“A personal document of a collapsing society”: Sliding into AS Fanning’s DMs to talk shop
If AS Fanning had written Take Me Back to Nowhere ten years ago, then the premise might have been thus: an album that explores the role of technology in an age of human hyper connectivity.
But in the decade since Fanning first emerged, we have well and truly zoomed off into the future with reckless abandon. So, in 2026, Take Me Back to Nowhere, instead, is a ripe exploration of the role of human connection in the age of hyper technology.
It is a subtle, but dramatic shift that the Irish songwriter’s record skewers in a manner that is somehow thrilling, comforting, and concerning. Almost three years on from Mushroom Cloud, a record that sealed third place in our best albums of 2023 list for its exacting grip on the zeitgeist, the crooner remains Berlin-based. This time, the synthetic history of the city’s music is woven into that exacting grip and bears a stark inflection in his sound. It matches the music perfectly.
Songs that may well begin with recognisable folk motifs, true to the Leonard Cohen comparison Fanning often receives, gather a head of steam as synthetic elements bring forward momentum to his melodies. What could be a more fitting match for the battle between humanity, technology, and its strange overlaps than a crooner with an acoustic, preordained to have a predilection for matters of the heart, to be pulled away from that pursuit and tumble down rabbit holes of technopoly in a whirl of more feverish sounds.
It seemed only right that my interview didn’t just ask questions on this matter, but found a similar knack for the means of delivery to also make an interwoven point.
So, ahead of a run of live dates – that includes seven nights in the UK commencing on March 19th – I caught up with Fanning in the most apt way I could think of: the paradoxically private and personal yet oddly indifferent world of the Instagram DM, and rather than the usual 30 minute Zoom or a chat over a pint, the interview stretched for mulled-over days as the world gathered speed, headed into wars, and generally moved so fast it threatened to make some questions redundant by the time of publication.
We live in rapid days, and though chat is a click away, both Fanning’s album and my brief time spent with him look at what that truly means for the future of human connection and our addled minds.
Diving into the rabbit hole of ‘Take Me Back to Nowhere’ with AS Fanning:
31/1/2021
