Beirut’s Zach Condon Escapes Himself

Hadsel is a small town way up in the northern part of Norway with a population of just over 8,000—a place where vast, snow-tipped mountains are reflected in calm, slate-black waters. It’s just the kind of setting you might expect Zach Condon to write a song about: idyllic, secluded and timeless. As the songwriter and frontman of Beirut, Condon has embraced his acute sense of wanderlust since the beginning, writing songs with names like “Prenzlauerberg”, “Bratislava” and “Postcards From Italy” long before leaving his small suburban town outside of Sante Fe, New Mexico. He’s traveled the world several times over in the 15 years since, making the dreams of a precocious creative teenager a reality.

And yet, when Condon made the northern trek to Hadsel in the first days of 2020, it wasn’t so much a destination as it was an escape. 2019 had nearly destroyed him. “Zach has been advised not to sing on tour,” read the band’s statement upon the cancellation of the remainder of their 2019 shows. Condon was spent, an accumulation of years of issues—both physical and mental—having finally taken their toll. A singer told not to sing might sound like a particularly harsh sentence but, for Condon, his prison had been building brick-by-brick for years. “Acute laryngitis” might have been the official diagnosis, but it seems clear now that his ailments were far further-reaching. The waning days of 2019 might have left Condon in a “state of severe shock and self-doubt,” but 2020 offered an escape. And he found it, as he so often does, behind an instrument in the furthest corner of the world.

There’s a story Condon has shared several times over the course of his career that I think says a lot about him as a creative person. It goes back to his adolescence in Sante Fe, New Mexico—a place about as far from Northern Norway, in location and temperament, as you can get on earth—and concerns something called a Farfisa organ. Condon had gained a reputation within the Sante Fe art scene as the kid who would gladly explore any odd instrument he might come across, even if, like this particular organ, its keys barely worked. Years later, he would use this same Farfisa to write “Sante Fe,” a single from his 2011 album Rip Tide that endures as one of his most popular to date. This is far from an isolated incident. On the first two Beirut records alone, Condon would play a flugelhorn, ukulele, mandolin, accordion, organ, conch shell, euphonium, french horn, glockenspiel, wurlitzer and trumpet. Some people rebel against their stifling suburban existence by learning four chords and playing them fast; Condon decided to learn a dozen instruments and study the ins-and-outs of Balkan folk and klezmer. Almost 20 years on, things haven’t changed all that much.

“For me, a new instrument equals a new song, it is as simple as that. That has always been the case,” Condon tells me during our recent conversation over Zoom. When he first booked his flight to Norway, music was the last thing on his mind—but it didn’t stay that way for long. He might have found himself almost 5,000 miles from that Farfisa organ back in Sante Fe, but it was a pair of organs—one which came on an “infinite loan” from a Hadsel local and one in a beautiful octagonal wood church—that fanned his flickering creative flame. He would work for hours on the pump organ in his cabin before heading to the church one day a week, further broadening the scope of Beirut’s ever-expanding sound. At the same time, he was indulging an obsession with the modular synth he’d brought along, spending hours on YouTube learning the minutiae of the instrument. “16 hours will disappear and you will hardly notice they are gone when you just snap out of a trance,” he tells me, his background looking like a control panel for a space shuttle.

The combination is something altogether unique in Beirut’s catalog, a kind of methodical, meditative amalgamation of sounds ancient and otherworldly, a church service for those from galaxies far, far away. “It’s not like I went up there sure that these two things were going to go great together, I had no idea,” Condon says. “To me, it mirrors the vibe that was up there. I started to see the drum parts as the weather; stormy, chaotic and really intense. Add then, you add the organ’s solid warm drone in the middle of all of it. That contrast sounded so interesting to me.” For someone whose thoughts seemed so muddled and nerves shaken, Hadsel is surprisingly content. Even as Condon recounts the experience, you can see the stress recede a bit, channeling those long, cold, arctic nights. These moments of discovery and creation have always been his happy place—it’s everything else that seems to get in the way.

I’ve never gotten the chance to see Beirut play live, and it’s looking increasingly likely that I never will. Save a few local shows in Berlin—where Condon now lives with his girlfriend—he does not plan to tour for this album (or any other, for that matter) in the near future. “I can’t perform. I’m not a performer. It doesn’t come naturally. I always had to put it on, like wearing someone else’s clothes,” he told The Big Takeover back in 2022. Though the decision to forgo touring is a recent one, the feelings about playing live are not. Beirut started out as a pure bedroom project, with Condon releasing records before ever delivering his songs to an audience. When he eventually did start performing, things were far from seamless. “Even during that first tour, I would say I detached from reality for a good year after it was over,” Condon says.

For the next decade plus, the road was the necessary evil, the thing he had to do to continue a relationship with the passion he so deeply gravitated towards. Alcohol and anti-anxiety medication quickly became the crutch needed to hobble through months on tour but, even after quitting drinking in 2019, the struggle persisted. “I don’t know if I am just too sensitive or what the hell it is, but I definitely decided I can’t do it anymore,” Condon adds. We don’t often acknowledge the reality that performing and writing are incredibly different forms of expression. We expect musicians to somehow reconcile this contradiction for the sake of our pleasure, so we can see the songs we love come to life in front of our eyes. But for some, it simply is not practical for their mental or physical health—and it has taken Condon years to come to the conclusion that this is the case for him.

There are hints of self-deprecation peppered throughout our conversation. Condon can be modest to a fault for someone who had such a successful career. It isn’t false modesty, per say, but I cannot say I agree with him in every bit of his own self-assessment. “I don’t think I am much of a writer,” Condon says of his ability as a lyricist. I would take umbrage with that, as someone who has been touched more than once by the yearning at the heart of a song like “Sunday Smile,” but his larger point about the role of lyrics on Hadsel is an interesting one. Before, he would try to stuff entire narratives into four-minute songs; he decided to plan out very little of the songs on Hadsel, instead embracing a kind of stream-of-conscious form of creation. There are even tracks like “Arctic Forest,” where vocals are present but lyrics are not, where the evocative is favored over the literal. In other places, this technique brought thoughts and themes to the surface that Condon would have never arrived at with a more deliberate approach. “It felt so much more natural to me,” he notes. “If the thought didn’t come, it didn’t come, but the whole thing was totally improvisational.”

Spontaneity is clearly something Condon values now more than ever. He has talked in the past about the idea that you can only be a novice once, that, once you leave the childhood bedroom where you made your earlier records, you can’t ever really return. In 2022, Condon released Artifacts, a collection of early, unreleased rarities and B-sides—giving him a chance to look back in a way he hadn’t in some time. What he saw was an artist creating from a place of pure inspiration, with none of the hang-ups and insecurities picked along the way. “I saw that as an adult I had been trying on all these facades where I wanted people to see me this or that way,” Condon says of his middle period, which includes albums like The Rip Tide, No No No and Gallipoli. “I was trying to fight being pigeonholed as this twee, steampunk troubadour. I wanted to be perceived a certain way instead of just seeing what happened when I got in the studio.” Who we are is always a story we tell ourselves more than an objective reality and, throughout Hadsel, Condon noticed he kept returning to this idea. “I can’t believe a thing I say,” goes the chorus of “Süddeutsches Ton-Bild-Studio,” repeated like a mantra—an admission that he may not be the most reliable narrator of his own story.

Zach Condon is not what you imagine him to be. Ever since he burst onto the indie scene as a young man from New Mexico playing Balkan folk music, he has defied expectations. But, if you are at it long enough, people adjust and begin to form their own concrete opinions about what you do and how you do it. You are a touring musician playing all over the world. You are a storyteller spinning tales of far-off countries. You are critically acclaimed. You are pigeonholed. Condon brought a ton of recording equipment with him when he made the move to Hadsel, Norway in the winter of 2020 but, for the first time in years, he left all of those expectations behind, escaping himself in the process and finding something invaluable: peace.

Sean Fennell’s work can be seen in Flood Magazine, Alternative Press, Paste Magazine and more.