Ones To Watch: Interview with Feldspar

If you like sweeping, epic melodies and heartfelt lyrics, you may want to check out Feldspar. Coming together just over two years ago, Will Green, Ben Lloyd-Evans, Woody Feldwick, James Forster and Jonny Burgess are currently embarking on their ‘Compass Tour’, visiting all areas of the UK to coincide with the release of their four singles – one each month from September to December. This month sees the release of ‘Beautiful People’ (reviewed by Gigslutz), so we thought we should get the lowdown on everything Feldspar. Here, Claire Lim chats to the band about mortality, minerals and heartache…

Tell us about your Compass Tour – what was the idea behind this?

We decided to do something a bit different with these releases – we had four songs, but rather than release an EP, we’ve released one single a month from September to December. So instead of one 16 date tour, we’ve broken it up into four mini-tours visiting the North, East, South, and West of the UK. It’s a good way to tour – it gives each single its own narrative and identity and also means we’ve avoided the occasional scheduling nightmares of playing in Manchester, going all the way to Brighton, then back up to, say, Leeds on consecutive days.

‘Beautiful People’ is the third single in the series of the four being released, what is the track about?

‘Beautiful People’ is a change in mood from the first two singles. Where they were big and boisterous, this track is more introverted. We thought it would be a nice change in pace to mark the turn towards Autumn and the darkening nights. It’s a song about mortality and aging and looks at the different ways we think about mortality as we get older. It’s not totally bleak – a key line is “we are the beautiful people; we are here and we’re alive”. You have to be conscious of the fact life ends in order to appreciate what is possible before that great inevitable defeat.

Feldspar sounds very Scandinavian – where are you all from and what’s the story behind the name?

It does sound Scandinavian, but in fact is not. It’s a kind of mineral – it’s the most abundant mineral in the earth’s crust, so it’s very common and occasionally extremely beautiful, which is a nice summary of our band. We’re from all over the UK – Leeds, Bath, Bristol, Cambridge – but we’ve all been in London for a good few years. I think we’ve all reached the stage where if we now go home, people take the piss out of us for living in ‘that London’.

What are your plans after these singles?

We’re not sure yet as we’ve been so focused on this Autumn. So we’ve got one last single to release – ‘Hang Your Head’ comes out 1st Dec with a tour in the West of the UK – then we’ll probably lock ourselves away for a couple of months to write some more material. After that, we’ll definitely be touring lots next year, playing festivals, and building towards recording our first full length album.

There’s quite a melancholic sound to Feldspar, was this intentional?

We don’t sit down and intentionally write sad music, but in terms of subject matter we are drawn towards more melancholic topics: loss, anger, heartache and so on. Music – like any form of art – needs to draw on the full range of the human experience in order to continue to be relevant. Writing songs about your troubles – and listening to other people’s – is a cathartic process, and I think making the music we make lets us be much more cheerful onstage than people would imagine.

What are your influences?

The root of the songwriting is the folk-revivalists of the 60s and 70s: Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon and, in their later counterparts, people like Nick Cave or Villagers, who keep the storytelling aspect to songwriting alive in more expansive musical settings. As a band, our influences are pretty diverse though. James is a blues guitarist at heart, Ben studied classical piano, Jonny used to be in a prog-rock band, and Woody has played in everything from a male voice choir to funk bands. The exciting thing is seeing that all come together into a sound that we think is quite unique, but also sits well alongside other lyrical rock bands like The National, Iron & Wine, or Arcade Fire.

If we were to dig into a little more Feldspar, where would you suggest we start?

A nice choice of words. To dig into Feldspar, simply get a shovel and start hacking your way into the earth’s crust… However, if you’re interested in the band, you can hear all the singles from the Compass Tour on https://soundcloud.com/feldsparmusic and the accompanying videos on youtube.com/feldsparmusic. Once there, you’ll also find songs from our previous releases The Flat & Paper Sky Vols I & II.