THE Boston Phoenix: Cellars by Starlight
BY BRETT MILANO
SAD ROMANTIC: like the best break-up albums, Francine's 28 Plastic Blue Versions
of Endings Without You makes its point as much through the music as through
the lyrics
Sometime last year, I ran into Francine frontman Clayton Scoble in the audience
at the Middle East, where he was nursing both a recently broken heart and a
recently drawn pint of Sam Adams. "Wait till you hear the songs I've been
writing," he confided. "It's going to be the ultimate romantic loser
album."
That's not necessarily what you'd expect a songwriter like Scoble to come up
with, given his love for intricate wordplay and subtly winding but ultimately
catchy melodies. Both are present on Francine's second album, 28 Plastic Blue
Versions of Endings Without You (Q Division), but it's also clear that Scoble
has stuck with his original concept for the album — and largely redefined
the sound of the band in the process. Whereas Francine's 2000 Q Division debut,
40 on a Fall Day, was a lively guitar-driven affair, the new one sounds lonely
and introverted, heavy on keyboards and loops; and instead of singing straight
through the material, Scoble often essays an intimate, half-spoken delivery.
And though his lyrics refuse to spell everything out, the mood and imagery of
the disc reflect the circumstances under which it was made.
"I'd stop on the way home from work and buy a bottle of wine; then I'd
sit up and write all night, "he recalls over a burger at Cambridge Common.
And so he wound up writing the kind of song that he'd avoided in the past. If
you go back through his catalogue, which includes a stint in Aimee Mann's band
(and a co-writing credit on her last album) as well as co-fronting Poundcake
before launching Francine in 1998, you won't find many love songs, happy or
otherwise.
"I don't think I ever cared much about break-up records before, even when
I was listening to them," he continues. "I was always too much of
a curmudgeon about it -I thought it was megalomaniacal to write those kinds
of songs, and I used to make fun of people who wrote them. But lately I've been
listening to things like Beck's new album [Sea Change] -yeah, it's pedestrian
and prosaic, but it's so plainspoken that it just killed me. The problem is
that most break-up albums have a common theme running through them: someone's
feeling angry because they've been used. I didn't have that. I had something
worse, which is coming out of a relationship feeling that the other person had
no use for you at all. I was feeling like I'd pay money to have been used."
Like the best break-up albums, 28 Plastic Blue Versions of Endings Without You
makes its point as much through the music as through the lyrics. That's largely
because Scoble's heartbreak didn't completely alter his writing style. He prefers
elliptical arrangements, in this case for self-protective reasons. " I
don't think I have the balls to really pull a page out of my diary and put it
in a song. The details are in there, but I also cover my trail pretty well -
that's a leftover from my discovering how much fun it is to write really cubist,
nonsensical lyrics. On this one I split the difference -a lot of it is pretty
private, but people might figure out the references."
One prime example would be "Novelty," which focuses on finding two
ice-cream pops left in the fridge. "They were real," he interjects."She
brought them over the last time we were together. I didn't have the heart to
eat them, so I kept them there until someone finally took them away."
The studio process for the new album also represented a change: Scoble, guitarist
Albert Gualtieri, bassist Sean Connelly, and drummer Steve Scully were joined
by producer and Jack Drag mastermind John Dragonetti, who's credited with playing
unnamed instruments. Given his history as an ace remixer/programmer and one-man
band -and taking into account the disc's heavy use of loops and keyboards -you
might well assume that Dragonetti got heavily involved in reshaping the songs,
bringing elements of the Jack Drag sound to the production. But both parties
minimize Dragonetti's influence on the album.
"I felt they already had it all down," Dragonetti points out. "In
the back of your mind, you don't want to interfere, and it came more down to
me being a moderator." And it turns out that Scoble handled much of the
looping and keyboard playing himself. "A lot of the loops and keyboard
parts were flown in right from my demos," he explains. "In part that
was because I'm such a crappy keyboard player that I didn't want to have to
play the parts again." Former Baby Ray bassist Paul Simonoff has since
signed on as Francine's full-time keyboardist.
Scoble's fears that Francine's fans wouldn't buy the new sound were laid to
rest when the band debuted the material on 28 Plastic Blue Versions of Endings
Without You at their recent CD release show, a sold-out, sit-down affair at
the Institute of Contemporary Art. They'll play a more traditional gig at the
Middle East next Saturday, April 5. In the meantime, Scoble is in search of
inspiration for some more cheerful, more aggressive songs for the next Francine
album. " I'm happy with the new album, and I'm looking forward to playing
the songs live, but only for a finite period of time. It's not excruciating
to play them, but it is a little rough. And I'm sure the band feel that way
as well. When they heard the material for the first time, they said, ‘That's
cool, we're behind this. But we only want to do it for this one record, so you'd
better get it out of your system.' "