WHAT EVERYONE SHOULD BE TALKING ABOUT THIS WEEK
Dan Smith is stepping outside of Bastille‘s world to explore history, culture, and creativity with his new album, ‘&’.
Words: Martyn Young.
Dan Smith from Bastille has never lacked ambition. You don’t get to where he has – leading one of the biggest and most enduring bands of the last decade, with a string of hit singles and dynamic albums – if you’re content to kick back and relax, spending your time off in a hammock on a beach somewhere counting your money. Instead, Dan wanted to mark Bastille’s break from touring following their long run behind their last album, ‘Give Me The Future’, with a new challenge. A new project that would stretch him both musically and intellectually as the songwriter and producer looked at new ways to tell different stories. The result is ‘&’ (Ampersand), a solo album from Dan that retains all the magic of Bastille with some diverting curveballs.
The album is a collection of stories exploring cultural and historical figures, filtered through the prism of Dan’s storytelling and rich musical gifts as he weaves these stories into some of the most beautifully crafted and heart-stopping music of his career. It’s a deeply ambitious and towering work from someone revelling in creative freedom and with the time and space to immerse himself in a new world. With an accompanying podcast, some ambitious live shows planned, and a general desire to combine different forms of media and discovery in illuminating ways, ‘&’ (Ampersand) is a supremely fascinating and compelling addition to Bastille’s songwriting world. So, we had a nice catch-up with him at home to find out all about it.
Hey Dan, so talk us through the timeline of how we got to ‘&’ as it is now?
It probably started a couple of years ago with a pair of songs called ‘Leonard & Marianne’ and ‘Bonnie & Clyde’, which obviously are inspired by real pairs of people. With both of them, I’m really interested in these people in the collective consciousness who we sort of think we know. I was trying to write about them or as them and trying to humanise them and find what I thought was interesting. Also, selfishly, it was having an excuse to dig into these really interesting lives and try to write something really intimate and beautiful.
“A really fun embodiment of this whole project for me is the conversation between music, culture, history, storytelling, humour, and perception”
dan smith
That’s something that’s always been at the heart of your songwriting, isn’t it?
Yeah, I’ve always, to some extent, written that way and loved it. I love getting to write songs, and as we’ve come off touring for a year or so and I’ve gotten back to normal life, it’s been nice to realise that writing songs and having the time and space to work on them essentially alone at home is a really fun distraction for me. Growing up, it’s what I did without any career motivation. It’s what I did for fun because it was escapist and relaxing for me. It was nice to come back to that.
How long were you working on these songs?
Some of them I’ve been gathering for years, but over the course of last year, we toured more than we expected, and I was working on some soundtrack stuff for a BBC nature show. I had the intention of working on these on tour, but I got home, and, in amongst other things in life, I loved picking these back up, rewriting some, and starting some from scratch. I got in touch a couple of years ago with Emma Nagouse, who’s a public historian and an academic. I didn’t want the album to be just a collection of songs about famous couples. I spoke to her and asked her to direct me to people I might not have heard of. We’ve become really good friends. We’ve started a podcast together that’s an extension of that conversation, both about the ‘&’ songs and other songs. A really fun embodiment of this whole project for me is the conversation between music, culture, history, storytelling, humour, and perception.
How quickly did it all come together for the album?
I pulled it all together at the end of last year, and on 1st January, I was like, I fucking love this. I want to record it in a way that I haven’t done before, which is something that loads of people do all the time – going to a residential studio and completely immersing yourself in it – but for us, because we’ve been on tour so much, when we’re home we want stuff to be as normal as possible. All of the albums we’ve made for Bastille have been going to the studio in the morning and coming home in the evening. It drags it out a bit. The aim was to have all of these songs finished, but it’s me, and things got bigger in sound and scale than I intended, but I had the whole album demoed. I made all these plans and invited a bunch of people to come and join me for three weeks and pull 17 songs together. It was ambitious, but we put our lives on hold to do these songs. It was like a freezing winter summer camp vibe.
That sounds intense.
I really loved it. We had this big whiteboard chart for the satisfaction of ticking things off. Having a plan but also leaving things really open. A bunch of songs we recorded live in the room as well as ones we did in my house. I wanted to make something that was really intellectually interesting for me. In a band, sometimes, when you’re talking about the same things all the time and doing the same things all the time, it feels a little bit like brain rot. I’m most excited by making new things, so there’s something innate in the touring cycle that feels very repetitive but also comes with the massive privilege of getting to play to people. This whole process was an opportunity to learn more about the world of academia, culture, and my position within that. Who am I to write these stories about these people? Musically, I wanted to do different things. I learned acoustic guitar and fingerpicking. It’s music I love, and I’m really inspired by. It was easy and chilled. I was working with people who helped me to pull back and sing more quietly and show vulnerability.
For you as a songwriter, does it make it easier having that established framework and concept and not having to put as much of yourself into it if you’re channelling other people?
I think it’s a songwriter’s job to make something feel personal and authentic. I’ve always struggled with that a bit. I’ve always written either referencing or through the lens of other people, and that doesn’t make the songs less personal to me. It’s about trying to find the human resonance within the stories. That was part of the challenge. This is not an album of history lessons. What’s the theme that I can relate to in these people? It’s something I’ve always done in our music. The idea of ‘Pompeii’ being about two volcano victim corpses bound together in stasis for eternity is hardly your classic pop song fare. I just made this for fun and for myself, ultimately. I’d love for people to hear it, but I’ve no expectations that they will. Not to sound too twee about it, but it’s made with pure intentions.
“It was ambitious, but we put our lives on hold to do these songs”
dan smith
The album definitely feels like it exists within the Bastille world, but it’s its own unique, beautiful thing. You have all these lovely ornate, folky songs but also big moments like your amazing vocal on ‘Drawbridge & The Baroness’. It sounds like you’re pushing yourself in different ways here.
Yeah, totally. It started with the intention of having the acoustic guitar and the single voice. I’ve always loved people from Simon & Garfunkel to Elliott Smith – people who layer their voice in different ways. If the expected norm is simplicity, then the ability to have something dissonant like a key change is important. I wanted to do something that felt musically interesting to me. I love albums like Frank Ocean’s ‘Blonde’, where you have moments that just happen once, and you have to enjoy them. There’s a lot of that in this album. I love having random heavy guitars appearing or orchestras rolling in.
There are loads of those amazing surprising moments.
Yeah, it lulls you in. That was very intentional in how the album was mapped out. You think it’s one thing, and then it’s not. It musically speaks to how I’m feeling at the moment.
Who do you want to shout out who worked on the album? Were they mostly people outside the Bastille world?
I worked again with Mark Crew, who I’ve done all the Bastille records with. We’ve run a record label, and we go way back. It’s always been important to me to want to try different things, but that doesn’t mean abandoning all the people you’ve worked with. Mark’s amazing.
There’s an American singer called Moira Mack who’s got, hands down, one of the most incredible vocals I’ve ever heard. She can whisper in the most heartbreaking way and then belt out the craziest gospel. Bim is an incredible singer that we’ve worked with for years, and she sings on a song on the album. We have a string section called Bolt Strings run by our friend Ciara. Charlie Barnes is an artist who also plays guitar with us live, and he was instrumental on the album along with James Earp.
I also worked with Johnny Abraham from the band Public Service Broadcasting, who’s a wildly talented, annoying genius. We worked with him on all of our reorchestrated stuff. He encouraged me to lean into the imperfections of it all. I wrote most of the songs alone, but on ‘Leonard & Marianne’, I got to write with Dan Wilson, who is a legendary songwriter. It was a lovely cross-section of people.
How did you harness so many people working together?
I gave everyone a welcome pack to the studio from me as an apology for having to spend three weeks solidly with me. It was a kind of survival kit.
Tell us what fans can expect to get out of the ‘Muses’ podcast, then.
Emma is one of the funniest people I know and fiercely intelligent. Her day job is working in history and comedy, and she’s so fantastic at storytelling and thoughtful about the world. She makes it really fun. The idea of the podcast was to make something worth listening to and explore these people, like Oscar Wilde or Julie d’Aubigny, who is this famous Parisian opera singer who broke her girlfriend out of a nunnery by burning it down.
We want to pick through what we know of history versus reality and explore what they are remembered for or forgotten and what it says about the times then and the times now. I enter these conversations as the interested and curious idiot. I’m not coming to it with any authority other than that I try to write songs about these people. There are some characters with shitloads of films and books about them, and some that have none. Emma sets me homework every week of someone different to write about. We wanted it to be a conversation between our two worlds. It’s a lot more fun and funnier than people might expect because Emma is absolutely hilarious, and she fucking rinses me.
“I enter these conversations as the interested and curious idiot”
dan smith
The podcast is a nice accompaniment to the album.
It was important that it was its own thing, but it’s also important to the [‘&’] music because if it wasn’t for Emma, some of these songs wouldn’t exist, but it’s its own organic thing that’s growing with new directions to write new songs.
It feels like you’re in a really fertile creative moment right now. How do you think all this stuff will benefit Bastille when the band reconvenes moving forward?
We’re only taking a break from touring for a bit. I’ve always juggled a lot of projects, some of which see the light of day and some of which don’t. Within the world of Bastille, we’ve made four albums but also four mixtapes. We’ve reorchestrated tours and done acoustic and unplugged stuff. I’ve always wanted the world of Bastille to be rich and varied, even if to some people we’re just a handful of songs. We’re so lucky to have had the experiences we’ve had. Having the time and space to be at home and have normality, but also one of the most creative and productive years of my life, has been brilliant. I’ve fantasised about this time in my head when we’ve had a break, and I get to do stuff. I’m very excited about the next Bastille thing. As far as where this sits within that? Fuck knows. I’ve got no idea!
Taken from the November 2024 issue of Dork. Bastille’s album ‘&’ is out 25th October.
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