Track of the Day: Far Caspian - 'Sun Room'

Irish alternative artist Far Caspian has shared the latest cut from the deluxe edition of new album Ways To Get Out in the form of atmospheric single 'Sun Room'.

Far Caspian is the work of songwriter-producer and multi-instrumentalist Joel Johnston, beginning from a Leeds basement home studio in 2018. Ways To Get Out was written and recorded throughout 2020 at Joel’s childhood home near Enniskillen in rural County Fermanagh, Ireland.

While Joel has enjoyed success throughout the project with well-received singles and EPs, the album tracks were written especially for the project and therefore represent a marked shift towards a complete standalone body of work - an album in the truest sense of the word.

Three unheard tracks - ‘35mm’, ‘Come Down and Waste With Me’ and ‘Following The Trend’ - arrives with the beautifully low-key ‘Sun Room’.

Opening with the softly captivating ambience of tape hiss, lo-fi keyboard samples, and softly-plucked nylon guitars, ‘Sun Room’ offers a surprising change of pace and heavier subject matter than previous releases, finding Joel dealing with the loss of family members and the impact that can have on your identity as a person.

“Older now, in a sun room, Wishing that you were still around, Folded up in your own head, Waiting here for you to make a sound”.

With his vocals sitting more exposed than ever previously, the quality of Johnson’s voice is able to shine through on the track, which slowly builds and opens out to a lush arrangement of harmonies, delicate piano lines and various ambient textural layers effortlessly combining to stunning effect.

Joel makes use of influences from lo-fi, shoegaze, bedroom-pop and early 2000s alternative music, but a substantial musical reference point for the album was Joel’s return to the music of his teens from the early to mid 2000s. Bands like The Postal Service, The Radio Dept, Broken Social Scene and The Walkmen) evoked deep feelings of nostalgia throughout the process.

Add to all of this a keen sense of place lent by the location and the unique set of circumstances surrounding the recording and the time it took place; the combined result beautifully conveys this transitional period through Joel’s personal lyrics and the idiosyncratic musical world he inhabits.

“This was the last song I wrote for the record," Joel says of 'Sun Room'. "I have never really touched on death in my songs and I don’t think I was planning on doing in this song either but it ended up coming out so I went with it. I lost both my grandparents within a few years of each other and when my grandad died it was the first time I was really taken back by death.

"He was the one I felt closest with out of all my grandparents and naturally it was the one that hit me the most," Joel adds. "I never wrote anything about the experience and then when I started to write this song it made me think of what happens when we lose important family members. The memories that tie us to our hometowns can be disrupted by losing someone that played a role in that time in our lives and I wanted to create a song that remembered a person both in the past and in the present, now that they’re gone and what that means for those old memories."

Listen to 'Sun Room' below: