| Painted Saints: Bringing Gypsy Back |
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| Written by Steve McPherson | |
| Wednesday, October 10, 2007 at 01:47 PM | |
 Paul Fonfara onstage Fonfara went to school in Boulder on a clarinet scholarship, even though his first love was guitar. "There was a guy who was studying violin, and he played bass and I played guitar and we were doing Sonic Youth-y loud rock stuff, and then before our shows, we'd do clarinet and violin duets," he says. "I sort of discovered that I liked it better. I just liked that kind of tonality and that sound." This led to stints with the bands that were the architects of the scene in Denver: The Denver Gentlemen, 16 Horsepower, and DeVotchKa. Eventually he left Denver to play with singer/songwriter Jim White, and following stints in New York and Spain, he found himself in Minneapolis, playing shows with a revolving cast of musicians as Painted Saints. Despite the presence of strings, the occasional bandoneon, and plenty of Eastern-leaning melodies, the latest Painted Saints' CD, The Bricks Might Breathe Again, is somewhat removed from the bands Fonfara's previously played with. It's a record that's shot through with the kind of lushness that comes with a generous helping of violin and cello, and it has a pleasantly woody and lo-fi vibe, thanks in part to the work of engineer Tom Herbers. The songs themselves are less narratives than snapshots or vignettes, a feel that stems directly from Fonfara's admitted inability to set out with a distinct goal when it comes to songwriting. "Playing with DeVotchKa, all our songs were very purpose-driven," he says. "We were trying to entertain people, and the songs were very craft-esque songs in their subject matter. Your angst songs, your love songs, and I can't do that. The way I write songs, I can't do that." It comes as little surprise, then, that Fonfara covers "Oh Comely," a song by another non-traditional songwriter—Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum—on Painted Saints' new disc. Fonfara's actually been covering the song live for three years now, but it's interesting to note that The Bricks Might Breathe Again is the second release by a Twin Cities band in the last three months to feature a Neutral Milk Hotel cover; Roma di Luna's latest features their take on "In the Aeroplane of the Sea." Where Roma di Luna took Mangum's original and exposed its delicacy via Channy Moon's beautiful and lilting voice, Fonfara beefs up the arrangement with bowed strings and a singing saw. Fonfara is the first to admit that, like Mangum, he has a limited voice, but he appreciates both how Mangum makes the most of his limitations, and also his open and honest way with a song. "He doesn't try to impress anybody," says Fonfara. "If they're good or bad, I don't think he really cares—he just writes them. And the lyrics—especially in 'Oh Comely'—there's some graphic sexual stuff and it's really cool that he doesn't have to shy away from it—I think it's really cool that he's just laying it out there."  Painted Saints, Fonfara on the left "That song's actually about taxidermy," he explains. "It's a song about this deer who's had his head cut off and stuffed on a wall and he's trying to figure out where his legs are. That's the storyline, but it's about lust—kind of—the whole idea that when you find something beautiful you destroy it. The whole idea of human nature where if we see something beautiful we want to shoot it and put it on a wall instead of letting it be beautiful." So even if his ideas come from a murky place, they usually end up someplace with strangely lucid settings.But back to that odd guitar sound. "When I was playing with him, [Jim White] had this old beat-up guitar that had sat out in a rainstorm in Florida and you can literally hold it up and see sunlight through the thing. So he recorded his first record on it, then he gave it to David Byrne for a while, David Byrne gave it back to him after touring with it, and then he gave it to me because I did this record and he couldn't pay me very much. There's four pennies on one side of the bridge to hold it up and two on the other, so the bridge is literally held on by pennies and I haven't been able to change the strings since I got it because the whole thing will fall apart." That appreciation for the odd or slightly out-of-whack sound served Fonfara well in working with Herbers; The Bricks Might Breathe Again was in fact one of the last records made at the present location of Third Ear Studios. "He's open to doing whatever," says Fonfara about Herbers. "I kept asking him for the weirdest mics he could come up with and we did a lot of that. We had a plate microphone on the floor outside the door so a lot of the drum sounds are actually using that mic, and then for the vocals, a lot of the overdubs we did with this taxi dispatch mic, and I think that by far sounded the best." That sense of mood, along with Fonfara's eye for the unusual and his ability to seamlessly integrate different instruments and traditions into single songs, keeps The Bricks Might Breathe Again from being easily pigeonholed. The sleepy, nodding "Paladin Whine" stands in marked contrast to the chain-gang country stomp of the title track, and somewhere in the middle rests the Victorian march of "For The Brokers of Bottlecaps." Tying it all together are instrumental interludes that give the record the cohesive feel of a soundtrack. It's an intimate record of small pleasures that grows with each listen, and even if it happens to fit under the rubric of a rising sub-genre, Fonfara doesn't have any illusions about the cycles that govern musical taste. "I think when we were doing it," he says, referring back to his days in Denver with DeVotchKa, "no one else was, so it sort of felt like we were on to something, and people loved it. So now it's the hip thing to do, and then it'll probably burn out in a few years and techno will come back," he laughs. After the interview, Fonfara took me over to the West Bank School of Music where he teaches and played me solo (and strikingly different) versions of two songs from the new record, plus a song from their first record, Company Town. About "The Fat Kid Rides His Bike Through The Snow," Fonfara says, "I don't think anyone ever gets out of their adolescence. Everything we do is basically all what happened in junior high and I definitely write a lot of songs about childhood—not necessarily my own, but that idea. The last song on the record is about a fat kid riding his bike in the snow and that's what it is. It's about this little lonely fat kid riding his bicycle in a snowstorm. It's kind of this victorious song because he's lonely, but he's out there being away from the world on this little adventure." Download "The Fat Kid Rides His Bike Through The Snow" or stream it below: Download "In Remembrance of The Pottersfield Special" or stream it below: Download "Kerosene" or stream it below: myspace.com/paintedsaints paintedsaints.com COMING UP: Painted Saints CD Release Show for The Bricks Might Breathe Again with Mike Gunther & His Restless Souls and Spaghetti Western String Company. Friday, October 12. Varsity Theater. 9 pm. 18+. $7. |
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| Last Updated: Wednesday, October 10, 2007 at 03:01 PM |
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