Fred Thomas' career-defining double album unravels at its own pace
The Ypsilanti indie lifer talks to Radio Amor about how 'Window in the Rhythm' came to life.
It’s actually stupid, Fred Thomas admits, the sheer number of bands he is technically associated with after 30 years in music.
A friend has the count at around 80 bands he has catalogued on a spreadsheet. That includes everything from Thomas sitting in on drums for an evening to going on tour with a twee punk band to the five or so bands he most defines as his own.
While so many of those bands and the experiences they produced helped shape the perspective of his latest solo album Window in the Rhythm, the Ypsilanti songwriter and multi-instrumentalist didn’t hesitate to acknowledge the album is as good anything he’s produced during his career.
“I think it does sort of grab the best aspects of a lot of things I've been trying to do for a long time,” he said.
On, Window in the Rhythm, Thomas’ first solo album in six years, seven songs patiently unravel at their own pace over an hour in a film-like experience. It’s all capped off with a nearly 15-minute tour de force that lives several lives of its own, instantly leaving no doubt this is the indie stalwart’s magnum opus — his Everything Everywhere All at Once, if you’d prefer.
Give a listen to Window in the Rhythm, and the career-defining claims don’t feel so bold. Typically running five to 10 minutes in length, Thomas’ slowcore-indebted songs warm up behind carefully-chosen arrangements like nylon-string guitars and field recordings before erupting into waves of distortion as he tackles songs about memories and self-acceptance.
The arrangements build palpable drama throughout, making seemingly small details like breathing in chemicals applied to disinfect a nearby parking garage or making someone a tape with the same Squarepusher song on it four times, but not in a row, feel monumental, to say the least.
Thomas is no stranger to the loose themes and detailed, often painful truths that make his songs add up to be greater than the sum of their parts, with his trilogy of previous solo releases, 2015’s All Are Saved, 2017’s Changer and 2018’s Aftering compressing his rawest feelings into one interlocking whole.
While the trilogy won Thomas critical acclaim and served as a satisfying listening experience for dedicated fans who hung on his every past regret, mistake and grudge, Window in the Rhythm aspires for even greater heights by reframing the unresolved feelings of yesterday as a way to understand the present.
It’s a heady listen that takes inspiration from some of Thomas’ favorite sonic masterworks including Portishead’s Third and Bjork’s Vespertine, as well as the lyrical adventurousness of Joanna Newsom’s Ys. Every note feels carefully considered.
Beyond that, the album soars behind the best production work of Thomas’ solo career, courtesy of co-producer Drew Vandenberg and mastering from Warren Defever at Third Man. Guest artists elevate the work to make it the Thomas’ best sounding solo album, including drummer/composer Quin Kirchner, while Raw Honey’s Maggie Hopp, multi-instrumentalist Mary Fraser and Australian songwriter Elena Dakota all contribute guest vocals. There are not one, but two harpists: Mary Lattimore and Shelley Burgon’s adding essential elements to the album’s atmosphere.
Released as a double album on Polyvinyl Records on Friday, Oct. 4, Thomas spoke with Radio Amor about how the sprawling, complex Window in the Rhythm came to be:
Radio Amor: One of the obvious, standout elements of Window in the Rhythm is that the depth and level of detail in the songs is taken to a different level. I wondered if you had an idea going into the process of making this album that this project was going to have more drawn out, intentional pieces that are a little bit longer?
Fred Thomas: Yes and no. I definitely returned to the album Ys by Joanna Newsome. That's been a favorite of mine since it came out and some point in the last five years I went back to it. I was so struck by revisiting it, because I was like, ‘I don't know if I've ever listened to this record all the way through. I know the first song inside out, but I don't think I've ever actually sat down and listened to the entire hour long thing.’ I sat down and listened and I was like, 'Oh, of course I have, I've listened to this record countless times.’ It's just five songs that feels like, you blink your eyes or you draw a breath, because it's so emotionally profound and emotionally correct that it kind of transcends time. I really went deep back into that record and thought man, some of these songs are 17 minutes, but they don't feel like, 'This is my 17 minute song,' hitting you over the head with its epic power. It was just like, that's what she had to say and she trusted herself to take the time to really get to where she had to be and to say what she had to say.
I wasn't really interested in replicating that album. It's such a masterpiece, but harp and the full orchestration - in this economy? (laughs) But I did take a lot of thought and inspiration and joy from returning to that record and still loving it close to 20 years after it came out. I was like, 'OK, I'm gonna see if I can kind of trust myself enough to get to a deeper place than I ever had before’ and it made my songs a little bit longer, too.
RA: I saw a description of the album on Bandcamp noted that it was “realized in pieces.” Can you describe how the concept for this album came to you and how the process of recording the songs unfolded?
Thomas: For a long time, I've worked in studios as a recording engineer, helping other artists get their songs down and a lot of the time that means I'm waiting for a band to show up and I'm just kind of like fucking around with an idea. Some of the songs that made it to this record started out from those kind of experimental, fucking around pieces. Like the song called New Forgetting, it's just organ and vocals that made it to the record. I was testing some microphones, a Hammond organ that was in the studio that I never messed with and a Leslie speaker and I just kind of started playing this progression and humming the melody that kind of made it to the record. I was like, 'Oh, that's a song.' That song just happened. I kept going back to that for a couple of years and I was like, 'Oh, wow that's a really beautiful song.’ It arrived. It was done when it showed up.
There are other pieces like that - little snippets and segments of things that are kind of buried in some of the mixes. I really wanted to make it sort of a patchwork quilt in the same way I've done with my other records, but rather than have it be like: Every song is a little bit different, or here's the electronic song right after the rock and roll song, it was kind of like, well, there's an electronic song buried deep, deep, deep within the other song, and you have to listen a couple times before you hear it. So, there's lots of layers and lots of hidden things in there.
RA: I noticed you felt like this album unfolds more like a film than a typical album. With six years since your last solo and the end of the trilogy, was there ever a point where you, in your mind, had the idea for an album on this sort of grand scale?
Thomas: This record is so different than anything I've done before, because I had no grand plan, I had no intention, I had no vision and I think that's what made it such a freeing, individualized experience. In the past, I've definitely been, 'OK, this is the record where I do this,' or I get inspired by something and I want to kind of mimic it or I discover a new synthesizer and the whole records made with that synth. I'm a real excitable person and music is one of the most exciting things in my world. That comes out a lot, but with this record, I sort of just let everything kind of happen in its own way and I didn't think about how it would be received at all. There's a lot of parts on the record where I'm like, 'Wow, this is really taking its time.'
With this album, I was like, ‘Let's just let the idea breathe. I think that lent itself to a way more cinematic sound, or a way more patient, movie-like quality. I felt less control over the music and the music really benefited from me not getting my fingerprints all over it.
RA: There are some songs on the record where the music emphasizes a certain part of your lyrics. There are even individual words that you accentuate both vocally and with the musical arrangements, like the word then on the song Wasn’t. Do you feel like the intentional, unhurried pacing of the album suits these songs well in highlights some of those small moments even more?
Thomas: It absolutely was a type of thing where, in life, as well as in my art, I've realized that I've really spent a lot of time running around accomplishing very little. That can be either literal, as in, I've just been kind of hyped up and wasting my time, or excited about things that weren't really all that substantial. Or it can be metaphorical - like this musical idea that I was so amped on, or actually it wasn't my idea, I was just excited about feeling identity from somebody else's thoughts or feeling the power of a collective inspiration.
I took days and days and days and days of just, 'Yep, I'm going to play this part and let it kind of do its thing. I don't know if I like it. I'm not thinking about if it's good. Normally in the past, I would start playing a song and be like, 'Oh, I know what the cover of the record is going to look like,' or 'I know what the lyrics are going to be about.' The thing was finished before it started. With this, I don't know if it's finished yet. I don't know if it started yet. It's sort of just kind of its own bubble and I feel totally at peace with it being whatever it is. Taking things slower was a huge part of that. Letting things slowly become whatever they were is not something I would have done in the past.
RA: Another standout element of Window in the Rhythm is the production. Could describe how you feel about the mixing and mastering and how that turned out and whether you feel like that elevated this album?
Thomas: Here's a funny thing. It's recorded in the same exact way, with the same people, for the most part. My friend Drew Vandenberg, who lives in Georgia and works at a studio down there, he's great. He's mixed and produced records for SPELLLING and Faye Webster and Of Montreal, and worked on some Deerhunter records. He's a really, really good friend and he's produced and mixed the whole trilogy.
The difference here is, I would come to him with a suitcase of piecemeal ideas and four track tapes and stuff I recorded in a basement and stuff I recorded in another studio and I add stuff to it. And then we would spend a week making my gibberish into a record. This time around, we spent a week working on it remotely, but it was all streamlined. It was all recording the same place. I had my friend Quin (Kirchner) play drums instead of me playing drums. He's just a phenomenal drummer. Pro tip to anybody who's a singer-songwriter who thinks they can play everything: Hire an actual musician who can play their instrument that you can't play for a living. I can play drums. I'm fine. I've drummed in bands, but Quinn is a drummer. Like, that's all he does and it really shows. It's not even any crazy complicated beats or anything, it's just, that's all he does. When you talk to a writer, you're like, oh, this motherfucker's thoughtful. It's the same thing. So that was a huge elevation and trying to kind of maintain a similar sound. They all sound kind of from the same center, whereas the trilogy records really were all over the place, fidelity-wise.
RA: While there’s lot of uniformity in terms of the sound of the album, the final track on the album, Wasn’t, is a huge standout and sort of tour de force that takes on a lot of different life forms. Can you describe where that song came from and how it became what it ended up being on the record.
Thomas: That was another song that started out as I was in the studio testing microphones and stuff. I kind of came up with this very basic, almost generic little bass line that sounds like a Pixies song. Just like the first indie rock song you write when you're in high school and you're getting into whatever people get into now, like The National or something, I guess.
That's kind of what that song became and I really wanted to emphasize how slow time felt for me then, but how important every day was, and how much changed day to day while we were all so bored trying to make our $350 for rent anyway way we could. With the long, drawn out ending ending, if you listen very closely, you'll hear the drums start going off the rails and that's because when I was around that age, I was really into punk and free jazz, only. That's all I listened to, I listened like Void and Albert Ayler. I was like, OK, I want to represent the free jazz and the Alice Coltrane, limitless spiritual energy, but also the energy of aggression from punk I was feeling.
A little bit further, the drums fade out and you start hearing a fucked up sounding acoustic guitar that sort of cuts in and out. That was a four track recording of me playing guitar in 1997 when I was, 20 or 21. I was like, 'Is this who I was then?' It was in the same key as the song, because a lot of our songs are in the same key. Then that fades away and Shelley Burgon’s harp comes in and it's beautiful and it's played masterfully. The thing I'm trying to express with that is it's all the same feeling with a different voice and with a different articulation. Here are nylon strings recorded in 1997 by an inexperienced fool, but here are some nylon strings recorded in 2023 by a master musician. We're all moving toward the same goal, and figuring out what that goal is, is the goal. That's why that song is so long, because every minute or two something changes.
RA: This album is already being described as career defining. Did you feel like you were prepared to take a big swing on an album like this that certainly comes across as that sort of grand statement? Are you satisfied with it to that degree that you would be comfortable with calling it something like career defining?
Thomas: I'll take it. I like that. I think that's true. I think it does sort of grab the best aspects of a lot of things I've been trying to do for a long time. It's hilarious to me in another way, because there have been times where I've been like, 'I'm quitting my job and going on tour with this band, because this is it. I'm taking the big swing.' I did that and that was cool and then I got another job because you could only swing for so long and it only paid so many bills.
So, when you think about grand gestures, I've been thinking about that in my own way for a long time, in a way that's almost kind of embarrassing at this point. My grand gesture days might be behind me. But I do also believe, yeah, this is a really, really fucking amazingly good record - probably as good as anything else I've ever done, and I'm proud of it. I think that maybe part of it being genuine to where I'm at is that it's not a grand gesture. It's just how I'm feeling today.