Charlie Pinhey
Music journalist & online sub-editor for CLUNK Magazine based in Bristol. Fumbling around on social media trying to tell people about my interviews and reviews. Follow me @charvawritesstuff
With her new album ‘Win Win’ out today, we chat to folk singer-songwriter Fenne Lily
Fenne Lily was talking to me under exciting circumstances. Her new record ‘Win Win’ just weeks away from releasing, but when we met over the laptop, she was in her apartment building in New York and was brimming with composure and exuding a certain level of calm. The album’s release will likely represent a bookend to a period of upheaval. This album is about a breakup, but it also represents Fenne moving to New York and the chaos that came with it, from living in an apartment block where there was a murder and finding solace in the studio and ultimately with herself.
Fenne’s thoughtful and kind nature is impossible not to latch on to and shines through on this record. Although it deals with some emotionally raw themes, it does have a certain happiness to it, something Fenne hopes fans listening to the album will find on repeat listens.
‘Win Win’ is a cool name for a record. What did that title represent to you and was there a broader concept behind the title itself?
I was on the phone to my dad and I was asking him for phrases that mean “All good” or ‘No worries” because this record is about a breakup. That’s pretty obvious. But the outcome of the breakup was that I was happier not being with this person and they were clearly happier not being with me. So, it was a realisation that the best thing that can come out of losing something is that the having was not actually as profound as it felt at the time.
But on the phone to my dad, between us, there was a list of about seventy different titles. But ‘Win Win’ was the one that people were like, “That’s kind of weird and good.”
Were there any titles that you almost selected instead of ‘Win Win’?
‘Off The Bone’ was one. But there was already a dog’s mouth on the cover, so it was starting to look like I was in love with the dog. I think titles are shit until you allow an idea to finalise them and in finalising them makes them more acceptable. I lived with about three different ideas for a week each and ‘Win Win’ was the only one that doesn’t make me wince.
With the album being written during a period of upheaval, broadly, where do you think ‘Win Win’ sits compared to your other pieces of work and albums you’ve done?
It’s the one that took the longest to record and shortest to write. I tend to find it easier to write when I’m feeling manic and emotionally fried. But that emotional state is not great to record in, so I had to wait for that to fully pass before I finished the recording.
I moved to New York, I was in a new relationship, and I had to move apartments twice and all these different things changing around me that meant I was in a kind of unmoored state. And the first batch of recordings for the new songs sounded like that. They sounded like I didn’t know where I was or what I wanted. So, we rerecorded five of the songs and that’s why it took so long to make. At the same time I wondered whether it was reasonable to rerecord so many songs and then I looked back at the original recording, and they do sound younger than I am now. They also sound less sure than I am too.
The final album ended up sounding wider and closer to what I like. I don’t like a lonely sounding place and I think these songs ended up sounding like everyone’s on a porch or in a room or in the sun and generally in a good zone.
When you started putting songs together for the record, when did they start feeling like an album?
I wrote two records at the same time but I wasn’t writing them with a view to them being records. I was just writing through everything that was happening. It was probably in February 2024 I realised “Oh shit, I have enough songs for two records.” I split them into vibe- ones that sounded like I had something to find and ones that sounded like I had found something. It was almost exactly a ten-song split.
I don’t know if other people feel like this but having all the tracks written there on the back of the record and having to sing off on the design of the sleeve made it feel like they were all in the same club. But before that it does feel like they’re pieces, because the songs are all about different people, written in different apartments and have different drummers. So, everything is different. The unification came in the same way I said about accepting the title; when you accept it’s a story and they all live together, that’s when it feels done.
Why did the opening track ‘Uh Huh’ feel like the right place to put that track? How much thought did you put into the ordering of the track?
Brother! That was the hardest and worst part of making records for me! My roommate, my manager, the label were all making playlists and sending me options. There are so many ways to do it!
I eventually decided on ‘Uh Huh’ opening it because that’s the point that almost opposite chronologically, in that ‘Uh Huh was one of the final songs to be written. It is about the meeting of someone else when you’re in a place where you feel no one else is going to love me.
Having that as the opening is where I’m at right now. It’s a welcoming to the world and then also saying everything else is a retrospective. I also like it when a record starts with drums like that. You can take a breath and be listening.
You have such an ability to boil down a myriad of complex emotions into snappy lyrics. Is there a particular lyric you’re proud of and/or looking forward to sharing live?
There are two that come to mind. There’s a song on the album called ‘Room To Room’ which is written from the perspective of one of my dogs when the other dog died. But it sounds like it’s about an ex-boyfriend; there’s a line in the song where I say, ‘And he’ll think this one’s about him too. Like a lot of what he hears, I guess.’ I like to think that the person that a lot of the songs are about on this record hearing those lyrics and being like, “Well, fuck. I thought this was about me.”
The last song on the record is called ‘In Life And On Planes’ and I finished it the day before we recorded it and it was the same with ‘Room To Room’, I wrote that the day before we recorded it. Those two songs feel the most special because they were the least laboured over. Anyway, I was living in an apartment block at the time where someone was actively being murdered, we only lived there for a week but a man was murdered below us. As you can imagine, it was the most stressful environment I’ve ever been in, but I’d had the first verse to ‘In Life And On Planes’ floating around for ages and I finished it in that apartment.
I’m not sure why, but the whole thing brought a very clear perspective on a complicated part of this relationship that I had left. There’s a line at the end where I say, ‘You say you feel stupid, well so do I for holding you one last time while you cry and waving the taxi off as you go. Now I know everything I know.’ It fell out of me and I knew that was the final piece of the puzzle, just saying that I felt ridiculous for having been in love with someone that was the way they were.
‘Win Win’ seems to have some strong Americana influences interwoven throughout. Were there any specific American influences playing a part in the album?
I found that when I moved to Brooklyn, suddenly all of my friends were musicians. I think that just happens by the nature of hanging out at venues and having a social life that is dictated to by gigs.
All the people I played with on this record I poached from other bands. The drummer I saw playing in a band called Sinai Vessel and he’s now drumming with Renny Conti. He just has the occasional skipped beat treat very in the pocket and an instinctive feel that is always moving and isn’t gridded or anal.
The guitarists that played on it, one was from Pinegrove, the other is a songwriter called Isaac Stalling and he’s a virtuosic child prodigy, although he’s not a child, he’s in his twenties. The bass player is now in Big Thief, who I saw playing at a jazz bar.
I picked people who I saw where it seemed like they were having fun playing and weren’t playing by rules who had been given to them by someone else.
In terms of musical influences, I love artists where I believe the voice and I don’t feel like they’re lying to me. Artists like Ken Yates, Thomas Dollbaum, Lambchop, Wild Pink and Wilco. Music where it sounds like everyone is making decisions as they happen.
‘Sleeping’ is one of those tracks that stood out in terms of that brass section outro. Was it always your intention to introduce those kinds of instruments?
That brass section is, in fact, not even brass! It was Isaac Stalling’s mouth, but it was double tracked with fretless baritone guitar. I don’t even think it was auto tuned, I think Isaac was just bang on with the pitch.
That final section I wanted to be an instrumental outro. I love an instrumental outro! We tried guitar lines and piano lines, but I believed it had to be something that sounded like screaming, but I didn’t want to scream and Isaac said, “Well, I’ve been practicing my mouth trumpet. I got really good at it on car journeys!” So he wrote this line and I agreed this was 1000% what had to be on the record.
I know we’ve discussed parts of this record being written from the perspective of your dog. Is that the same for the album’s cover?
I found the woman who shot it, Sage, on Instagram. She had these series of pictures where she was covered in rats and pictures where she had goats in her bed with her and is so good at creating this surreal, animal/human world. We eventually had a couple of calls where I set the parameters of what I wanted; it needed to be scary and have motion. Then she texted me and said the portrait should be of me from inside a dog.
I was like, “Say no more!”
Truly, I felt like I was being chased by this lost relationship and all of this sadness. And, although I’d moved away from it, I felt like it would always, kind of, be stalking me. So, I feel like that’s also been somewhat depicted.
I have this mission with album covers that they shouldn’t fly under the radar. An album cover is important. I had a covid record, where I didn’t have any options to pick from, which made me sad. So, since then, I’ve made it a thing that I pay attention to album covers, because they’re a piece of art in themselves.
What do you hope people take from ‘Win Win’ once they’ve listened to the final track?
Satisfaction. I want it to feel like the story and scenes are clear and lasting and feel finished. I also want it to feel uplifting. In my opinion, this is an uplifting record. I mean, if you listen to actually uplifting music, you will not agree. But, I think there’s a pride to making something about a terrible time. In a way, it’s hard to say what I want from people consuming something that I’ve made, other than I want them to eat it again. I want people to feel like, if they do listen to it again, that there’s something else within it that they’re curious about.
Listen to ‘Win Win’ here: