Mali Velasquez

I imagine myself playing these songs in a small club that is slowly burning, says A. Savage of his second solo record, Several Songs about Fire. Born in 1986 in Denton, Texas and raised around the newspaper where his parents both worked, by 2012 A. Savage became a headline of his own as the co-frontman of Parquet Courts. After more than a decade in New York, Savage has left the city and the United States, marking his exit with a masterpiece of maturity and a worthy corollary to his first solo venture, 2017s Thawing Dawn. Fire is something you have to escape from, and in a way this album is about escaping from something. This album is a burning building, and these songs are things Id leave behind to save myself. The songs themselves were marked by constraint even as Savage drafted them, sculpted in part in the bucolic, nocturnal hush of rural England, where he and Jack Cooper (Modern Nature, Ultimate Painting) worked deep into night trying not to wake Coopers sleeping daughter. Every song had to be able to be stripped down to just an acoustic guitar, says Savage. If you can distill a song into a single instrument, its much easier to understand it. The intimacy of these tracks are refracted by the presence of some of his closest friends, among them Cate Le Bon, who listened to Savage at work on what would become the album during a US tour in 2022. It was really special to see them come into existence and to then be in the studio working on them with him, explains Le Bon of working toward his vision, rather than within a band. The beautiful friction of shoulder to shoulder was replaced by something else.