The Eamon Fogarty Interview
New Hampshire-based multi-instrumentalist, composer, singer/songwriter Eamon Fogarty has been sonically surfing the shadowy landscape of music’s melancholic memory for the last decade since the release of his official 2015 debut “WHERE DO YOU THINK WE SHOULD LIVE?” With comparisons to Scott Walker and Mark Hollis’ Talk Talk, Fogarty blends the utility of the universe by bridging the gap between melody and meditation in just under an hour. With 2019s “Blue Values” putting the young musician on the melodic map, Fogarty takes his listeners on yet another atmospheric adventure with last year’s “I’m an animal now” as he guides us through his joyous journey from King Crimson-infested waters to the more refined ecosystem of tonal texture and poetic precision.
Before relocating to New York, could you tell me about growing up in New Hampshire? How did you initially get into music, specifically the multiple instruments you’ve conquered over the years? Was this relevant to your household growing up, and who were some of your earliest influences during your formative years?
Some of my earliest memories are of hearing the John Denver and Neil Young songs my dad would play on his twelve-string. This would be a great origin story, were it not for the fact that what initially drove me towards music was film scores (e.g. John Williams) and big-name classical stuff (Beethoven! Bach!) I wanted to learn how to conjure those grand emotional landscapes, so I took piano lessons. Unfortunately, I was also a child and didn’t like practicing, preferring to work out songs I’d heard on the radio like REM’s “Night Swimming” to plunking out my five-finger dexterity exercises. Where I’m from is a fuzzy borderland between suburban and rural. It was great if you were (and I was) into hiking and orienteering, but it didn’t have the population density to support any live music scene beyond standard issue Mall Emo TM. My high school friends and I defined ourselves in opposition to this prevailing zeitgeist of fake theatrical quote-unquote punk. The U.S. was invading Iraq under pretenses, and here everyone was listening to some 30-year-old man-child screaming about how his girlfriend dumped him. Baffling! King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man” felt way more in sync with the times.
When did you first begin going to shows, and how quickly did the gap from learning to play to wanting to perform music yourself happen? Did you participate in any outfits or projects before recording as a solo musician?
Photo: Jessie English
My friends and I started playing together as a band long before I ever went to, let alone played, a proper DIY gig. We played the occasional battle of the bands, but most of what we did was jam for hours every Saturday afternoon as soon as I’d gotten off my morning shift at Dunkin’ Donuts. I had bought a Tascam cassette recorder, thinking we’d use it to record our songs, but by senior year, we’d started drifting apart, so instead, I put it to use for my first fumbling attempts at solo song-making. Having yet to discover music blogs, most of my listening was guided by guitar magazines and Prog Archives, which is probably how I heard about Dungen. The fact that Gustav Ejstes engineered Ta Det Lugnt himself and played most of the instruments was a huge inspiration to me as a budding home recordist. I spent most of my free periods holed up in a band room practice booth, trying to get better at bass, drums, piano, and whatever other instruments were in my school’s large instrument storage closet. If I had to pick one concert that set me on my current path, I’d have to go with seeing Bonnie Prince Billy with my erstwhile singing partner Ava at Higher Ground in Burlington when we were in college. This was on the “Lie Down In The Light” tour, and he had a killer band that included the great drummer Jim White. I was completely transfixed by the two of them (Jim and Will) and how they performed with their entire bodies. Jim, being a drummer, has no choice but to be athletic in his playing, and he turns the churn into a dance. Will was channeling something mystical–simultaneously grounded yet otherworldly, like a flesh and blood alien who has landed. There were songs where he would stand on one leg or go up on his toes and move in sympathy with the flow of the music, gesticulating gracefully like a hillbilly butoh dancer. Years later, I read “Unbalancing Acts” by the theater director and playwright Richard Foreman, wherein he describes techniques for getting unique and compelling performances out of his collaborators, including having the actors recite their dialogue while in mildly uncomfortable and/or physically demanding positions, such as balancing on one leg. I’ve often wondered if that’s what Will was doing.
Photo: Jessie English
Firstly, tell me about the writing and recording process for your 2015 debut “Where Do You Think We Should Live?” and some of your fondest memories of bringing that project to life. I understand you're also an audio archivist, tell me a little about that. How much have these elements influenced your music over the years?
The most joyful part of making “WDYTWSL” was getting to know my friend Alex P, who produced two songs and went on to engineer all of “Progressive Bedroom”. Experimentation takes patience, and I loved working with Alex because we were on the same page about taking the time to do things “wrong” to see if they’d work. Some producers would balk at building a track starting with several layers of differently tuned guitars (as opposed to drums), but not Alex. He created the conditions for me to be present in the recording process in ways that people I’d worked with up to that point (including myself!) hadn’t. For the last few years, my day job has been working on a project (Discography of American Historical Recordings or DAHR) whose mission is to create a comprehensive database of every 78 rpm record commercially recorded and released in the United States. Listening to music from that earlier time always gets me thinking about how the recording process changes how we make music. Most of those early recording artists never even heard the records they made! Imagine the first time you hear your voice on a recording. It’s uncanny and changes the way you see yourself. This can be good or bad: listening back, you can either fixate on your mistakes or see each pass as an opportunity to create a new performance in dialogue to a previous one. I’ve done plenty of both... I don’t fetishize the old way of making music, but I do find it helpful to remember how new these technologies are in the grand scheme of human history.
“Most of those early recording artists never even heard the records they made! Imagine the first time you hear your voice on a recording. It’s uncanny and changes the way you see yourself. This can be good or bad: listening back, you can either fixate on your mistakes or see each pass as an opportunity to create a new performance in dialogue to a previous one. I’ve done plenty of both...”
From 2017 to 2019, you released two wonderful bodies of work entitled “Progressive Bedroom” and “Blue Values”. How did you go about stringing together a group to help bring these projects to life? I’d love to know some of the backstories of songs from each album, like “Evening At The Purple Sage,” “The Carrot,” “Gods Guts,” and “How Royal The Jelly.”
“Progressive Bedroom” and “Blue Values” represent two wildly different approaches to assembling and recording an ensemble. “Progressive Bedroom” was recorded with Alex P at his studio Basement Floods with the help of Ben Engel (drums) and Michael Hammond (bass), who were my New York band at the time. We knew the songs, and all we had to do was show up and play them, after which I could tinker and overdub to my heart’s content. I often like to write songs “in character,” and “The Carrot” is one such song. At the time, I was thinking a lot about the illusion of social mobility and the choices governments make when disciplining their subjects (the carrot? or the stick?) I wrote from the perspective of an aristocrat lolling on a balcony overlooking the masses, smugly confident they’d never catch up or catch on and only dimly aware of his evil and cynicism. The songs on “Blue Values” were harder to pin down, even for me. “Gods’ Guts”, for example, was written in a fugue state en route from Austin to New Orleans while on tour with Psychic Temple (AKA “Blue Values” producer Chris Schlarb) and is less about a specific character and more about the forces that twist people into incoherent shapes the second they try to name them. That record was also recorded under very different circumstances. I had the opportunity to assemble my literal dream band from Chris’s network and record with them out in Long Beach. At that time, I was obsessed with Julia Holter’s record “Loud City Song” and particularly enthralled by the bass sound. I mentioned this to Chris and was flabbergasted to learn that not only did he know Devra Hoff, the bassist on that record, but that she would be in town and willing to do the session. Most of “Blue Values” was recorded in just two days a couple of weeks after the 2016 election. I was intimidated to be recording with heavy hitters like Devra and the drummer Chad Taylor. There’s a moment during the recording of “How Royal the Jelly” that these people I was working with were taking my dinky little songs seriously: at 1:47 there’s a descending sequence of chords that happens twice before the super quiet part. Devra had an idea to invert the chords the second time through so the bass would sometimes be playing in fourths beneath the root note, which she explained was a thing they do a lot in black metal. It was a small tweak, but it created one of my favorite moments on the record.
Photo: Alex Dupree
Last summer, you released quite possibly your most compelling work, “I’m an animal now” Orphean Kiosk Recordings. Tell me about this album and how your approach differs from your previous works. What have you been up to lately, and do you have any exciting plans or projects for 2025? Is there anything else you would like to share further with the readers?
“I’m an animal now” is the pendulum swinging back toward my older “tinkering” approach. “Blue Values” was made using hired guns, whereas this time, I worked exclusively with friends, some I saw all the time and others for whom the project was a nice excuse to stay in touch across long distances. It was a much more social process, how the songs were written. Several of the tunes emerged from a song-a-day-for-a-month challenge organized by my buddy Steven Van Betten (who went on to found School of Song), and many of the songs debuted at socially distanced song-shares (outdoors or online) during COVID lockdowns. Probably the biggest sonic difference is that I had Hannah Frances and Will Stratton sing the vocal harmony parts, something I would ordinarily handle myself. It was far more of a community effort, even though I played a greater proportion of the instrumental parts! I’ve been working on a new batch of songs in Youngstown, Ohio, with Anthony La Marca, who makes great records as “The Building” when he’s not off touring with The War On Drugs. Anthony has a light touch as a producer, but he’s paradoxically also kind of a maximalist with a deep and abiding love for John Cougar Mellencamp. I will attempt to explain: In addition to being an excellent drummer, he also plays all the instruments I play (guitar, bass, key), so once we’ve got the bones of a track down, we’ll trade off doing overdubs as new ideas come to us. Regardless of what musical pyrotechnics I might be attempting, he never adds too much at any one time but slowly allows the hidden architecture of the song (or what the song could be) to be revealed through the gradual accretion of sonic layers. It’s quite improvisatory. Repeat the process enough times, and a simple song can sound massive. Or you can pare it down if it’s not working. As Anthony likes to say, “You can’t mute what’s not there.”
