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FENNE LILY

Fenne Lily

Big Picture

    A gorgeous and gripping portrait of Fenne’s last two years, Big Picture was pieced together in an effort to self-soothe. Tracked live in co-producer Brad Cook’s North Carolina studio, the album delineates the phases of love and becomes a map of comfort vs claustrophobia. Though its creation took place amid personal and global turmoil, the ruminative yet candid Big Picture is Fenne’s most cohesive, resolute work to date, both lyrically and sonically. “This isn’t a sad album — it’s about as uplifting as my way of doing things will allow,” she says. “These songs explore worry and doubt and letting go, but those themes are framed brightly.” With confidence and quiet strength, each track provides an insight into Fenne’s ever-changing view of love and, ultimately, its redefinition — love as a process, not something to be lost and found.

    While the album was written alone in Fenne’s Bristol flat – a fact intentionally reflected in its compact sonic quality – Big Picture was transformed from a solitary venture into a unifying collaboration during the recording process when she was joined by her touring band, Melina Dutere of Jay Som (mixing), Christian Lee Hutson (guitar and co production), and Katy Kirby (vocals). Notably, these 10 songs are Fenne’s first and only to have been written over the course of a relationship; 2018’s On Hold and 2020’s Breach both confront the pain of retrospection, saying goodbye to a love that’s gone. Big Picture does the exact opposite — rooted firmly in the present, it traces the narrative of two people trying their hardest not to implode, together. “This album is an observation of the way I think about love, the self[1]examination that comes with closeness and the responsibilities involved in being a big part of someone else’s small(er) world,” summarizes Fenne. “It was written in a place of relative emotional stability – stability that felt unstable because of its newness, but also because of the global context. 2020 was the year of letting go, but we’d all already let go of so much and nothing felt like mine anymore. Writing always did, though, so that’s what I chose to do.”

    TRACK LISTING

    SIDE A:
    1) Map Of Japan
    2) Dawncolored Horse
    3) Lights Light Up
    4) 2+2
    5) Superglued
    SIDE B:
    6) Henry
    7) Pick
    8) In My Own Time
    9) Red Deer Day
    10) Half Finished

    Fenne Lily

    On Hold

      Fenne was born in London and moved to Dorset as a toddler, where she grew up in the picturesque English countryside. She was a “free range kid,” as she calls it, after her parents took her out of school for a period at the age of seven. Over the following year, they taught her while the family travelled Europe in a live-in bus. Even after she returned to traditional school at 9, her home education never ended, extending to music. Her mother gifted Fenne with her old record collection, through which she discovered her love for T-Rex and the Velvet Underground and Nico. Soon after she fell for the strange genius of PJ Harvey and came to worship Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell, and the richly crafted worlds of Feist, which inspired Fenne to pick up a guitar.

      “On Hold,” a tender collection of expressive, open-hearted songs, was Fenne’s first foray into songwriting, written during her teenage years. Writing her own songs was initially a “therapy exercise” for Fenne, who is normally reserved when it comes to talking about her feelings. The album, self-released in 2018, organically found a large audience online, which grew after she opened for Lucy Dacus and Andy Shauf’s North American tours last spring. Surrounding its release, The Line of Best Fit deemed Fenne “a new and extraordinary voice capable of wringing profound and resonant moments out of loss.”

      In Fenne’s words, “To have this record physically rereleased is a big deal for me and the person I was when I made it. A lot’s changed since then but these songs and what they’ve given me will remain dependable reminders of beginnings and endings that shaped me as a teenager. For an album whose title is half ‘hold’, it makes sense that now whoever wants to can finally do that again.”

      TRACK LISTING

      SIDE A:
      1. Car Park
      2. Three Oh Nine
      3. What’s Good
      4. The Hand You Deal
      5. More Than You Know

      SIDE B:
      6. On Hold
      7. Top To Toe
      8. Bud
      9. Brother
      10. For A While
      11. Car Park (Overflow)


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