Fauness

Photography by Bob Foster. Interview by Heather Hawke.

Fauness’ four-track EP Maiden No More is reflective, both as in the way the sounds are glittery and sparkle like fresh snow on a bright clear day, as well as by how thoughtful this pop exploration into the emotional cascades of womanhood is. 

She was raised between the lonely, leafy suburbs of New England and their opposite, Finsbury Park, London and though her creative spirit (fueled by American R&B and pop country alongside doses of UK club culture, folk and classical music, and an archetypal 2000s teen hood) grew, it wasn’t until a few years later, working as a writer and visual artist in London, that she gained the courage to release her own songs. After playing keyboards on stage for Jam City at a London gig, a chance encounter with a girl on the train (“an angel with lilac hair”) recognized and approached her, asking where she could hear some of her own solo music. Like a sprinkling of magic pixie dust, the question came at exactly the right time to really bring Fauness into true form. 

The title of Maiden No More comes from the second section of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy’s tragic late 19th century odyssey about a young woman caught between worlds. Her day job writing about classical art seeps subtly into certain lyrical themes of the new EP: beauty, idealized images of the female form, the pressures of achievement, longing for self-realization. The EP was co-produced by Jam City and serves as both a summit and statement, polishing her cathartic songcraft into a dozen shimmering minutes. The collection captures the moment at which the dazzling blossoms of her previous EPs, Toxic Femininity, Lashes in a Landfill, and Dreamcatcher, have fully emerged. Each song is co-produced by Jam City, whose Earthly imprint issued the previous releases. 

Fauness’ web/socials: Bandcamp – Soundcloud – Instagram

Hi! So, this past year and a half has been pretty chaotic due to various reasons including the pandemic…Before we began, how are you doing with everything? How has this last year been for you and how are you feeling? How have you been coping with everything? 

Thank you for asking! During the pandemic I’ve made a lot of music, but my writing process changed significantly as a result of spending more time at home. In the before times, most of my inspiration would come during my journeys to/from places, often from walking around and going from A to B. Once that was no longer possible, I had to go learn how to find inspiration from being stationary, which felt a lot less intuitive. I think I’m just about getting used to the process of looking for inspiration rather than letting it come to me organically. But now it seems that the world is beginning to open up properly so maybe I’ll revert back to my former way. This is all to say that even though it took a different shape, making music was my main coping mechanism during the past 18 months, a world to escape into. 

I feel like the music industry has shifted even more so during the pandemic. How has it felt, to you, as an artist? Has it been freeing? Is it scary trying to question how to approach music making and then how to or if you want to creatively release it to the public?

I love performing, and right before the pandemic hit, I was planning my first major live shows. Those had to be postponed obviously, and for a while I was thinking of ways to create something visually and sonically compelling that could be shared online. Ultimately, I really believe that the heart of music lies in that relationship between the performer and their audience, and for me, it made more sense to wait to cultivate that relationship in physical space rather than attempting to capture a fraction of it virtually. Along with writing in the studio, performing is my favorite aspect of being an artist and it’s a space that feels very freeing to me, so I can’t wait to be able to do a live show again. 

Going back to the beginning. What was your childhood like growing up between the suburbs of New England and Finsbury Park, London? Did creativity/music/art play a big part of your childhood?  

Creativity/music/art really was my childhood. My parents are both very musical and my brother is a very skilled bass and piano player. I grew up completely immersed in music, but this actually meant that took me a while to carve out my own relationship to it, purely because it was so much a part of my family, particularly my dad’s life. I always loved pop music in a way that none of my family did. Secretly, I always wanted to be a pop star but felt like I couldn’t be open about that dream because it wasn’t one of the many kinds of music my family liked. My brother can recognize a good bassline in any song, but pop music is the complete opposite of his taste. In terms of going between London and New England, it was an extremely surreal and isolating way to grow up. For the most part, I always had friends and tried to integrate and assimilate in both places. But people knew I was different. In London I was the American girl and in the US I was just something that people couldn’t understand. On the plus side, it meant that I was exposed to two different youth cultures and could learn and be inspired from both of them at the same time, whether in terms of fashion, music or nightlife. 

Tell me about your musical upbringing. I read that growing up you were fueled by American R&B and pop country alongside doses of UK club culture, folk and classical music, and 2000s teenhood. When you were old enough to start seeking out music, where did you regularly find yourself (a certain record store / internet site / getting recommendations from a certain friend)? When did you first become aware that music was going to be a part of your life? What was your formal / not formal music education like growing up? 

My first musical love was country music in the mid 1990s. I was very young, weirdly young to be so independently obsessed with one particular genre of music. I don’t really know how it happened, I think that I heard it on the car radio and just made my parents listen to that same radio station every time we went anywhere. Looking back, it was a real golden era of country music, with so many melodic gems in rotation on the radio or on CMT, the country tv station. I loved the emotion, the atmosphere of the music, the way it told stories, and the particular kind of singing, mostly the female singers like Trisha Yearwood and Martina McBride. We moved back to London for a bit a little later on and my love for country instantly evolved into a passion for American RnB, which I think is fundamentally the same sort of music with different kinds of chords and a different yet overlapping history. Nobody in the UK listened to country so I stopped listening to it after that. My first proper concert was Brandy at the Royal Albert Hall in London. 

Let’s talk about your new EP Maiden No More! What was your songwriting/creative process like for it? How long was the writing/recording process of it and was there an event or a specific timeframe where a large chunk of the lyricism came out?

Each song on the record has its own very distinct writing/recording process behind it. “Dragonfly” was written about a year before the other songs. Both “Dragonfly” and “It Gets Better “are basically identical to their original demos. With “It Gets Better,” I didn’t even re-record vocals, I just used the same ones as on the demo because I liked how they sounded and they captured the emotional world I was trying to explore. With “Arrow,” the first part of that track was actually a poem I’d written before I got to the studio. I wasn’t planning on making it into a song. The first line is a question: “Can you tell the time of day by the light and the bird song?”; this came to me because at that time, every morning I’d wake up and lie in bed for a moment looking out of the window and listening to the birdsong (I sleep with the curtains open). During the pandemic I didn’t always set an alarm so I would try and guess what time it was by the shade of the sky and what I could hear. 

Did you have any parts of the tracks off Maiden No More (whether it be lyrics, beats, harmonies) around the time of your previous EPs (Toxic Femininity, Lashes in a Landfill, and Dreamcatcher) or before? How much did you, and this EP, evolve in that time? 

“Dragonfly” was actually written before the tracks on Dreamcatcher, which came out during the pandemic (and had a track, “Violet Flame” that I wrote and produced early on in the pandemic). This EP is a very natural progression from my first two records (Toxic Femininity and Lashes); I think you can tell that I’ve gained confidence with my singing voice and am leaning into the softness of my tone a little more, and with a little more power at the same time. Especially on my first record, I was holding a lot back vocally, not emotionally but vocally. Singing is so bound up with confidence and one’s emotional state, more than any other instrument. As a teenager I was always singing to myself, but I wasn’t in a strong enough place emotionally to really mine my voice as an expressive or artistic tool. Now communicating through my singing voice an essential part of my life, like sleeping or eating.

Which songs on Maiden No More were the easiest / most difficult to create? What are two or three songs you are most proud of on this record? Why?

“Dragonfly” and “It Gets Better” came out in one studio session, like I said, pretty much exactly as you hear them on the record. “Arrow” was quite a different track when first recorded as a demo, but this is mainly due to the production, particularly the drums. I love all the songs on this record equally, but I will say that “Arrow” is different from anything I’ve put out before because it’s the only one of my songs to describe/explore a particular relationship with another person. For me, love songs feel cliche, so I’ve always avoided them. I deeply enjoy plenty of love songs by other people, but my point is that breakups or other aspects of romantic love seem to be the go-to emotional landscape for songwriting, which ignores all of the other aspects of human experience. So I’ve always rebelled against that with my own stuff. “Arrow” is the closest I’ve got to a love song so far; it’s about a particular relationship with someone I love, not romantically, but it’s still very personal in that sense. It was a new one for me to try and explore it in song. 

I read that Maiden No More is named after the second section of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy’s tragic late 19th century odyssey about a young woman caught between worlds. When and how did the EP title come about in the album creation process? What is the significance of the title for you? 

I read Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles for the first time in December 2019 and was blown away by the ability of a male writer to not only create such a multi-dimensional female character, but also narrate the complexities of her inner life, her mind. Most of the book involves Tess moving from place to place on her own, cast out from society, not having a niche or a place or a community to belong to. I mostly read novels by female authors, usually female authors of color; Hardy somehow manages to capture a sense of alienation that is extremely profound given the fact that he himself had to experience of being marginalized. Hardy’s book reminded me of one of my favorite novels, Toni Morrison’s Paradise, which tells the story of a group of women who are also caught between worlds. Rather than navigating life alone as Tess does, these women find each other and start living together in an abandoned nunnery. Like Tess, they all meet a tragic end. I’m fascinated by stories of women who are truly outsiders, for whatever reason, whether they’ve chosen to be or found themselves in this situation by virtue of circumstances beyond their control. I’ve felt like an outsider my whole life, so these stories are very meaningful to me (it’s also where the title Arduous Journeys Undertaken Alone comes from). At the same time, making music is about feeling like less of an outsider, finding a way to belong and being seen/understood, to bond with others. This is especially true with popular music. 

What was your favorite part about the writing / album creation process of Maiden No More? 

I think the best part was honestly getting back the final mixes/masters and listening to them for the first time. This is the first record that I’ve had professionally mixed, and it was such a treat to see how much it enhanced the sound. 

I really dig the video for “Dragonfly”! What was the treatment for this video? How long was this video in the making? Any fun behind the scenes facts from the making of it?

There is actually a very long story behind the video! Essentially, the original video didn’t go ahead as planned (it was my first time attempting to work with people doing CGI which was a learning experience to say the least!) so basically, I had to create a brand new video in 4 days. I managed to go location scouting, write a treatment, organize a great team and get everything shot, edited and color graded all within that timeframe. This was my seventh music video so luckily, I had the experience to be able to salvage the situation and make something beautiful and meaningful. Also, living in a city like London with so many talented creative people help. I’m so glad you like it! We got so lucky with the weather. All week it was forecast to rain and on the day of the shoot we had the most incredible sunshine. It was good vibes all day and I think it shows in the final cut. 

On that topic, I know you co-directed the “Dragonfly” video alongside 19 year old filmmaker Aarony Bailey, how hands-on are you with making of / direction of your other visuals (press images, artwork) that accompanies the music? Do you feel like the art that accompanies one’s music is more / less important than it used to be? How do you feel like social media / the internet impacts the intention behind all of this?

With this one I was super hands on. I think, going forward, I’d like to direct all of my videos. I have this dream of sitting back and letting someone else do the work but increasingly, I have clear sense of what I want my visuals to consist of, so it makes sense for me to play a leading role from now on. I love working with Aarony because she’s a talented DoP and a great editor as well as a director. We have a kind of sisterly relationship so can be very honest with each other, which definitely helps with the creative process. I’ll definitely be getting her to shoot and edit for me again in future. 

Have you had any mentors along the way?

My friend Leslie Dick, a writer in Los Angeles, is the closest thing I have to a mentor. She’s not a musician but she has an unusual degree of empathy and has spent her life surrounded by artists. She’s always there when I need advice and is always so encouraging. My goal is to expand my audience as much as humanly possible, and she makes me feel like that’s well within my reach. Generally, I look to older women for advice. Women who are now in their 60s and older always seem to have a wealth of wisdom, perhaps because many of them benefitted from feminism as a comparatively visible and imaginative movement when they were younger.