A. Savage Steps Out on His Own

Andrew “A.” Savage’s voice is unmissable, iconic and, dare I say it, generational. So few singers or poets have soundtracked my life more viscerally than he has, be it via his 2017 debut Thawing Dawn or, honestly, anything he’s made across 11 years fronting Parquet Courts—and, perhaps, you feel similarly. I remember sitting in a doctor’s office waiting room and watching the band play “Wide Awake” live on Ellen; I wrote about their seventh album, Sympathy for Life, for Paste two years ago and it was one of my first reviews I was ever assigned; I discovered them in a chic Cleveland department store sometime in the mid-2010s, when “Stoned and Starving” filled the aisles. And it was in all of those moments where Savage’s bravado stood warmly in the eye of the storm. His singing, it’s gritty and harboring chaos even when it’s presented as subdued and gentle; when he croons across tracks like “Eyeballs” and “Buffalo Calf Road,” you can hear the punk atoms coalescing with a rewarding branch of delicacy.

Because Savage has put out two Parquet Courts records since Thawing Dawn, it became easy to forget that we’d been waiting for him to follow it up for six years. I liked it that way, though. When the news of Several Songs About Fire’s nearby release came into my inbox earlier this summer, it was then when I remembered it was an album I’d been longing for—if only someplace deep within my soul where the work of Parquet Courts just couldn’t reach. And, my goodness, the wait was fully worth it and then some. Several Songs About Fire is exactly the type of solo record you should want from someone like Savage; it’s got sonics not too distant from those of Parquet Courts, but there are intricacies and small details that make it obvious just how dense of a world he’s built on his own. It’s the perfect spectrum of push and pull, one that becomes more and more nourishing with each new disentanglement.

Savage was born in Denton, Texas in the late 1980s, and the city became a crucial fixture in shaping his artistry. Even after his family moved to Dallas when he was in elementary school, he’d return to his birthplace often, be it for live shows or, in 2004, when he enrolled in the University of North Texas. Bands often didn’t play Dallas, they played Denton—namely because of the huge population of college kids living in the city. At UNT, Savage started up his own group called Teenage Cool Kids while he was living in a DIY house called 715 Panhandle—the place where he met his future Parquet Courts bandmate Sean Yeaton, whose band was playing a gig there. Savage belongs to an incredible cohort of folks who cut their teeth in Denton, including Roy Orbison, Meat Loaf, Sarah Jaffe, Don Henley and avant garde composer William Basinski. Everyone talks about Philly and Chicago, but everyone overlooks the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex hub of noise, punk and bluegrass in those conversations.

“When I was [in Denton], that was a great time to be there—especially if you were into experimental music,” Savage says. “There’s a house there called the House of Tinnitus that has been going for decades now, and it’s a mainstay on the avant-noise circuit of DIY places. And that’s because the University of North Texas has one of the most prestigious jazz programs in the world. It has a lot of cool composers that come out of there, but there was also a lot of great punk bands that were happening there at that time, too—probably my favorite, and the most influential, being the Marked Men, who I think people in my generation, all of my friends, a lot of us started because of that band.”

Despite having lived the first 20-odd years of his life in Texas, Savage holds no real affinity for the cowboy chords and Western pastorals that have become largely associated with the Longhorn State in movies, TV and literature. Country music was in his orbit, of course, as it was a focal part of dance culture among rural, working class families. When he was in college, he and his buddies would go to Crazy Horse—a cowboy bar that was also, kind of, a gay bar in town. Those worlds didn’t overlap publicly while Savage was a patron, but the Dallas Morning News would cover the space’s accessible, welcoming vibe in 2010. There was bluegrass and outlaw country happening in pockets nearby, but there was also such a stark, palpable presence of rock ‘n’ roll and hip-hop. Everyone from Janis Joplin to ZZ Top to Travis Scott caught wind of their own creativity and star power in-between the states spurring borders. “The country thing, it’s just one part of a very diverse place,” Savage explains. “I think the Texas of people’s imaginations is a bit stuck. When you’re from there, you see how diverse it is. It’s diverse culturally and diverse ethically and diverse politically and, certainly, geographically. I’ve been to one rodeo in my life. I didn’t ride a horse until I was living in New York.”

After college, Savage moved to Brooklyn and formed Parquet Courts a few years later—but the migration wasn’t born out of a career-based move. In fact, Savage never imagined doing music as a career in the first place. He didn’t have the lightbulb moment of wanting to strike out on his own in the Big Apple just to say he gave it a go. No, the triggering incident for him came when Teenage Cool Kids did a three-month world tour, spending two months crossing the entire continental United States and then holing up in Europe for another month. It was a familiar revelation for Savage, as he started to piece together that growth or curiosity could not properly germinate once you get caught in the cycle of local routine. “I realized how big the world is, and that can be a tough thing to see in a college town when you’re living with all of your friends,” Savage says. “There’s almost that mentality where I’m in this college town and I’m like, ‘Well, I don’t want to stay here and become a “townie.” I was born here, so I should jump ship.’ I was young, I was ready for something new and exciting. New York is where I had the most friends, so it was like, ‘Okay, I’m young, let’s try it out.’ And then that turns into 15 years.”

Several Songs About Fire started to come together fully after Parquet Courts finished their massive, intense tour from late 2021 into early 2022. Writing is never easy, but Savage was waiting for a chance to have enough space to put a pen to paper. Jack Cooper and Cate Le Bon had both expressed interest in working with him on whatever starts to emerge as his next record, and he’d actually step out on tour with Le Bon for a few dates in late 2022. Some of Le Bon’s collaborators, like Euan Hinshelwood and Dylan Hadley, would join Savage on Several Songs About Fire—along with Jack Cooper, Magdalena McLean, John Parish and Le Bon herself. Parish had co-produced Sympathy For Life and made his affection for Thawing Dawn known to Savage. His inclusion is what set the momentum forward, and the bones of Several Songs About Fire had started to become a skeleton.

While touring with Le Bon, Savage was workshopping songs like “Elvis in the Army” and “Le Grand Balloon” on stage in a live setting—as opposed to trusting his instincts in a studio. Since he was opening up for Le Bon, he was, essentially, opening up for Le Bon’s fans, which made the stakes even lower. He could test-drive whatever verses he wanted, or switch up some chords if needed. There was bliss in not being an introduction; it was a centering exercise. “I felt a certain sense of freedom, in that there was no expectation of me, really,” Savage explains. “I didn’t have to go out there and play the songs that people were shouting out, because people weren’t. I could just work on things on stage, and that felt very nice. I tend to write more lyrics than is needed for a song, and I could just try out different lyrics and five different ideas. It was great.” While no tracks from Several Songs About Fire have 100+ verses like Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” Savage is definitely an overwriter—he admits that he tries to write three versions of every line just to get the best language possible.

Savage went to England to record Several Songs About Fire—and not because he was craving a change of scenery from dreary old Brooklyn. Bristol is where Parish lives, and he happens to be a family man who doesn’t travel much and has a hard out at 7 PM so he can get home to his wife and daughters. On top of that, Cooper, Le Bon, Hinshelwood and McLean were all already in the UK—and Hadley had been there, too, working with Le Bon. Perhaps it’s an unglamorous truth, that Savage decamped to England to make his record because it meant that he would be the only one who would need a plane ticket, but not every function of creation is mythical or folklorish. Now, on the eve of Several Songs About Fire’s release, Savage resides in France—having exited the noise of New York for the cluttered wonder of Paris. Moving to Europe feels like a natural progression for Savage. Since his Denton days when he started touring, he’s become the kind of person who now, because of that intense, cross-country and cross-continent lifestyle, feels comfortable out of his comfort zone. He’s a nester, though, having only lived in two apartments in New York—and one of them he called home for 12 years.

“I am comfortable with being mobile,” Savage says. “I’m still quite fond of New York and I still consider myself a New Yorker. I really think it is one of the most terrific cities in the world but, you know, having healthcare is important. And the cost of living is also important. It’s a fabulous place to be an artist and it’s a terrible place to be an artist, because there’s so many inspiring people in New York and it attracts so many cool people—but it’s not a kind place for artists, unless you have money, which I don’t. But that’s one of the things that defines being an artist in New York, this struggle to keep your head above water constantly. It gives you a sense of aggression and a sense of drive to get things done. I think that, after having done the boot camp of 15 years in New York, I think that quality might always be with me. It’s almost like a bug trap, it allures you. But, if you get too close, if you get too deep in it, it can kill you.”

Having made Several Songs About Fire in Bristol and now living in Paris, Savage is no longer being subjected to the busy streets and loud, intimate volumes of East Coast streets. Though, it must be noted that someone in France is doing an immense amount of hammering on his side of our Zoom call—a truth that is even funnier when Savage claims that French people are a little bit less forgiving about noise than New Yorkers are. But, as of right now, he only has his acoustic guitar with him and he doesn’t have a stable, permanent residence yet. He’s surrounded by boxes of books and minimal furniture, as he’s packed up shop and taken a risk at building his life up from scratch in a new country. “It’s encouraged to not get too loud,” he laughs. “And I miss that, really. I miss playing out of an amp. It’s probably the longest period of my life that I haven’t done it. I think that there is a lot of creative value in taking a leap of faith in one’s life. That’s kind of what I’m doing right now. I think of the leaps of faith in my life, and one of them would definitely be moving to New York and another one would definitely be living in New York and quitting my job to go on tour with Parquet Courts. These are big leaps of faith that really paid off in dividends, creatively, and I’m hoping that this will be the same. I suspect that it will.”

Much of the work on Several Songs About Fire is guitar-focused work ensconced in lush instrumentation. Though songs like “Elvis in the Army” boast the post-punk architecture that wouldn’t be out of place in the middle of Light Up Gold, songs like “Hurtin’ or Healed” and “My New Green Coat” are greatly patient and contemplative and rooted in graceful harmonics and instrumentation that is more buoyant than it is chaotic. You can hear the vibrations of each instrument, the vibrations in Savage’s voice. It’s truly marvelous to unpack, especially with the knowledge of Savage’s steadfast ideology around song construction. “I would say that every song should be able to be distilled into a single instrument and still be the song,” he explains. “I don’t think that a song should rely so heavily on instrumentation that, when you take one element away, it stops being the song.”

It’s a good explanation for why so many musicians opt to build the skeleton of a track with a piano or guitar. Savage has been playing gigs like that around the city, too, just him and his six-string. “There’s a sense of freedom in that, it’s very autonomous,” he adds. “You don’t have to rely on anybody, you don’t have to worry about somebody being late. It’s just you and your song, and I think there’s something really pure about that.” Savage could have gone out and assembled a big band for Several Songs About Fire—and, in some ways he did, given that there are eight musicians on it—but he wanted to keep the focus on something that’s scalable. In this case, it was his voice and his instrument.

There are some real intimate moments on Several Songs About Fire where Savage sings quite openly about feelings of displacement and isolation. On “Elvis in the Army,” he uses Presley’s deployment in the military to map out his own anxiety around being away from home. “Lately, I’ve noticed my heart’s disavowal of the suffering myth,” he sings. “Guess I’ve thrown in the towel. Debt, dust and memories to collect and trade to the man on the fan and in the room where I lay.” Likewise, on “My My, My Dear,” Savage writes about his time in America as a past affection, even though it was written before he left, singing “The cantos of my New York Years are scribed in ink that disappears, the autumn leaves that store the glow of summer then invite the snow.” On “David’s Dead,” he curses the cost of living he ran away from when he moves across the pond. “I have paid rent to the same lord of land for 10+ years, and now I’m tired as hell of living life this way.”

“There was a point where I realized—and this goes through all of the records that I’ve made—it’s rare that I set out to address something. I don’t really make dramatic records—but, in a way, they’re all kind of dramatic, because they’re all just portraits of your life at a certain time,” Savage says. “It’s a snapshot of a certain year of your life, basically. That’s the way it is for me, anyway. [Displacement] might not be the mission statement, but it ends up making itself clear somewhere throughout the process, normally towards the end and you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s what I was on about.’ I think what it was was an emotional preparation for this idea of leaving this place I call home. It wasn’t my ‘Goodbye, U.S.A.’ record, but you’d be forgiven for coming to that conclusion—because I think I was preparing myself for this idea that there was going to be a big change.”

Beyond music—but not too far beyond—Savage is an incredible artist who paints surreal portraits of human life. When he was living in Brooklyn, he had his own studio in Bed-Stuy, and he has designed many of the Parquet Courts album covers—including the 2016 LP Human Performance, for which he received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Recording Package. Savage was even an artist-in-residence with Nike a few years ago. The work he does on a canvas sometimes informs the music he writes (and vice-versa) because it’s all such a large extension of who he is. One of the things that got him hooked on the marvels of music-making was the design choices that surrounded it.

Savage puts a lot of his identity into Parquet Courts and the solo records he makes. He has a whole world of artwork that no one has seen before, but he’s trying to get better at sharing—and is hoping that now, because Rough Trade has started running an Instragram page for him, that they’ll start sharing some of his work there. (Last month, that hope came true, as folks got to see three of Savage’s acrylic paintings.) “All the music that I make, I pretty much insist on doing all of the art for it, because it’s just such an important part of it for me—and it’s one of my favorite parts, to be honest,” Savage says. “It’s a huge part of my life. And, for a while, I lived this double-life where, when I’m not touring or recording, I’m painting. I’m in a period of that right now.”

On Several Songs About Fire, Savage writes about televised wildfires, jails getting knocked down, food deserts and the cost of living. There’s a line on “Thanksgiving Prayer” where he sings “I don’t need dollars, pounds or pesos to know I am rich, I got people who allow themselves to love me and are insane enough to be loved,” and I think it taps into the greater symbolism of the album altogether. But I think about how, in the wake of Wide Awake! and Savage’s residency with Nike, there was criticism towards him on Reddit (which doesn’t hold nearly as much crucial cultural significance as Redditors might believe).

Folks brought up how Wide Awake! was an album that greatly critiques consumerism and capitalism and that Savage collaborating with a shoe conglomerate was a sell-out move—both morally and economically. But I’m not so certain that those people who levied that feedback truly understand what it means to make art for survival in a world that’s dominated by companies that don’t care about anyone’s survival but their own. I’ve worked shit jobs writing clickbait articles just because the wages could pay the rent; I’ve done artwork for companies for chump change just because I couldn’t go another week without groceries.

I ask Savage about his time with Nike and whether or not he sees it as something that could, or even should, act in conversation with how he’s chosen to lambast economic parasites and neo-fascism and the cyclical turmoil of financial and societal violence and class strife in his songwriting—both on Parquet Courts records and his own. He tells me that there’s a perception about Parquet Courts that has, maybe, been misunderstood and that the criticisms arise from misperceptions of what his life was like. When people see their favorite bands in highly visible roles, be it on music websites and in magazines, or on TV shows or headlining festivals, what they likely don’t see is the economic reality of those musicians’ lives. There’s this expectation that, if you ever pen anything that rebels against the afflictions set in motion by problematic venture capitalists or the general fuckery of the modern world, you must also detach your means of survival from those clutches. But such rules just simply can’t exist in 2023, not as the price of housing rises, grocery costs are skyrocketing and the ongoing fight for erasing student loan debt doesn’t look promising.

“Wide Awake! has a lot of political opinions on it, and people assume that we are these radicals,” Savage says. “What it is, so far as my lyrics go, I am a person that lives in capitalism. I am a person who lives in New York and is beholden to it. And I think that, maybe, sometimes, people don’t realize how beholden to it I am, just like everybody else. Parquet Courts, I’m very fortunate to have made a living off of that band—but that’s not the only way I make a living. New York is an expensive place and I do my art, too, but I separate my visual art from stuff like graphic design, which I do a bit of, too. It’s another way to pay the bills and, much like everybody else, you shouldn’t always be judged by who your employer is. [Nike was] my employer at the time and I was in a position, at that point, where I couldn’t afford to not take that job. I was hired in the capacity of being a designer for them. And I viewed it not as being an artist or a member of Parquet Courts; I viewed it as being a designer, which I don’t do much of that anymore these days. I don’t really love doing that kind of work, and I wouldn’t recommend anybody working for Nike—because it wasn’t a nice experience, to be honest.”

Savage cites the Parquet Courts song “Pretty Machines” and how it’s a story where he turns the mirror on himself as being a participant in capitalism, and he notes that that admittance is what everything he writes is framed around. In the aftermath of some of his designs being printed on shoes, shirts and jackets, folks he’s close with began reaching out to him directly and making it known just how disappointed in him they were. “I recognize my role. I ride as a participant in capitalism and it’s something that I can’t, in reality, liberate myself from. I am beholden to the economic realities of my life and debts and bills. That [Nike] job helped me out at a time when I needed it. I’m a painter, and that’s very different from designing things for a company. And a lot of my favorite painters in history have made their living not from their paintings, but from doing stuff like design—Charles Burchfield did wallpaper design, Stuart Davis was a graphic designer and he didn’t really love that, either. It’s another thing that I do to make money. I don’t think of it as part of my life as an artist. It’s more of my life as a worker,” Savage explains. Even though he once wrote a jingle for a diaper company, he still lives under the same oppressive systems as everyone else.

The work Savage does on Several Songs About Fire exists somewhere on a spectrum bookended by David Berman and William Carlos Williams. He infuses vivid imagery with masterful pacing, leaning into the same biting material that’s come to define the last 15 years of his songwriting. (A favorite of mine is the verse “My weekly dinner of popcorn and Coke, every Friday like communion that I took as a joke” in “Hurtin’ or Healed.”) Savage considers himself a poet, and that designation is true—as his penmanship sometimes feels derived from the work of Richard Brautigan and John Williams. But, when he stumbles upon a beautiful execution of language in someone else’s writing, the syntax and meter isn’t making a direct, noticeable impact on him—but he does understand and revere the act of poetry as performance, even if the literary influence on his lyricism doesn’t boast a distinguishable line for him. There will be no A. Savage rendition of “This Is Just To Say”; the focus is, instead, on how the language he’s drumming up on his own eventually makes it to the people he’s serving.

“I think people get intimidated by [poetry] because they see it as this very codified institution. These words on a page, what do they mean? The meaning of them comes more alive when you speak it,” Savage says. “I like the way that using your voice and singing can change a word or turn of phrase that, maybe on paper, would appear a bit more mundane. But, when it’s coming out of your mouth, it’s all about delivery. It’s the reason why Mark E. Smith is the genius that he is. He’s known for this very talky kind of delivery, but it’s the way he delivers those words that makes The Fall such a great band. It’s about the way you give them to the ears of your audience that counts. That’s what I’m thinking of when I’m in songwriting mode, I’m thinking about myself giving those words to people on a stage or on a record—the process of those words flying through the air from my lips to their ears.”

Hearing this is no surprise, as Several Songs About Fire is a folk record to the bone. Yes, there are beautiful orchestral pieces supplied by Hinshelwood, McLean and Le Bon, but standing at the center of it all is A. Savage with his guitar and his voice. There’s a sense of rebirth all across the album, with the recurring motif of burning and the catharsis of letting go of places and past lives. There’s a line in “My New Green Coat,” where Savage sings: “Memories, like objects and people, need cleaning.” He’s affixed to that broadcast, too, as he’s crossed an ocean just to place more care on his act of living. That’s why Several Songs About Fire is a dashing portrayal of hope, too—because, once the final notes ring out, the ashes fall to the ground and there’s still room to start anew.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.