- Tue, 2009-08-25 12:58
The follow up to Noah & The Whale's gold selling debut album, Peaceful The World Lays Me Down, is a release the includes both a film and an album. Sharing the title The First Days of Spring, both the album and film intertwine beautiful imagery and poetic reasoning amongst the complexities and delicate sensibilities of the moving image coupled with a musical narrative.
I Like Music caught up with Charlie Fink, director of the film and the man behind the concept, to chat about The First Days of Spring as both film and album. We find out about his inspirations, how he approached the creative challenge and how he will move the project forward into the Noah and The Whale live show.
"I Like Music because… I've been surrounded by music my whole life. It seems impossible to imagine a world without it." Charlie, Noah and The Whale
ILM: The First Days of Spring is an album and a film. What is their relationship to one another?
Charlie: In terms of the realtionship I want people to have with them, I want them to distinguish each from the other. I want them to have their own relationship with the album as an album and their own relationship with the film as a film. The music is essentially the backbone of the film. It defines its pace in an abstract way. It narrates it in a sense, but it's not the same story. The narratives of each are complimentary. I see it as being a 50 minute film in its own right and also a seperate album.
ILM: How did the idea develop? Did one come before the other?
Charlie: I literally had the idea of making an album and a film as one project. Making a film where the backbone is the soundtrack. Before I had any story, any melody or anything, that idea was there. I wrote the record keeping images of the film in my head. The album is very structured. The music led the way.There are melodies that repeat with certain visuals. The album mirrors itself. Each song sort of has a partner song and there are melodies that repeat and lyrics that repeat and change.
ILM: We spoke around the release of Peaceful The World Lays Me Down, and you told us that the album was to some degree influenced by the poem Death Be Not Proud by John Donne. Does The First Days Of Spring have a particular point of reference in terms of inspiration?
Charlie: Lots of different things. Although in the same way T.S.Eliot's The Waste Land had a large influence on some of the imagery. The opening stanza 'April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land,' reflects in a lyric in one of the songs saying how the second month in Spring is the cruelest month, a slightly blatant reflection, but still. That was something that influenced the mood of the record and the film. It was one of the things that helped set it.
ILM: How do you describe the themes and ideas that intertwine within the film and the music?
Charlie: A big theme in both the music and the film is that of redemption and re-birth. It's weird for it to be set in Spring. Obviously Spring is the time that those things should happen, but those images can also be incredibly cruel and painful. The idea that starting again can be a very hard thing. That's what connects them both. Both the album and the film are a one person story, which is about loss, grief and ultimately redemption. Although it's an open question really...
ILM: You mention the parallels between songs, mirrored sounds and imagery throughout the album. How did that affect your writing process?
Charlie: I wrote this album in a completely different way from the first album. I had this vision for the structure almost before I had a lot of the songs. I had a huge document with how I wanted them to be structured, how I wanted them to relate, how I wanted the narrative to flow. I had song titles and song ideas before I had lyrics. Previously songs would come as often as a melody or a stanza or a couplet. My idea with this was to create an overall thing first. In the same way that you would try to storyboard a film or structure the bare bones for a novel. That's how I wanted to approach making this record and writing it.
ILM: How did that process filter through into your directing experience and techniques?
Charlie: I'd never done anything like this before, only a few music videos. But that's something I've never been afraid of. Soemthing that has been very comforting this year, and something I've realised I wholly believe in and will apply to everything I do is summed up in a WH Auden quote, "To make art, all you need is something to say and a respect and understanding for the medium." That for me is exactly how I see it. The first time I remember coming into the music industry, the first contact I had with the music industry was when Laura Marling asked me to produce her debut EP My Manic And I. I'd only done bedroom demos, demos for other people and bits and bobs before. I remember going in to do that and realising that no-one around me had any idea, well obviously Laura did, but none of the other people had any idea what they were doing. The fact that I had a vision, a passion and an understanding of what music is, was enough to get me by. The technical stuff I could just pick up on the way. There's a really nice quote I heard the other day was from Denzel Washington, he said "The time to worry about flying is when you're still on the ground." Incredible, it's right. Once you've launched yourself into something, it's too late. It's too late to worry about it. You know, I'm either going to make this or not. And if I don't I'm never going to live with myself, so I might as well get on with it. You realise that you have to just embrace the things that throw themselves up at you. For example, with film making, if you're shooting a film outdoors and in your head you've clutched on to it being sunny and it ends up being an overcast day, well you have to make it work for an overcast day. You have to re-write it. That's something to embrace.
ILM: How will this new project affect your live set up and show?
Charlie: That's a hard thing. The thing that is most satisfying to me about the new record is the combination. The unity of all the songs is far more powerful than each individual song itself. All the songs have much more impact in the structure they are in together, than they would have alone. Perhaps performing the whole thing live together and in order would make the most sense. But I don't know. The old songs we are playing live now have been given a modern varnish and are in the sound of the new set. We'll see.
ILM: Finally, have you found the time to discover any new music recently?
Charlie: I heard the new record by a band called Sleeping States the other day. It's this guy from Bristol. He's actually made three records before this. Two of them were self released and one of them only got a very limited release. But this is the first record he's doing on Bella Union. It sounds remarkable.
