On his fourth studio album Take Me Back To Nowhere, A.S. Fanning sounds both unmoored and quietly resolute. Drawing inspiration from science-fiction, experimental sound worlds, and a newly collaborative studio process, the album feels immersive, uneasy, and strangely tender.
Written during a period of physical injury, creative paralysis, and deep psychological disorientation, the record captures an artist grappling with fractured realities, personal, political, and imagined, while searching for moments of connection amid the fog, the 12 track release moves between dystopian electronics, driving indie-rock and reflective alternative ballads, the result is an album of beautiful work comparable to the likes of The National and Nick Cave.
Ahead of its release this week (Feb 6th), we spoke with Fanning about writer’s block, broken wrists, other-worldly production choices, and how Take Me Back To Nowhere became his most expansive and collaborative work to date.
This is your fourth studio album. How did your approach to writing Take Me Back To Nowhere differ from your previous records?
I got quite a bad writer’s block while writing it. In some ways it didn’t seem like a block because I was actually writing quite a lot. But I had completely lost my confidence and felt like I was navigating in a fog. So I started to lean on the band a lot more. I had all these fragmented ideas and lyrical passages, which I would throw out to the band and see what they responded with. It was quite a nice way of just moving a song forward from a place where I felt stuck. As a result, it’s definitely the most collaborative album that I’ve made.
The album explores themes of disorientation and fragmented realities. Was that something you set out to explore from the start, or did it emerge naturally during the writing process?
It was something that emerged in the writing process. I felt quite disconnected from the outside world while I was writing this album, and whatever block I was having caused a bit of a crisis in me. I had a broken wrist at the time, which didn’t help, and led me to quite a paranoid ‘Rear Window’ sort of lifestyle, where I was observing the world through the prism of social media, and tending to see the worst in everything. Social media isn’t great for that at the best of times, but when you’re watching a genocide being live-streamed and it’s just popping up on your timeline alongside videos of dogs and whatever other bullshit, it’s extremely disorientating. I escaped into reading Sci-Fi novels, which I enjoyed but probably also fed into that feeling of surreality, of the “real” world being sort of a suggestion rather than a hard fact.
How did ‘Stay Alive’ come together, and did it feel different to write or produce compared to other songs on the album? Is it representative of the full upcoming album?
I guess that song was a bit different in its production than the other songs. We ended up completely deconstructing it at one point. But a lot of the songs were put together in a sort of piecemeal fashion. Whereas the previous album was largely full takes of us in the studio – As in, the five of us set up and playing together, and these being the final takes and arrangements that ended up on the record, with very few overdubs – With the new one we sometimes had pre-recorded templates that we started with, with drum machines and synths etc. Or else we would record a song and then start picking it apart to play with different combinations of sounds.
I’m not sure why we did it that way. It wasn’t something that was pre-meditated. I think I had in mind that the album should have a slightly other-worldly feel to it, so maybe that was part of it – not wanting it to be too reliant on the organic feel of a group of musicians in a room together. But ‘Stay Alive’ was quite an extreme example. We really took everything apart in that song. Replaced the drums with samples for the first half of the song, myself and Bernardo (the guitarist) went off and re-amped a lot of sounds through various effects, and we got some additional help from sound artist Marta Zapparoli (who contributed to a number of songs on the album). She makes a lot of other-worldly sounds, including a project where she spent time up in the Arctic circle recording the sound of the northern lights. So there were quite a few elements in the production that were brought into it after the initial recording was done.
You had to adapt your usual songwriting methods after breaking your wrist. How did that challenge shape the sound, structure, or lyrical style across the album?
I think the structures of the songs are quite different because of it. There’s a few songs on the album that have a classic verse-chorus-verse-type song structure, which is probably something I’m inclined towards when I write a song on acoustic guitar. Instead I was writing using a laptop with programmed beats and a little MIDI keyboard I could play with my good hand. Which also led me to more synthesized sounds as a starting point. But the structures are a bit more free-form. On songs like ‘Today is for Forgetting’, I was just writing lyrics and then copy-and-pasting a drum loop to fit the length of the lyrics I’d written. When we worked on it with the band, we ended up adding a brief change of chords in the middle, but I had written it with just a two-chord pattern repeating for five minutes, or whatever it was.
Sonically, the new single draws a strong comparison to The National for me (one of my faves) – are there any artists that you would say have been a real inspiration to your sound?
I don’t think I really have a sound. I think it changes quite a lot from album to album, or sometimes song to song. While making this album I was listening to a lot of very synth-oriented stuff like ‘The Expanding Universe’ by Laurie Spiegel, which I remember referencing in the studio. I don’t think song-based music has such a big influence on me these days. I always appreciate good songwriting but it’s often other elements that I feel inspired by, like interesting sounds I haven’t heard before. Or often just an atmosphere. I remember while we were mixing up in Robbie Moore’s ‘Idea Farm’ in Sweden (where the album was also recorded) hearing ‘Pick It Up’ by John Maus. It was late at night and I was in the studio messing around, and Robbie was in another part of the complex, I think listening to some mixes on a different sound system or something, and I heard this haunting sound filling this big empty space in the barn, there was something magical about it. It’s hard to put your finger on but there’s some mystery in it that excites me. David Lynch’s films sometimes have a similar effect, I remember watching ‘Eraserhead’ while I was writing this album. The general atmosphere of that film, and the soundtrack, the underlying feeling of unease, was something I thought about for days afterwards.
The album title, Take Me Back To Nowhere, suggests a desire to escape or return to a void. How did you land on this title, and what does it reflect about the record as a whole?
I think it is about wanting to escape. About feeling overwhelmed and confused and just wanting a way out. I think it was a line that occurred to me for a song, and I started writing this cowboy song, which ended up being a kind of recurring refrain on the album, so it kind of worked to use it as the album title. In my imagination, this album was a kind of Sci-Fi album, I was imagining this vast emptiness of space. There’s a cartoon character in Germany called Bernd das Brot, a chronically depressed loaf of bread who gets launched into space somehow. It’s like a late night screensaver and when we’re on tour we’d often put it on in the hotel after a show. I feel like he was a bit of a mascot for this album and I make reference to him on the last song ‘Talking to Ourselves’.
Looking at the album as a complete work, what do you hope listeners take away after listening?
I suppose I hope that it might feel like an immersive experience. That it might create a transportative feeling, of entering into a particular world for 45 minutes or whatever it is. I like the idea that people might feel like they’ve been on some kind of a confusing and strange journey, that there’s no need to make sense of it but maybe there’s some feeling that’s left lingering. But It’s a liberating feeling for me to think that once an album is released, whatever meaning people take from it is out of my control. That at that point I can just let go and trust that people will be willing to engage with it in their own way. I can agonise over it endlessly but at a certain point I have to let go and accept that people might take the exact opposite meaning from whatever my intention was, and that they’re not necessarily wrong.
Listen to the latest single below and be sure to stream the full album on its release this Friday:
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