Track By Track: Fables New Album 'Change Is A Slow Moving Beast'

Tāmaki Makaurau songwriter Fables aka Jess Bailey is currently in the midst of a flurry of launch shows for her long-awaited debut album via Home Alone Music. Recipient of a timely vinyl LP release late last week for Record Store Day, Change Is A Slow Moving Beast will officially be out on digital streaming platforms this Friday, and is available now in good record shops nationwide. Concluding her tour this week in Dunedin, Queenstown and Lyttelton — supported for all dates by fellow traveller Mali Mali — Bailey generously opened up about the ideas and feelings behind every song on Change Is A Slow Moving Beast...

Fables Album Release Tour
with Mali Mali

Thursday 23rd April - Pearl Diver, Dunedin
Friday 24th April - Sherwood, Queenstown
Sunday 26th April - Wunderbar, Lyttelton

Tickets on sale HERE via UTR

1. Forgiving

A play on words. ‘All I have is for giving. All I have is forgiving’. I needed to put this as the first track of the album as a way of saying take a seat, I need to hold your hand when I say this. It is a little poem put to music. A musical appetiser, if you will.

2. Cacophony

I called the song Cacophony (despite it being difficult for me to spell every time I put it on a set list) because it's the opposite of Euphony. Cacophony and Euphony being a collection of abrasive sounds and harmonious sounds respectively. A cacophony feels like the sound of collapse and rebirth; the chaos amidst the storm, the mess we’re in, the tide pulling you in all directions. Amidst the white noise and persistent chaos of everyday life there is also possibility for creation and realisation. Transformation comes in many forms.

3. Eyes Closed

Eyes Closed feels like a musical pack horse on its way to whatever comes next. We are gearing up for something. It's got plenty of strings, piano, a cyclical guitar part and some excellent moments brought to you by Dave Khan and I having a lot of fun with the MicroFreak. This is where I have my first and only guitar solo on this record. It is a single note, distorted and arguably rough and ready but I still look forward to hearing it every time it plays out … but the song doesn’t end there. There is a coda that gives me the chance to have the last word … for once. Eyes Closed is about naming the uncomfortable gap between what you hoped something could be and what it actually was. I wanted the song to feel gentle and pretty on the surface, almost reassuring, while holding something heavier underneath, that quiet dread that comes from knowing, deep down, that something isn’t right. Physically I couldn't tell you where I was when I wrote Eyes Closed, but I know emotionally it was dark. I just visualised the partnership that I wanted versus the one that had. The arguments I never wanted to have let alone lose and then, I just wrote the song.

4. Sensitive

This is my favourite song on the album. This was one of the last songs written and first ones we completed for this project. I wrote it on our last day recording at Parachute Studios. Everyone went out for pies and I just sat by myself and let it all spill out of me. I showed the team when they got back and we recorded it right away. We had already spent a few days together by this stage and we were really starting to pin down the sound of this album. This song became the reference track for everything else. Cass Basil plays a gorgeous sparkly synth part and Dave has got some really meaty piano chords in there.

5. Enough

Enough came from a place where I was too defeated to write in metaphor, I usually blur the lines between what I’m singing about and what I’m actually trying to say, but this time I didn’t have the energy to hide anything. Honesty in my songwriting isn’t something I consciously reach for, but these songs are unintentionally autobiographical; they show me what I’m feeling before I’ve even admitted it to myself. I think the songs found a kind of clarity I wasn’t expecting, a version of truth that feels lived-in, flawed, and human. The song went through four different recordings before it finally found the atmosphere it needed. We built the track around the simplest version of it: just me and the guitar. From there, the sounds we added were chosen for the way they could hold space rather than occupy it. Nothing in the arrangement tries to fix the feeling; it just stays with it.

This song still stings. I try not to listen to it if I can get away with it. The song’s lead guitar line is a mixture of a vintage 1950s baritone guitar with a rubber bridge (played by Dave Khan) and a nylon-string guitar played by me. For the bassline, Cass Basil opted to use a fretless bass and multitracked harmonies. The instrumentals feel like a big exhale. Dan used the real kick drum (played by Arahi) in the track to trigger an 808 kick. If you listen carefully you can hear my bracelet rattle on my guitar as I pluck away, we kept it in because when you listen to the vocals in this take you can hear my heart split in half again, in real time.

6. Notebook

This album was always going to be a departure from folk music as I had known it, but the process of recording this song really cemented that transition. It took many attempts; re-working and re-inventing. It was the last song we finished. I was so close to cutting it from the album completely, but it ended up landing exactly where it needed to be. Dave was the mastermind behind the shift in this song. The version you hear now came together in the shared studio of Reb Fountain and Dave Khan. We hit a wall and went for a swim, came back and Emily Wheatcroft-Snape (lead audio engineer for the album) and I gave the vocals another go. Still in our togs, a little sandy. There we have it. We spent the rest of the afternoon layering up the angles in the clouds (read: harmonies) and the song was done.

7. Minibar

You know that feeling when you walk away from a scene imagining all the things you wished you’d have said but didn’t, or would say if you were only given the chance. Minibar sings of having said the unspeakable, called someone out or said it like it is and having lived to tell the tale, made it far enough away from the scene to stop and catch your breath amid the adrenaline rush of speaking your truth. I remember I got a bit weepy tracking the vocals for this song. I got out of the booth to join everyone to listen to the playback and Dave had clocked that my feelings were so close to the surface and he said, “We were all with you there.” It was true. I felt so held over this recording process, I was given so much permission and space to be vulnerable. It is a gift and a privilege to have such a strong team around me.

8. Someone I Know

We added in “Space Western” to the mixing notes for Dan Luscombe and he really nailed it. I feel like this song needs to be in the cinema somehow. It's lush, sprawling but still intimate. Arahi played drums, electric guitar and piano on this one. We finished it off in The Beths Studio with Emily. There is a three way conversation going on between Cass’s clarinet, Dave's pedal steel and Arahi’s guitar. I love the slap of the snare also played by Arahi. I also had a lot of fun singing the backing vocals for this song, in particular “Bitter about it, girl”.

9. Sundown

I actually wrote Sundown on a mattress on the floor, couch surfing in the wake of a separation. For me, idle hands make for an unsettled mind, made worse in the early hours of the morning. Too tired to be awake, too awake to sleep — this poem fell out of me and into my notes app. The intent was to capture a moment when you find yourself somewhere, with someone that feels safe and comfortable, when you both talk about how you could end up intertwined together, but choose to maintain the space between and leave some room for yearning rather than become entangled.

Sundown wouldn’t be what it is without the players who brought it to life. The first pre-production session happened at Reb Fountain’s house — me on guitar, Reb on bass, and Dave Khan on electric, huddled over the voice notes app on my phone. That day set the trajectory for the whole song. When we got to Parachute Studios to record, Cass Basil (bass) grounded the track — her playing gave it the warmth and steadiness I’d imagined, the heartbeat under everything else. Dave Khan’s pedal steel and electric guitar textures lifted the song into something cinematic, widening the emotional space and giving it that aching, dreamlike quality. Arahi’s drumming sat back in just the right way; I love that he plays like a vocalist, always leaving space for the story to unfold. We then brought it back to Reb and Dave's studio and Reb produced the vocal takes. There is a sense of organicness that she brought out of me that day, I could be myself and the time pressure and need to be polished disappeared. It's not over sung, but it's not limp either. Finally, Dan mixed the track, bringing out the golden tones I’d been chasing. He gave it the feel of a familiar classic while keeping it fresh. Each of them nudged Sundown closer to the world I’d pictured, familiar yet delicate, intimate but expansive.

10. Woman

Crossed legged, on the floor, congas (Arahi), harmonica (me) and then the angles are back. This song I wrote about how the voice in my head was often mean to me, but once I got to know her then I could reason with her.

11. Backup Plan

I feel like this song was one of the last songs I wrote for this album. When you play music it’s pretty often I hear “play me something we all know” and so this song is the antidote for that. It feels laidback and chill but also a little scratchy.

12. Everytime I Find The Meaning Of Life

There is a book called Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It: Wisdom of the Great Philosophers on How to Live, by Daniel Klein. I am going to be honest, I haven’t read it but it did inspire this song. It features all of us humming together to make a drone. Dave doing stadium size rock and roll ringing out electric guitar and a sample from Four Square's produce refrigerator in Matakana as the last sound on the record.