Faker

Fri 2nd Dec, 2011 in Features

It has been almost four years since the release of Faker’s Be the Twilight and after repeated release date delays the band has now decided to release their follow up album, Get Loved, for free.

In a statement posted on the band’s website they explain that “The point and excitement in writing and releasing Get Loved is in danger of being missed. We made Get Loved, our third record, a year ago with a view to releasing it right away. In complete candidness, we’d probably have released it in a matter of days if we could but as the machinery around delivering a record began to kick into gear, it was decided that Get Loved would not be released until June of this year…You love something, you set it free right?”

Bandleader Nathan Hudson caught up with FL a while back for a pow-wow about the record and his time away from the limelight.

A lot of bands just disappear from my periphery when they’re between albums and tours. Where have you been in the last three or so years?
Brazil. Actually, that’s not really true. I was there for a little while.

We kind of felt like we had reached a saturation point playing live. By the end of it we weren’t 100% sure why we were doing it or what it meant. We were going in circles or something. I guess between albums we tried to demo and rationalise whatever was happening on the road. I didn’t want the record to come together in the same way as the previous one: I wanted to try something that felt new.

We’ve been through an abundance of lineup changes since the last record came out. Paul, our original drummer, fell in love in LA and left the band to get married and have a baby and live a very different life in general, and that set off a chain reaction of changing band members.

Nick [Munnings, guitar] and I had been working together for about seven years, and we decided to just make the record from our perspectives. We wanted to figure out what we wanted to say and how we wanted to move forward, as opposed to trying to second guess ourselves and spring-boarding off of the back of a chain reaction. We took the time to find a space to settle down and really write and record the album that we wanted to, and Get Loved has come from that.

What gave you the inspiration to do all of that for the new record?
Well, my own relationship with music is a big factor. I’ve always been a big fan of bands who have been able to grow and change and evolve – Blur is a good example. We noticed that a lot of bands like Yeasayer and Beach House had been producing themselves and it was something I thought that we could do. It was that and deciding that I wanted to spend a bit of time with myself traveling. I went to South America and spent some time in the US to kind of figure out what I wanted to write about. Then I tried to have a home life, and that was kind of less successful. Hah!

What did you want to write about?
A whole lot of things. Specifically I guess there are three songs in the middle of the record that I refer to as the ‘cities and towns’ trilogy. It’s about place and travel and the impact your environment has on you. It felt nice to explore and use different metaphors for what people go through day-to-day rather than building everything around the nature of relationships. Those songs centre the record – Graffiti on the Skyline feels like the mouthpiece song for the record. A manifesto or something.

Why is that?
It’s a song about having an effect on the place you habitat. It’s kind of a song that is excited about the idea of interacting with your environment. In holidaying in Brazil I was really struck by the nature of graffiti as a part of the cityscape and public space. And it was nice to see how much that was appreciated – I met some people who made graffiti and it got to understand about how that works in that part of the world and I’ve since been able to apply that to my own [musical] work locally.

Is that something that resonates with choosing your own adventure as a whole?
Yeah. It says something about what makes a place feel like or a home, or how you draw a relationship with the places that you live. Part of me, whether it’s in personal relationships or in traveling, has been known to pine for something that I’m trying to reconcile, and that gets put forward into what I do in terms of writing. It’s nice to see what other people do when they’re trying to reconcile something about their space.