Fred Thomas (of Saturday Looks Good To Me) has announced a new solo album, Window in the Rhythm, and it comes out this Friday (10/4) via Polyvinyl (pre-order). It’s a seven-song, hour-long double album, and it features drums by Quin Kirchner; guest vocals from Raw Honey’s Maggie Hopp, Fred’s Michigan neighbor Mary Fraser, and Australian artist Elena Dakota; harp from Mary Lattimore and Shelley Burgon; and co-production from longtime collaborator Drew Vandenberg. The first single is “Embankment,” a nearly-nine-minute song that finds Fred’s stream-of-consciousness lyrical style in great form. Here’s what he says about it:
In December of 1997, my friend Geoff, his mother and her boyfriend all died when the furnace at his mom’s house malfunctioned and poisoned the air while they were sleeping. He was 26 and I was 21. A completely unthinkable tragedy no matter who it happened to, but for me and all of the young punks in Michigan, this was an incalculable loss that would change everything. Geoff had started his own studio and offered amazing work at affordable rates, tracking the first 7”s for my early bands along with so much more music that might not have been recorded if he hadn’t made a space for it. After getting to know him for a few years as a client, we became super good friends and he played drums in my band Flashpapr. He was my first real peer to die, and we were both children. This song goes deep into the feelings of those times, and how it felt terrible to be excited about anything new happening while still carrying that loss. At exactly the same time Geoff died, my band Lovesick started, I moved into a new group house, finally started working at the record store I’d been wanting to get a job at for years, met a lot of people who would become lifelong best friends, and was generally experiencing the eruptive intensity and daily change that happens when you’re that age.
There’s layers and references in almost every line of this song, so it’d be a LOT to go into the finer details, but something really strange happened in the fall of 1998, almost a year removed from Geoff’s death. In Ann Arbor, where I lived, there was a city-wide clean up of various parking structures, parking lots, and other public lands, and whatever chemicals were being used produced very noticeable fumes that gave people headaches and lingered in the air, sometimes faintly, often overpoweringly, until winter. Looking back it’s kind of a perfect metaphoric device for how those times felt, some unexplained and potentially hazardous thing hangs wordlessly in the air, it affects everyone and no there’s information given on how to get through it or even talk about it.
Listen:
Tracklist
1. Embankment
2. Coughed Up A Cufflink
3. Electric Guitar Left Out In the Street
4. Season of Carelessness
5. Hours
6. New Forgetting
7. Wasn’t