Track by Track: School of Language on Old Fears

The work of Field Music man David Brewis, School of Language’s new album Old Fears is due out on 7 April via Memphis Industries.

A beguiling, minimal, melancholic pop record with just the right amount of funk, you can stream a little sampler of Old Fears below and read a track by track breakdown of the full record from the man himself.

“Distance Between”

The last song to be written and recorded, and probably the song which pulled the record together thematically. A lot of the record is about introversion (though these days I’m not quite as bad as this song makes out). I think that without the final spoken line, saying basically “Okay, I will try and explain”, it would be bordering on misanthropy. Musically, I can hear the influence of hours in the van being force-fed William Onyeabor and Ethiopiques compilations when I was touring with Eleanor Friedberger last year, along with a hefty dose of Chaka Khan and Michael Jackson.

“A Smile Cracks”

This is me looking back to my university days, when I was an over-serious young man, coping with shyness by affecting an air of high-minded quasi-intellectual disdain! I stayed at home, commuted through to Newcastle and didn’t speak to anyone on my course for the full three years. I do think back and wonder what the heck I was doing but also that time was defining. That’s when you’re trying to figure who you are and who you’re going to be and there’s a certain amount of trial and error involved.

I wrote this on guitar first but, once I had an idea for the drums and the bass, I started to strip out the guitar and the chords and it became more and more funkified – I started describing it as DIYRnB. The guitar breaks around the second-verse are shamelessly indebted to “A Night To Remember” by Shalamar.

“Suits Us Better”

A lot of the record is set in or around 2001, which is the year I finished university but it’s also the year I met my wife at Sunderland Uni’s dingy nightclub, which seems inappropriate given neither of us studied there (and probably never went there again after the night we met) and we mostly chatted about Plato and F Scott Fitzgerald. We had seen each other in the city library before this. The reference to empty shelves stems from her monopolising all of the books I wanted to borrow.

“Between The Suburbs”

The lyrics here were probably inspired by the collaboration my brother did with Paul Smith last year, where they set some of Paul’s travel writings to music. This is really just a succession of images mostly from around Roker where I live and towards our studio and the town centre but then heading out to where I grew up; a suburban commuter village in between Sunderland and South Shields. I always ended up on the train through to university with loads of kids off to private schools around Newcastle. I had no idea about all these other kids who lived right next to me but who lived completely separate, parallel lives to me and my mates.

I had most of the music for this hanging around for a couple of years. It only really started to turn into something after I started watching Treme and was looking for excuses to add really prominent tambourine to things.

“Old Fears”

Sometimes a record needs a pause. I suppose there’s quite a bit of Brian Eno influence in this but maybe more so John Carpenter.

“Dress Up”

This was the first song I finished and sonically, this set the template for the record; the combination of sampled percussion, unnaturally roomy drums, spindly guitar and heavy synth bass. This was the song which showed me what the record was supposed to be after having some vague notions on my mind since way back when we were touring Measure.

I wanted the record to be personal and truthful even if that meant giving away slightly more than I feel comfortable with. I started trying to pin down the things that I’m most scared of. I wrote about feeling like I needed to pretend to be a normal person, especially when I was working nine-to-five, and how doing that made me feel like a hypocrite. For a long time I felt that by making records I was just delaying the day when I had to go back to pretending. I’m not sure I feel like that any more.

“Moment of Doubt”

A little poem to myself, facing up to anxiety and self-doubt.

“Small Words”

A twin to track 1, another paean to introversion; feeling like in order to be sociable I have to dig in and fake it. This is also my most overt afrobeat tribute – my inexpert take on Tony Allen-style drumming overlaid with floating, rhythmically-intertwining guitar parts.

“So Much Time”

The music for this track (and the next one) was originally written and recorded to fill in the spaces between poems in a radio show put together by a group of young writers. Most of the pieces for the show ended up with a more filmic quality than I might usually write and, in this case, I think the music matched the feel of some of the more image-oriented writing I had. Earlier last year, as the music for the first few songs for the album was starting to take shape, I basically locked myself in a darkened room for three days in front of a blank screen and wrote. I tried to avoid editing myself, knowing that I could go back and change and hone things later. At least half, and probably more, of the lyrics on the record came out from those three days locked in the dark in the studio.

“You Kept Yourself”

The flip side to all of my pondering on fear, anxiety, and shyness was thinking about love and how feeling safe in someone else’s company makes everything else easier to deal with. This song is just about how it’s worth fighting through the difficult times for that feeling.

School of Language are touring later this month

April
07 – The Cluny, Liverpool (Tickets)
10 – Point Ephemere, Paris (Tickets)
22 – Exchange, Bristol (Tickets)
23 – The Lexington, London (Tickets)
25 – Broadcast, Glasgow (Tickets)
26 – Brudenell Social Club, Leeds (Tickets)
28 – Deaf Institute, Manchester (Tickets)