Gruff Rhys discusses ‘Sadness Sets Me Free’, unlikely collaborations, and 25 studio albums
Sound, the final frontier. This is the voyage of Gruff Rhys. Its two-year mission is to explore strange new worlds, seek out new strands of creativity, and reach new listeners. To boldly go where no musician has gone before.
On his new song, ‘Celestial Candyfloss’, Gruff Rhys takes off to space, lost in a wood-panelled shipping container floating among the stars. The imagery perfectly embodies the sound of his new album, Sadness Sets Me Free, which he describes as a “pocket symphony”, with a style so beautifully cohesive it feels like you’re floating; the 25th studio album that Gruff has worked on is the perfect record to listen to in orbit.
The image of Gruff in a shipping container turned spaceship is also the perfect metaphor for his extensive career. With music being space, an endless chasm of creativity and exploration, we, as listeners, are destined to immerse ourselves within it whilst focusing on the one thing we perceive as recognisable. In this case, it’s the shipping container driven by Gruff.
Humouring this metaphor, there is no one better you would like at the helm of your intergalactic exploration, as Gruff’s career has seen him explore various crevices of the musical galaxy. In doing so, he has landed on different planets and worked with multiple lifeforms, which has seen him sell a tank to the Eagles, use a mountain as a muse and have Paul McCartney chew vegetables down a microphone.
“We were able to approach him and ask him to revive the chewing bit on the song ‘Vegetables’ by the Beach Boys,” Gruff told Far Out. He has left the spaceship behind and instead decides to speak from his office in Cardiff. “I don’t know when he recorded it. It will have been between ‘66 and ‘67 or something. He was totally into it…when we were recording, we had to take security into consideration, like we were been sent detailed maps but only at the last minute of where to go and how it’s going to be. Then that got cancelled, and he asked us to send him the tapes. We got a tape back where he was talking us through various textures of vegetables.”
A smile creeps on the musician/spaceman’s face as he recalls the moment he and the rest of Super Furry Animals heard the recordings, “So, he was talking, saying, ‘this is the carrot’, and then he was chomping it to the beat, then he would introduce the celery,” he adds. “We didn’t think to use his voice. I suppose we could have chucked him in, but we felt like that would have been exploiting him, and we just wanted his amazing sense of rhythm.”
Despite Sadness Sets Me Free being Gruff’s most recent album, it carries on with the only thing consistent throughout his career, which is a sense of inconsistency. He’s never been afraid to try new things and reach for different sounds, which he says is the result of frequent collaboration, regardless of whether that was in his first bands when he was young, a vegetable-hungry Beatle or with people from various cultures and backgrounds.
“Learning within the bands I’ve been in, like Super Furry, learning from each other, how to piece songs together with my mates when I was 16, 17, and the first records I was making with my first band,” he told me. “We were just discovering how to structure sounds, and that was a huge learning experience, going to the studio with the producer, Gorwel Owen, at the time, and just having that whole world opened up to us.”
He continued: “Something that influenced me a lot was getting to play with the Tuareg band Imarhan and going to the south of Algeria to record a couple of things with them. They were setting up everything live, playing at a very low volume, and recording these really intricate low-volume jams. And you know, when you listen to them back, they sound huge. I think that was very influential on how I wanted to record Sadness Sets Me Free; even though it doesn’t sound anything like Imarhan, the recording technique was similar.”
The technique Gruff is referring to is the fact that every instrument – bar a couple of guitar solos and synth sounds – recorded on the new album is acoustic. The bass was a double bass, the drum kit was all mic’d up, and the tracks were recorded live. The wood lining on his intergalactic spaceship is even a reference to the acoustic nature of the album, all of which contributes to the fact despite there being so much happening on each song, it still sounds relatively stripped back and peaceful.
“The tour that preceded the recording was just as important,” he said, “So like, I’d prepared some terrible sounding demos and then… we rehearsed a few songs before the tour and the rest we kind of jammed at sound checks and things on the tour, and we sang a few of them live. Part of the thrill, I suppose, was coming out of lockdown and all that period, being able to play music live with friends and just jam lots and develop the songs like that. So, the recording process itself was really immediate because we had everything practised, and some songs went down very arranged.”
The new album is an excellent way for Gruff to mark number 25 in his overall discography; it’s very peaceful but doesn’t sacrifice any atmosphere to achieve that sound. It’s unlike anything he has worked on before, but at the same time, it is a perfect representation of who he is as a musician. The intergalactic indie bops look up at the Milky Way and take solace in the magnitude of space, using the universe as a form of escapism from terrible times on planet Earth.
But unlike space, music is tangible in the sense that people can look back on songs, releases and processes. However, when Gruff looks into music, he takes from it the same thing he does from the cosmos: a sense of solace, peace and harmony. If he could pass on any advice to anyone else trying to get into songwriting, he would encourage them to do the same.
“Just appreciate every chance to do it, I suppose. Life’s quite big in what it throws at you every day,” he says. “I’m the same. There’s so much stuff I’ve got to do to get by, to get my kids through the day, you know? Then, when I get the chance to write, it’s really special. Songs are peaceful for me; I liken it to doing the crossword or something; it’s just really pleasurable trying to fit words into a melody. I just find it something I really enjoy doing.”
