I got to sit down and chat with British singer-songwriter Frank Turner before his set at Sea Hear Now Festival in Asbury Park, NJ, this past weekend. In addition to talking about performing on the first day of the festival, we also got to chat about his most recent album, touring, synthesizers, and writing processes.
Melodic Mag (Elizabeth): So, first of all, how does it feel to be playing the inaugural Sea Hear Now Festival?
Frank Turner: Thus far, great! I mean, I woke up this morning, looked out the front window of the tour bus and could see waves slapping on the shore 20 meters away and I thought to myself, “That’s a view I could handle waking up to more often.” And, you know, I love Asbury Park, got a long history here, and I’ve already seen a bunch of my friends and I’m going to see more later, so it should be good!
MM: Yeah, and there’s a bunch of New Jersey natives playing, so it must be good to see them.
FT: Yeah, yeah, we’ve got that regular thing, it always happens, which is I quite often don’t check who’s playing what day of the festival until we get there just because I don’t want to disappoint myself, like yesterday I had a look and found out that The Menzingers and Social Distortion are going on tomorrow. Which is a shame because I love hanging out with those guys and we’re going to be in Ithaca tomorrow instead.
MM: So, kind of going back now, your album “Love, Ire, and Song” turns ten years old this year. What’s it like looking back on that and comparing it to your most recent album?
FT: Well, when we made that album ten years ago—well, we made it 11 years ago, it was released ten years ago—we didn’t have many realistic expectations for it going any further than the very small community of people who were paying attention to what I did at the time anyway. So, to even be having this conversation about that record in America, it feels great! And, you know, we’ve done anniversary shows in places I’d never been when I wrote the record, like Toronto and Boston. And I’m sort of at pains to not don the mantle of heritage artists too readily because of that new record this year as well that I’m equally as proud of. But it’s really nice to look back on a thing that I did in my mid-20’s and still be talking about it a decade later.
MM: Yeah, I thought it was awesome how you played the full album not only at Lost Evenings Festival in London but the last night of your run in Boston. I was there and it was a great experience, getting to hear the whole album live.
FT: Yeah! That was a really fun run, it’s weird to be in one place for that long. I kept waking up being like, “Why are we still here?” -laughs- But yeah, it’s exciting. I find it very difficult to compare my art across time, if you will. Just because it’s so tied into where I was and who I was when I made those records. And I couldn’t make “Love, Ire, and Song” again now but I couldn’t have made “Be More Kind” back then, so I find it kind of difficult to say anything particularly meaningful other than I am ten years older. *laughs* That’s the difference to me.
MM: Yeah, I get that! And now jumping forward to “Be More Kind”, what was the writing process like? Did you write it on the road?
FT: Yeah, writing is kind of a continual process for me really, I know that there are some bands that have like writing periods in their diary and that just seems really odd to me. Because once I take time to gather the ideas that and sqinch them up into songs, the process of inspiration arriving is continual for me. I mean obviously you have fallow periods and fruitful periods as well. But yeah, I was writing on the road…well, I was writing an album about something completely other which I will do next, because that’s written and done, but then 2016 started happening and I sort of felt bound to respond to it in some way. For the first time in quite a long time, the preceding two records especially are not about the world, they’re about a fantasy of the heart or however you want to put it, so it was kind of an interesting change for me to kind of look outside again and talk about what’s happening in the world around us. But once this sort of direction and subject matter was clear, it was quite an easy write.
MM: Yeah, especially with all the harsh political climates and everything, I feel like so many artists are writing things that are very one-sided, but “Be More Kind” is sort of a unifying album.
FT: Yeah, I hope so! Thank you, the thing is some people have said that my record is sitting on a fence sort of and I can kind of see that, but the point is, as you said, other records are being made that take positions and obviously I have strongly-held beliefs and views of my own but that wasn’t really what I wanted to talk about with the record, specifically by design, you know? I wanted to discuss the way in which we conduct our arguments, because that seems important to me, at least because it seems to me that we’ve collectively become very bad at disagreeing with each other in an adult fashion, and I think that that’s a serious problem that we need to address.
MM: And I feel like in this day and age a lot of people kind of take pride in being divisive.
FT: Yeah, the very first thing I was taught at school about arguing is that you have to be able to inhabit the mental universe of the person you disagree with because simply that’s the only way you can ever beat them in an argument, you know? -laughs- But yeah, you’re right! I have a lot of friends who seem to be rejoicing and celebrating the fact that they can’t understand people they’re disagreeing with and among other things, I think that’s just a celebration of their own ignorance. It just means, “Cool, you haven’t thought about this enough.” And like, the thing I always come back to is the number of people who wake up in the morning and think to themselves, “I’m going to try and make the world worse today,” is vanishingly small, it’s just not how most people operate. And that thought then leads us to this staggeringly obvious conclusion that there are many routes to virtue. And again, the fact that people need to be reminded of what is like, lesson 1.1 of basic philosophy is pretty tragic to me. The people who—well, to take an example, everybody in the abortion debate thinks that they’re doing the right thing. Now, obviously, I have opinions within that, and there is an argument to be had, but it’s useless, it’s a complete fucking waste of time to just say, “Well, they’re EVIL,” because they don’t think of themselves as evil. And we have to engage with what it is they think about the world and have that discussion.
MM: I agree! And kind of tying into that, when you released the song “Make America Great Again,” did you have any worries about it being controversial, especially with the song name, even though it’s a pretty unifying song?
FT: -laughs- Well, I’m glad you say that, it’s meant to be an outreaching song. And the repurposing of political phraseology for opposite ends is an old trick. I mean, the word “yankee” was an old insult to Americans from the British troops, it’s been done in the past. And in a way, I was actually kind of in a hurry to get the song out because I was sure that somebody else must be about to write about it, and they haven’t appeared to have done that thus far. -laughs- But yeah, it seemed like an obvious approach to me, but, yeah, I was a little bit nervous about it, mainly because I was sticking my head above the parapet again, having spent quite a lot of time really quite happily not having a conversation about politics. I could live a longer and happier life if I never had to do that. -laughs- But, it seemed important. I’ve had a few people be upset about the song, but more hearteningly, I’ve had people come to me at shows who are self-identified republicans or Trump supporters or whatever who have said to me that they grasp where I’m coming from with it. Interestingly, I’ve had more people who were annoyed about the synthesizers on the song than about the politics, which I think is fucking hilarious. And, indeed, displays a sort of conservative mindset among music fans which I think is pretty fucking lame. -laughs-
MM: Yeah, about the synths, that’s pretty new and experimental for you, I heard there were a decent amount of them on “Be More Kind.” What inspired you to go in that direction?
FT: I mean, every time I make a record I try to do something I haven’t done before, obviously, or that would be a waste of my time. With this one in particular, there was a bunch of methodology, it kind of stared with “Positive Songs” we kind of rehearsed them as a band, arranged them as a band, and recorded them as a band, and that kind of—it was great, and it was how I wanted it to be, but I wanted to take a different approach. So, I was demoing on my laptop and just kind of flying in loops and beats and stuff and it started nudging me in that direction anyway. And we toured with Arkells, from Canada, who are, first of all amazing, and they have kind of a hefty kind of dose of synthesizer loops in what they do. And then I read a book called “Ripping Up and Starting Again” by Simon Reynolds which is a history of post-punk music in the U.K. in the 1980’s which is kind of a blind spot in my musicology if you know what I mean, and I found it really exciting reading about the first people humanly fucking around with the first sequences that kind of got manufactured and trying to make music with it. And my expertise when it comes to the technology involved in making electronic music is pretty low. -laughs- So I felt as if I was just going “Fuuuuck, what does this button do?” -laughs- And then yeah, I just kind of wanted to follow that road. And another huge influence on it that I forgot to mention is The Postal Service. Their album “Give Up” came out in 2003, which I know was a long time ago, but that record had a huge impact on me at the time and I fucking love that band. And, by extension, Jimmy Tamborello.
MM: Yeah, those guys have some great synth sounds! So, you’re currently finishing up your United States tour and then going onto Europe and touring with Jimmy Eat World, what’s that like?
FT: Yeah, we’re busy! It’s funny, like this is my seventh record and I’ve been around this merry-go-round quite a few times. -laughs- But of course, the difference is that we’re all getting older, I mean, I’m 36, I’m the youngest guy in the band by some distance actually, and we’re taking it a little easy now, some of us have kids now. I have a fiancée, I have a cat, -laughs- there are reasons to go home now that there weren’t before. And I guess I was engaged in a sort of arms race to be the hardest touring motherfucker in the universe for quite a long time and have realized with the benefit of a little age and wisdom that’s a fools errand.
MM: Yeah, with you playing more than 2,000 shows, you’re up there though!
FT: True! But first of all, nobody’s ever going to beat B. B. King, so give up. -laughs- But it’s like, no-one else was really as interested in it and I’ve done myself a fair amount of damage living that way. All of that is a long preambled saying to that the tour is going well, thank you very much! But I think we’re all quite looking forward to having a few weeks off coming up, and then the European shows should be fun, and next year should be good too!
MM: Great! Kind of going off of the tour, I saw you in Boston and you had different openers every night of that residency. What inspired you to do that?
FT: It was kind of—I don’t know, I think it was actually suggested by my booking agent. -laughs- Plus, my list of people who I want to play shows with is longer than you’d believe. And if you factor in the people I’ve told when drunk that I want to play a show with them…I’m awful with that, really, I should apologize to the universe for doing that all the fucking time. -laughs- But yeah, it was cool. Jeff Rosenstock was awesome, War on Women were fucking unbelievable live. I’m definitely doing more shows with them, and you can put that on the record! -laughs- But yeah, it was fun, it was a good run! Obviously we had Homeless Gospel Choir as well, Derek’s like my hero, I love him. But yeah, it was good!
MM: Finally, I wanted to ask you how your second book is coming along?
FT: Yes! I’ve just sent out draft number two about half an hour ago. It’s going great! We’re nearly there. It’s funny, I did the first draft and obviously it required a lot of edits. It’s a book about songwriting, I wrote a book about touring and that went well, but I didn’t just want to do a plain sequel, that struck me as kind of boring. Plus, there’s kind of a narrative arc to the first one, getting from playing to nobody to playing to 12,000 people, whereas this is a book about sort of continuing to exist would be less interesting, I think. -laughs- So yeah, I finished the first draft and it was kind of interesting because I also gave a copy to the Souls to read and to check the facts as they were, not so much the grammar and the spelling. And it was kind of interesting because each chapter is about a certain song and it goes through a lot of songs and a lot of people have…certain memories of certain events. -laughs- Which was interesting to me! Some of which I was like, “Oh fuck, yeah, that is how it happened,” and some of which I sort of said, “No, it’s not how I remember it.” I’m the one writing the fucking book! -laughs-
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