Imagine that you are a 36-year-old musician from the U.K. named Badly Drawn Boy. You have recorded four prior albums; the first was awarded Britain’s Mercury Prize making you an instant sensation at 31. Your second record was the soundtrack for a very successful Hugh Grant film. Your third effort, Have You Fed the Fish? cemented your fame. One of your singles was even used in a GAP commercial. It sold many sweaters.
Your last album, One Plus One is One, tanked. Some of the songs were inspired by the death of a close friend, something that still hurts. They were about relationships that didn’t work out. They were about your grandfather killed in Normandy during World War One. There were a lot of flute and sparse guitar parts and Phil Spector-style children’s choruses, which people just didn’t understand. You have two young children with your girlfriend Claire, ages four and-a-half and six. You think about them all the time.
You left your independent label XL because you were concerned about your career. You didn’t know how you were supposed to expand your audience. An audience buying sweaters because of your song in a GAP commercial. You remember when you put out 10 copies of your first EP (hand-pressed, in Nashville because it was cheaper) and gave them to the local record shop. The next week they were sold to strangers, and the shop wanted 50 more.
And you sit and wonder why nothing since then has ever felt as satisfying.
So you decide that you are going to sign with major label EMI for your next four albums. But still you have doubts. You even flirt with the idea of signing with a less mainstream company that’s not trying as hard to make you feel comfortable, but eventually the label manager (who’s from the same part of England as you are) wins you over. You think about what your idol Bruce Springsteen would do and you wonder why nothing you put out ever sounds as good as “Thunder Road.” You quote that in the last lines of your new work, Born in the U.K.
Born in the U.K. goes through many changes. First, you try to record it with a producer who worked with Blur, but everything turns out crap. You’re concerned that the public has forgotten about you, that your career may already be dead. But you’re also afraid that people are sick of you because in one year you released two hit records and had to dodge paparazzi when you took your children to the zoo. You wonder why the bands that you really like to listen to, like Ween, sound nothing like how you sound. And why you like those bands more than the music you produce yourself-piano-tinged numbers about the loss of your girlfriend’s innocence
So you scrap all the old material and create 25 new songs with producer Nick Frangien, eventually culling that pool down to 13. Everything sounds as good as it’s going to, and maybe there are even a few beautiful moments here and there, but the truth is unavoidable: you’re not in love with it. And in concert you’re frustrated because everybody is dead quiet during the new songs, but they explode with raucous applause for the Hugh Grant movie tunes. At Oxford club the Zodiac, you tell the crowd that when your new record comes out you won’t have to play shitholes like this anymore. And lately you’ve been thinking that maybe it’s easier to be someone like James Blunt, with a huge supermarket single, than who you are right now-someone obscure enough to be famous and famous enough to be obscure.
You wonder why you have to remain underground. You start to wonder if you actually are the kind of artist who can produce a hit (you’ve come close, that’s for sure). You wonder what hit singles even mean. You end up touring England and New York City, and get confused because every city’s the same when you’re only there for a day and a half. And you go get pissed after the shows when they are good shows, and you wake up the next morning with a hangover and search for your trademark stocking cap in the darkened hotel room before your next flight.
You end up in Toronto. You’re doing an interview with some 19 year old and you wish that you could smoke, something you’ve wanted to do ever since finishing your last fag 40 minutes ago. But now it’s raining, or maybe hailing, and it seems like every patio in this smoke-a-phobic city has been closed. You go to the café across the street with the 19 year-old, you order a Caesar and tell her the truth-that you are scared and hoping for as many hit singles as possible, so your children can go to nice colleges, all while trying to avoid eye contact. You hope she doesn’t notice that your reddish brown shoulder-length hair is shot with grey. You can only finish half your Caesar because you have to do an interview with MTV.
At your concert that night (which is at a nice venue instead of a shithole) you break halfway through for another cigarette, and you feel funny during “This is That New Song” (from the album that tanked) because you’re unsure, looking over the exuberant mid-20’s crowd, whether you’re happy or sad or just exhausted. The lighting makes you look like you’re crying, but it’s only sweat. And after the show you climb into bed alone half-drunk and wait for the next day, for the next concert, for the next album. And you think about Springsteen when he says, “Is that you baby or just a brilliant disguise?” And you decide it’s you. Probably.
