Dear Music by Fawn Music came out on Saturday.
Fawn Music is Bex Johnstone, who came to me two years ago with a whole bunch of songs that she’d been writing throughout her life but never released for various reasons.
On our first meet-up, she explained that she needed a safe space to be able to express herself and warned that there may be tears, but it’s all part of the process; she wanted to be completely unfiltered in her songwriting and singing.
That was fine with me. It actually reminded me of an interview I’d read with Alanis Morrissette where she said a similar thing to her producer Glen Ballard when they made Jagged Little Pill. And I love that album.
Bex grew up on the Scottish island of Islay and has been singing since she was a child.
She has a very pure, Celtic voice which is an absolute dream to record. We soon learnt that the less processing I put on Bex’s vocals, the better. Just some lush reverb, and away we go!
Bex is a very prolific songwriter. I would estimate that she brought about 60 songs to me throughout the making of the album. Some we recorded, some we didn’t. Some songs were fully fleshed out and others were semi-improvised.
There is one song on the album called Anchor Me, which went through, literally, hundreds of different takes before it was complete.
The backing vocals and basic beat stayed the whole time but Bex experimented with different lyrics, melodies, even spoken word, and we added so many instruments, percussion, interesting samples etc. At one point, the song was actually 28 minutes long! And yet, it somehow never got boring.
And then there were songs that were played live in the studio. Dear Music, Running and Hey Mara were just Bex and her acoustic guitar, recorded live into a single microphone.
But we fleshed some of them out – Dear Music contained some unbelievably evocative cellos from Jas from a band called Spaceacre. Running contained some of my field recordings in the background, bleeps and a beat that is actually me slapping my legs, through a processor!
Other songs played into Bex’s love of Bon Iver, particularly Vulnerability, which was the last track we finished. Like many songs on the album, it had been through a number of versions until we stripped it back to vocals, electric piano and guitar.
When Bex wasn’t looking, I added synth bass, marching snares and piano and it quickly became one of her favourites.
One of my favourites to record was Breathe Again. Towards the end of the recording of the album, Bex had the melody and chords and, without even rehearsing, we recorded the take that’s on the album, Bex singing and me playing piano.
I learnt a lot from Bex whilst making this album.
For instance, I’d never been one to make my own samples but Bex loves them so that encouraged me to delve into them more. For example, the breathy synth sound on the chorus of Recovery is a sample of Bex’s voice, and other songs have samples of birds that are detuned to something ghostly. There were also unintentional samples – it rained during the recording of the song Dear Music but the sound of it on the roof added to the ambience of the recording.
It was also interesting seeing how many different places Bex was prepared to take a song. I encouraged Bex to release some of the alternate takes of the songs on EPs, which came out before the album. So, for example, for Anchor Me, there’s the main version, an acoustic version with a rap, and an instrumental remix so that you can write your own lyrics to it.
But even the EPs weren’t enough to contain Bex’s prodigious songwriting output. She was still bringing new songs in when I was mixing the album!
But this means that she has plenty of songs to consider when she records her second album.
It took her 35 years to start recording her first album but I feel there’ll be no stopping her now.
You can hear the album on all streaming services. Here it is on Spotify:
PS Bex gave me one of the best reviews I’ve ever had!
