Songwriter of the Year 2023: A.S. Fanning turns lockdown woes into wonder
“Because living young is getting old.” – A.S. Fanning
Like a fart in a lift, the befouling pandemic has largely been viewed as something you can wilfully ignore out of existence. The glancing looks we now cast back upon a devastating couple of years usually dwell on the daft oddities: the way you’d scrutinise your neighbour’s Deliveroo habits, the first name terms you suddenly acquired with your seraphic Amazon driver, and the peculiar adoration you instantly developed for hitherto unknown shows like Gardeners’ World. These are the things we have mulled over. However, when it comes to art in particular, how gargantuan it was has remained a stone unturned.
This pandemic wasn’t just a queer blip. It was a hunking great curveball that turned a fair chunk of our own humble existence on its head. In all honesty, and in selfish terms, I flourished for the most part. But the Irish songwriter A.S. Fanning floundered. And it is easy to see how that was possible, especially for a musician cut off from their work. All the same, most of the press releases from the period simply equated this huge hardish into the word ‘introspective’ and nothing more. Few records actually grappled with specifics and braved the despair. And then came Mushroom Cloud.
Fanning croons into a dramatic swirl of instrumentation that renders his reflection with a fitting flurry of melodrama. Then he arrives at the line, “Because living young is getting old,” and to use the horrid parlance of our times, every listener of a certain generation ‘felt seen’. In a manner that seemed strangely brave, Fanning stared down the existential dread that comes at a certain age and whisked it into poetry that was aptly over the top and then happy enough to prise a joke out of it all in the sober light of morning. ”I found myself laughing at some of the lyrics I had written,” he says, ”Which I think is quite a healthy thing, to be able to take a step back from your darker thoughts and see the absurdity in them.”
The peaks and troughs of dark thoughts, absurdity, and sobering revelations not only waltz throughout the songs on Mushroom Cloud but also shape the broader arc of the album. What begins with the demented orchestration of the titular opener ends in the blissful twinkling of purposefully plucked notes on ‘Pink Morning / Magic Light’. This makes for a stunning journey through the darkened, hallowed chapters of Fanning’s pandemic, and even though you didn’t share the moments, you can certainly relate. In achieving such poetic resonance, it conjures up your own memories and, as such, will likely remain a record that many will keep with them for the rest of their wretched little lives.
Speaking of which, we caught up with Fanning to muse over the workings behind his masterpiece and the great songwriting strides he has made this year. “I think there were several different influences on the album. I wrote it mostly during the last lockdown of the pandemic, so there was definitely a feeling of claustrophobia as well as general foreboding, constriction and doom,” he began in dour fashion, which, once again, we must stress was an appropriate response rather than anything maudlin.
Things got even worse for the poor fellow, as he explains, “A long-term relationship was ending at the time as well so that added to my sense of unease and uncertainty. I was also reading a lot of Mark Fisher, including his collection of essays on hauntology and lost futures, and I remember listening to a podcast series about the Cold War, which probably all created a sort of existentialist, dread-laden soup in my head.”
At this stage, it seems apt to quote Fisher on the matter of hauntology, for it neatly ties into Fanning’s own disavowal. “The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations,“ the philosopher argues. “There can be few who believe that in the coming year, a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed.“
While this may be true, there is beauty in the wallowing of the feted grip of former glory. Somewhere in the welter of Mushroom Cloud, there is a celebration of The Beatles, an affirmation that they’re still there. We’re just ploughing on forth to the beat of a drum more tuned to our post-renaissance times. As we do so, we happen upon our own great works, like Mushroom Cloud, perhaps humbler in its disposition but deftly resplendent in its own way. In this regard, it is an album that makes you aware that there are endless brilliant works being released presently, and it achieves one of the finest feats music can muster in urging you to seize the present and dive into the bounty of modern culture.
So, how did this all come about? “As regards the songwriting process, I was trying a sort of ‘morning pages’ technique of just writing a couple of pages of stream-of-consciousness nonsense every morning and then looking back at it a bit later and picking out any phrases that jumped out at me, and using that as a starting point. I was feeling quite depressed and anxious, so I suppose this was a way of bypassing my filter or my more negative/self-doubting thoughts,” he explains. “Even if what came out was often quite dark, I feel like this way of writing enabled me to acquire some distance from the darker thoughts, to be a bit playful and not take them too seriously.”
And that is the final triumph of the album: it embraces personal despair with honesty and open arms, bringing it out into the light of day enough for it to acquire a comic edge with the sun on its face, to such an extent that lines like, “The arc of human history bends towards misery,” almost seems laugh-out-loud. Now, that’s the mark of a feat that has been crafted from top to bottom so that lines and notes lead onto each other like one of those videos that reveal tumbling dominoes actually fall into a larger picture.
