uncrowned Myspace Queen)”.
Jeremy’s New Year’s resolutions:
“Be more naive. And go for more walks”.
chris@unlimitedmedia.co.uk - published dec 2006
