A published poet and filmmaker, making proper deep alt-pop with extreme catchiness and mind altering lyrics, Sam Frankl provides depth into his inspirations

Sam writes, “Macondo was inspired by 100 Years of Solitude. Moments of personal calamity are often relayed through the broader lens of cultural history. The death of a central character is sometimes offhand and seemingly incidental. Heartbreak feels like a footnote. It was a sort of medicine for the narcissism that tends to engulf breakup songs.

With that in mind Angus and I thought that my Dad, essentially embodying my elder self, was ideal. Angus knew of a second hand camera shop on the Kent coast so we structured the idea around a shoot there. The lenses and camera parts serve as a metaphor for the character’s memories. He tends to them, restores them and views them. The light flares that we see are shots of the inside of camera lenses, ostensibly, they are taken from the view of the protagonist.”

Cover Photo by Hollie Fernando

The Latin American Boom: I name check two South American works of fiction in the body of the EP. The lead single, ‘Macondo,’ shares its name with the fictional town in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude.’ It’s an homage to a breathtaking novel, which directly influenced the tone and scale of the song. The EP itself bares the same title as my favorite Julio Cortazar novel. It is acknowledgement of Cortazar’s metaphor of hopscotch; a game of incremental gains, where you have to move backwards in order to move forwards. This is a coming of age record in many senses; I’ve had to make a lot of mistakes to get here.

Leonard Cohen: Lyrically, no one has influenced my work more profoundly than Leonard Cohen. When I set about writing ‘Overstayed,’ the third track on the EP, it was his wry sense of humour that I was trying to emulate. I wanted to write a song about a relationship that had run its course and was now limping comically on, doing nothing but harm. I constantly revisited New Skin For The Old Ceremony, looking for a way to similarly blend humour and the desperate melancholy of failed romance.

Captivity: Trouble No More, the second song on the EP is written from the perspective of a dear friend of mine who is currently serving prison time in Florida. The song is an examination both of captivity and resignation. I think there is an inherent duality to captivity in all its forms; both the pain of losing liberty and the comfort of losing culpability. For some people there is a cathartic bliss in losing the ability to choose. We often tacitly consent to our liberties being infringed upon for the sake of security. The line, ‘I don’t wanna be trouble no more’ is intended to allude to that.

LuQuS: I coproduced two songs on the EP with my friend Luke Hester who goes by the production moniker LuQuS and has recently formed the amazing group, Dahlia Sleeps. Previously I’d produced music in a very solitary way. This collaboration taught me such an incredible amount, both sonically and about the importance of sharing ideas. I’m hugely indebted to Luke for everything he passed on in those sessions.

Streaming: I think it’s the duty of a producer to be an avid consumer. It may be a problematic business model, but streaming music allows for an unprecedented level of consumption. I read a Goldlink interview in which he said, and I’m paraphrasing, ‘I didn’t grow up with genres, I grew up with Limewire.’ The way a generation consumes music directly impacts the nature of the music it makes. I try to make music that coherently bridges disparate production styles. In the course of listening to one playlist we often jump stylistic chasms, so it seems natural to try to make music that does the same.

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