Can You Handle This Much Fionn?

“It seems some people see it as a leap,” Wicklow born songwriter Fionn Regan says of his eagerly-awaited second album Shadow Of An Empire, a record that abandons the pastoral and impressionistic tones of his Choice and Mercury nominated debut The End Of History (Mr Regan, it seems, doesn’t do nondescript album titles) for a day-glo electric-folk rumpus that recalls the cocky crackle of Blonde On Blonde era Dylan or the Kinks or the Stones when they still wrote songs instead of riffs.

“Sometimes people build a house for you in their head and they expect you to live there,” he considers. “I was interviewed the other day and somebody said I must have worked hard to get from the first record to this record, and in a way I did. I started to do a lot of writing on the page towards the end of the touring, a lot of the time I had a Moleskine and a pencil hammering away in the back of taxis. But even since this record I’m actually starting to really work, I’m focusing at my desk alone, and even if the room’s falling apart around me I’m not getting distracted. It’s an obsession almost.”
An obsession, or a vocation. One thinks of Dylan in Don’t Look Back, hammering away on an acoustic typewriter while there’s a full scale party swinging around him. And Regan, sequestered in the Universal offices, sporting a new ‘do that can best be described as Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Moptop, thinks, speaks and converses almost exclusively in metaphors.
In the Fionniverse, everything can be illustrated in terms of something else, and even casual banter reveals the faculties of a man continually plugged into his own word horde.
Hardly surprising then that the new record fuses garage band exhuberance with lyrical complexity and humour, all informed by prolonged exposure to art and books. This from the press release: “I wrote these songs from the page up, on an Olympia portable, the idea being that the words would stand up on their own. I think the percussive nature of typing informed the phrasing. I was reading a lot of Welsh, French and American poets, I started to explore Brecht, Mahagonny in particular, I have always loved Kerouac… Then I admire visual artists like Joseph Beuys, Basquiat and Francis Bacon equally. All these people switch the light bulb on, make me connect back to my work”.
“I’ve been listening to the audio readings of Dylan Thomas and Jack Kerouac, Visions Of Neal,” Regan says now. “Kerouac’s delivery is like a drum kit and a horn section and everything. He’s got such a strong turn of phrase and such a dance about it and it’s so exhilarating to listen to.”
Another writer, the venerable EA Poe, provided inspiration for one of the album’s highlights, ‘Lord Help My Poor Soul’.
“Those were his last words,” Fionn explains. “To me it was very much my idea of his last night, the unravelling of the senses that led to that. When he was found he had a different set of clothes on. It’s a great mystery that made the song fall together.”
Funny how rock ‘n’ roll sometimes sounds ancient, and 19th century scribes like Poe and Rimbaud can still appear new and revolutionary. Shadow Of An Empire is, for want of a better tag, a retro-Modernist artifact, and one that feeds off the 24 hour buzz of the metropolis.
“It does have more of a city swagger to it alright," Fionn says. "There are more reds and blacks. Maybe more of a leather jacket than a donkey jacket. I wanted it to be raw and lean and just enough to stand up. Let the tambourines be out of time, let the vocal be live and go, ‘This is what happened in the room’. I didn’t want it to be a beautiful box with no content.
I’d rather it was a tea chest and you find a gold ring in the side of it. I can only hope that after a couple of listens it will reveal things.”
So, here’s a collection of songs that gestated on the rapid spin cycle washing machine hum of the tour bus, songs that speak of turnpikes and gas stations and diners glimpsed from tinted windows; of crowded cafes and bustling backstage areas. Songs informed by the whole load-in/soundcheck/eat/gig/load-out/econo-lodge whirligig. ‘Protection Racket’ and ‘Violent Demeanour’ could be film stills or snapshots derived from stolen moments experienced in Baltimore or Barcelona or all points in between, while ‘Catacombs’, ‘Genocide Matinee’ and ‘House Detective’ utilise Dylan’s meter the way poets and playwrights lean on iambic pentameter.
Plus, the support of a full rock band has given Regan a license to get profoundly scatological (“A bitter story leaps from the archives’ quagmires/Lamented in lectures like battery acid naked/Now the arm rests turn to axes slamming on hinge /The front row is reserved for the lunatic fringes/Down at the genocide matinee”).
But vibrant as it is, the new album, recorded under the supervision of Fionn’s US label Lost Highway, was no cakewalk. Initial sessions with producer Ethan Johns (Kings of Leon, Ray LaMontagne, Ryan Adams) were scrapped.
“A record came of it but it hasn’t hit the air,” Regan says. “That was the first time that I’ve done things in a traditional way, and I was delighted about having people trying to help me to ease the crossing of making a record. It was like a painter who’s commissioned to draw a painting: you sketch out the mountain and they pay for the paints and they’re going to buy it off you when you come back.
“And when you come back they go, ‘Ah, I thought the gorse was going to be on this side and I thought that there was going to be more of the ocean on this side’, and all of a sudden you find yourself with a big problem on your hands, because you’ve ripped that strip out of your soul to make the thing. And I decided to reverse out the drive.”
So, Regan repaired home to Wicklow where he elected to produce himself. The tunes were recorded in a disused factory space, using an armoury of instruments including a cruise ship piano, a circus drum and a brace of cheap Silvertone guitars. You can play the record a half dozen times and never once think about the concept of ‘production’. Shadow Of An Empire, despite the lofty title, is the sound of musicians in a room having a hoot with some fine songs. Simple as that.
“The only thing I can do is document where I’m at at that particular time,” Fionn says, “and if that means I end up having to navigate around the rocks and watch the tripwire and tightrope walk in the high winds, then I’ll have to do it. That’s the way it is with this record. I put up a fight for it.
“Sometimes it’s a bit like charades or something,” he concludes. “‘We want...’ And at the end of that particular charade I think the answer was Gold by Ryan Adams. And that wasn’t what I had in mind. So I just had to grab the wheel and I was like, ‘Right, I have to turn this over, we’re gonna do it’. But the long and the short of it is that I ended up with a better record.”

Shadow Of An Empire is out now on Heavenly Records. Fionn Regan embarks on an extensive Irish tour in March.