Fenne Lily: Everything I Know About Love • Interview • DIY Magazine

“I’ve said this before, but actually Nick Cave said this first,” Fenne Lily smiles before explaining why she believes that songs can often predict your future. “The idea that songs are prophetic is the kind of magical thinking which I would normally reject,” Cave wrote to a fan via his Red Hand Files blog three years ago, adding: “But there has been too much coincidence, too often, not to feel that some songs perhaps hold a certain unsettling knowledge, beyond the understanding of their creators.” Cave’s words have stuck with Fenne ever since, and the idea became even more meaningful for her when writing her forthcoming third album, ‘Big Picture’.

“For me, writing comes from a place of having no other way of explaining what’s going on to myself,” she tells us, sat on the porch of her current LA base. This feeling is evident throughout her newest release. Written during lockdown, the record finds Fenne navigating her world suddenly shrinking, alongside the experience of a relationship falling apart while confined to four walls. “I knew I wanted to write songs about somebody I was in love with while I was in love with them before they left or I left,” she reflects. “Lockdown gave me that, but way too much.”

During the pandemic, Fenne and her partner moved in together after only three months, choosing to cohabitate rather than possibly never see each other. At the beginning, it was great. “I was just cooking a lot of food and having a lot of sex,” Fenne laughs. “It was almost like a caveman vibe.” However, things soon began to change as the new, uncertain future started looming ever more presently. “I went from feeling really free and having music and all of my lives that I juggle and feel stressed out and fed by, then I just had this one really tiny life where I would be standing in Sainsbury’s looking at different types of rice being like, ‘This is my life now, I literally hate it’,” she shares. “But also, at the same time, being like, ‘I’m so lucky because I’m with somebody, I have WiFi, I have a garden’. I have all of these things but I’m still not happy. And that makes me feel guilty.”

These frustrations soon began manifesting in arguments between Fenne and her partner. “I couldn’t explain to him how much I was feeling pain because I knew that he was feeling the exact same pain, so I just started writing about it privately,” she notes. “As a result, ‘Big Picture’ feels like it’s a record for me. I was writing about the end of the relationship before it had come. Obviously, you can’t tell someone [at the time], ‘I have a feeling that this situation is gonna ruin us…’”.

“I wanted to write songs about somebody I was in love with while I was in love with them before they left or I left.”

Finding a quiet spot in their shared flat to vent her feelings through songwriting, Fenne’s conflicting thoughts can be seen throughout the lyrics of ‘Big Picture’. On lead single ‘Lights Light Up’, she sings: “We held each other while everything burned around us”, going on to admit later in the song that “I guess we never really had much in common”. ‘In My Own Time’, meanwhile, finds her musing: “Sometimes I feel like I’m killing time here, or maybe it’s killing me”.

“There’s a song on the record called ‘Superglued’,” she notes. “I had the guitar part and I liked the guitar part, but I couldn’t figure out a way to fit lyrics to it. I just put a recorder on for 20 minutes and got really drunk and sang whatever came to mind. The first thing that came to mind was the first verse where I talked about not wanting to move in with this person.

“There were songs that I looked at after I’d written them, or while I was workshopping better ways to get my point across, and I was like, ‘Fuck, what is my point?’” she recalls questioning. “Oh my god, yeah, that I feel trapped and I don’t think this has a future. And I also don’t know if I have a future. Or the world!”

The relationship didn’t last, but Fenne’s path of self-growth was only just beginning. While experiencing her world changing both outside and inside of her immediate space, she realised that she wanted to switch things up, become more independent, and ultimately move away from England. “I think through writing this album I realised that I wanted a completely different life,” she nods. “It’s like when you get a haircut after a breakup. It’s like, ‘I don’t want to look at my hair when I was sad when I was with that person because it’s just gonna make me sad’. I didn’t want to look at the person I was depressed with in COVID and I don’t think they wanted to look at me either. I think through writing the record [I realised] that is way more important to address than I thought before I started writing the songs.

Since moving to New York (“I’ve got one of those Sex and the City fire escapes!”) Fenne has started living the life she always hoped for. “I don’t want to sound smug, but what I’m doing and where I am now is exactly where I wanted to be when I was writing this album,” she smiles.

‘Big Picture’ therefore presents a snapshot of a painful and pivotal time, soundtracking her COVID experience as she watched her personal life fall apart from the inside out. But this is not a melancholic album; instead Fenne favours warm and comforting melodies in the record’s folk-leaning tracks. “I was talking to a friend recently about records that have a frame around them that make you interpret them in one way and then you focus in and it’s a completely different story,” she begins. “I think this is similar to that where I feel like, outwardly and sonically, it’s positive and comforting. It’s warm. But then, in terms of the lyrics, there’s a lot of me trying to almost, in code, figure out whether I’m in something that is worth staying in. But there’s also a lot of sweet moments where I’m clearly - well, clearly to me - trying to remember all the perfect things in as much perfect detail as I can because I know at some point they won’t be there anymore.”

How does it feel revisiting that time of her life when she listens to the album now? “When I look at it now, it doesn’t make me sad to think about that period of time because I don’t think I would have had the chance to be so involved with someone and make that person my entire life. But at the same time, I know now that I don’t want to do that again,” she muses. “I like the thought that if I’m seeing someone or I have a love, we’re almost orbiting each other, rather than combining and making one weird super-planet that’s self-contained and interconnected in every single way. It’s too much.

“I feel like it was almost like a sensory deprivation tank situation where I definitely got something out of it growth-wise but ultimately it was like a long sleep and now I’m awake and I want to stay awake.

‘Big Picture’ is out now via Dead Oceans.

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