Saturday Looks Good To Me founder Fred Thomas announced just days ago that he’d be returning today with his first proper solo album in six years, and that album is now here. Titled Window in the Rhythm, it follows the trilogy of albums he put out in the 2010s–2015’s All Are Saved, 2017’s Changer, and 2018’s Aftering–and it finds Fred delivering an hour of new music across seven songs. Most tracks hover around the 8-to-10 minute marks, while album closer “Wasn’t” is nearly 15, and they find Fred going on linear journeys, with his stream-of-consciousness lyrical style propelled by casually suspenseful indie rock backdrops that never once drag. Fred says he looked to Joanna Newsom‘s Ys as “the template for making a long, slowly-articulated album that feels like it’s over in a moment,” and I would say that’s exactly what Window in the Rhythm successfully pulls off.
For a deeper dive into where Fred’s head was at while writing this album, he told us about 10 albums that influenced it, including Ys, as well as Kate Bush‘s The Dreaming, Bedhead‘s Bedheaded, Joan of Arc‘s How Memory Works, Butthole Surfers‘ Double Live, and more, and he had interesting things to say about each one.
Stream the new album and see Fred’s full list with commentary below. Pick up a physical copy from Polyvinyl.
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10 ALBUMS THAT INFLUENCED FRED THOMAS’ WINDOW IN THE RHYTHM
Joanna Newsom – Ys (2006)
More than anything else, I looked to Ys as a north star when working on this album. Not in terms of direct sonic influence, but more aspiring to find my own version of the emotional microcosm this album created. When Ys was made, there was a big deal where the album leaked a few months ahead of time, so I first listened to it on a burned data disc my friend made me for a cross country move. It was early October, and hearing these five songs wash by as I drove up the West Coast towards an uncertain future felt like Newsom was recreating music from scratch in her own image, without rules, and without calculation or concern about how it would be received. Among many other things, Ys helped me see that a song can transcend time, and doesn’t have to deliver anything expected. My album ended up being more about my relationship with my own past than the types of experiences Newsom inspects on Ys, but I looked to it as the template for making a long, slowly-articulated album that feels like it’s over in a moment.
The Dead C – The White House (1995)
The deep Dead C heads think of this one as their “pop” record, and I guess that’s fair. I bought this record when it came out because the cover was so intriguing, and I got stuck on how the final song “Outside” went on for almost 18 minutes and somehow never felt long enough. The last song on my record, “Wasn’t” is in part a direct echo of “Outside,” starting out like a straightforward song, quickly falling into liminality, but then staying there until the very last ember has given up all of its smoke.
Kate Bush – The Dreaming (1982)
Pretty much all things Kate Bush are game changing, but this was the first album she completely self-produced, and one where she really went in on early ‘80s synths. The way she integrates ugly or discomforting sounds in with her uncannily beautiful songs illuminates the weird, monstrous duality of being human. Every impeccable work of art is made by someone with a gross, slowly decaying body, and this album does an amazing job of simultaneously handing us both the immaculate and the queasy. I tried using bleak synth ambience and homely acoustic instruments to evoke a similar humanizing clash.
Storm & Stress – Under Thunder and Fluorescent Lights (2000)
It’s really fascinating for me when music is both threatening and pretty. Nothing about this record ever resolves, it just kind of starts stammering while attempting to tell you something and continues in a 44-minute run-on sentence.
Bedhead – Beheaded (1996)
Another record that feels like if October lasted years. When this record came out I was 19 and very sick, spending a lot of time driving myself to doctors and hospitals trying to get well from this mysterious illness. When I wasn’t doing that, I was lying in bed in my grim little rental in Ypsilanti, staring at the walls and playing this record at a low volume. Bedhead was another band that had full faith in taking as long as they needed to get their songs going, and this album is a direct blueprint for the songs on my record that introduce each new part in a slow, gradual build.
Belong – October Language (2006)
Seriously, another October record? YES! This is without question one of the most important ambient/shapeless/murk music recordings of all time, and Belong’s playfully destructive distortion is a key inspiration in all of my synth sounds that stay bubbling beneath the more clean-cut guitars.
Deerhunter – Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? (2019)
When this record first came out I was seriously disappointed. I’ve been counting Deerhunter as one of my favorite contemporary bands since Cryptograms, and at first, this just felt like the final chapter in their fall off. The songs felt random, piecemeal, hollow. I’m not sure where my feelings changed on this record, but at some point I put it on again and it took on a new life. What once felt disjointed now seemed more like artistic choices akin to Bowie’s Berlin records, and Cate Le Bon’s production struck a throughline that gelled into a cohesive whole. I borrowed some of the gliding vocal harmonies and circuitous arrangement style for my record.
Portishead – Third (2008)
Just an incontestable masterpiece of opulent melancholy, perfect on too many levels to list. What I admired most from this record when working on Window in the Rhythm was Portishead’s ability to mold minimal electronic elements into something uniquely their own. Not gonna lie, maybe like 70% of the synth sounds and drum programming on my record were made completely in the box with stock Ableton instruments. Obviously every software sound belongs to the entire world and it would be audacious for me to say I took Ableton hi-hats to unforeseen places, but I looked to Third, the previously mentioned Kate Bush record, Broadcast, and even the Young Marble Giants for inspiration in breaking the plastic molding off of preset sounds.
Joan of Arc – How Memory Works (1998)
This fucking band. Tim Kinsella’s brain will be appropriately appreciated for its genius by generations of the far future, and in the meantime, here on earth I’ve been trying to understand this amazing document and shake just a little bit of its magical dust into my own creations for the last 25 years.
Butthole Surfers – Double Live (1989)
No, for real. Check it out; it’s a double album. It’s songs from the studio records but presented totally differently in a way that makes it either its own thing or their best material depending on how you see it. They do a fairly faithful R.E.M. cover and some jams that are psychedelic on the surface but feel a tiny bit emo. This is a record I have liked a lot for years and never understood why I like it, what I like about it, or why it sounds different every time I return to it. How could I not try to achieve that kind of dream-derived confusion with my own music?