As front-man of Brisbane rock’n’roll band Powderfinger, Fanning enthralled listeners with his impassioned grunge cries during the outro of Pick You Up and steadied during the middle of The ‘Fingers career on the back of the flawlessly constructed These Days and the pure pop genius of My Happiness. In June this, year roughly two years since Powderfinger played their last show on the banks of the Brisbane River, Fanning released the album Departures.
While being his second solo album, the follow-up to 2005’s Tea & Sympathy that featured the aforementioned Trojan horse Wish You Well, Fanning explains that Departures is a more focused and committed effort than its triple platinum selling predecessor.
“Tea & Sympathy was kind of a project because Powderfinger were still together; we were having a year off so I made an album. Departures was made knowing that I wasn’t going back to Powderfinger – a really different mentality. Tea & Sympathy was just written by sitting on the veranda and drinking a bottle of wine or getting high. But with this album I put a lot more thought into it.”
Aurally, Departures is a completely different beast to Tea & Sympathy, a notion that becomes obvious from the first listen. Departures quite literally got ‘Hollywood treatment’ under the helm of über-producer Joe Chiccarelli whose résumé includes The Strokes’ Angles and Boy & Bear’s five-times ARIA-award juggernaut debut album. Fanning explains that the expectation of production-value on his latest album was always in the mix.
“Tea & Sympathy lends itself to sitting down with a guitar. I wasn’t in that situation at all with this record, teaching myself how to program drums and do things really differently to how I had done them before. I did Departures with a totally different view in mind.” Surprisingly, this new approach freed Fanning from the weight of expectation, considering Tea & Sympathy was so successful.
“I didn’t have any great expectations for this record, I think a lot of people probably had a lot of expectations for this record because Tea & Sympathy was a pretty successful record but I wasn’t trying to ‘follow it up’ or any of that crap that is normally associated with it by the music press.
“I just wanted to make music that was different to what I had done before. About halfway through the process I ended up getting, having the opportunity to go and make the music with Joe and that kind of changed the mentality that I was going into the record with.”
The reason Fanning jumped at the chance to go and make it in LA was that he would get to work with such a well-regarded producer and the access that he would have to really slick, top-end musicians. As Fanning now confirms, even after 25 years as a recording artist, there are some opportunities in ‘the biz’ that still excite him.
“I wanted to see what that was like so I saw the opportunity and just grabbed it! Originally this record was going to be a little more cut and paste-y and a lot more lo-fi than it ended up. I mean the demos of Departures really reflect it a lot more – I’ll probably look at trying to get them out at some stage as well,” concludes Fanning on the studio permutations of Departures.
With the higher production value of this record, the beefed-up sound, actually threw-up an unexpected challenge Fanning – to not let the songs sound like Powderfinger songs. One songs that flirts close to this line is the third single from Departures, the stirring Grow Around You. Fanning discusses the challenge of getting this song to how it sounds today.
“That song went through a few different permutations, and you’re right, it could have turned into a big rock power ballad but I think that it would have ended up sounding a lot like Powderfinger if it had gone down that road, and that was part of the idea of this record was not go there as well out of respect for Powderfinger and out of curiosity.”
The concept of challenging himself as songwriter is not new to Fanning. One particularly memorable anecdote from his songwriting history is the story surrounding the Powderfinger song These Days that came in at no.1 on the Triple J Hottest 100 in 1999. The song was first released on the soundtrack of film from the same year, Two Hands. The story goes that the film’s writer and director Gregor Jordan asked Powderfinger to write a song specifically for the scene where karma gets the better of Brian Brown’s gangster character.
“Gregor Jordan came to us and said, ‘I like your music – can you guys contribute some music to a film I am making?’” Fanning clarifies the origins of the song. “To which we said, ‘Can we see it before we agree to do it?’ And he showed us a scene that he was looking to put a song and we actually wrote two songs for it with These Days being the second one written. We recorded the first one and we were like, ‘That’s alright’ and then I went home that night and wrote These Days. The scene we wrote it for is the one were the girl walks up the hallway and shoots Brian Brown and co. I hadn’t seen the whole film at that stage but I knew the story and I knew the idea.”
As one would discern from this article so far, an audience with Fanning is intelligently enlightening due to his extensive experience and keen observation. Finally, Fanning talks about his upcoming Day On The Green show in the Yarra Valley at Rochford Wines on Saturday November 9 – a live show that will see Fanning at his best having honed his live performance during July/Augusts Departures tour of Australia. Joining him on the lineup at Rochford Wines are similarly iconic Australian artists The Cruel Sea, Sarah Blasko and Bob Evans.
“I know them all through Powderfinger and touring Tea & Sympathy. I have played with all of them at some stage, with Kev [Mitchell a.k.a Bob Evans] more so through Jebediah. From just talking to friends of mine and people about the lineup, everyone really likes it. There is a lot of variety there but also enough familiarity to keep a thread running between all four acts. I think it is going to be a great day. Hopefully we get good weather – that’s the main problem in Victoria isn’t it?” tells an enthusiastic Fanning who still manages to have a little jab at ‘The Place To Be.’
Fanning is also very definite in establishing that if you saw his Departures show at the Palace Theatre in August that this performance will be different. “We have no intention of reproducing the show we put on for the Departures tour – we are going to do a different show again and this time there is a visual element to it – more production. It is a little bit more theatrical.”
BY DAN WATT
