In a city with a musical identity associated with loud, down-tuned guitars and nature-driven folk singers, Brian Fennell’s music is singular and peerless. Fennell, who performs as SYML (which is Welsh for Simple), writes songs about life, love and loss with beautiful, cinematic soundscapes unlike anything that’s come out of Seattle over the past few decades.
SYML’s latest album “Nobody Lives Here” is scheduled for release on April 4. I recently spent some time with Fennell and we talked about his former band Barcelona, his time with the Seattle Symphony, his new album “Nobody Lives Here” and more. Below is an abridged version of our conversation.
Music is very much part of the culture here in the Northwest, and your sound and your style is so unique compared to what else has come out of Seattle. Before we get into that, I wanted to ask you about your old band Barcelona, because that’s where I know you from.
How did you get into Barcelona, and how did the transition from Barcelona to Seattle happen?
Yeah, Barcelona, we just met. We were all at Seattle Pacific Universty in the city, except for Brian Eichelberger, who’s my main collaborator, best friend, since we were kids. He wasn’t a student there, but we lived together at the time.
Honestly, Barcelona was probably a response to—in some version or another, we were all involved in church music at the time, because that was what was cool on that campus. Back then, Christian music just sounded like U2, basically, and I was a huge U2 fan. It was an avenue to get some of those creative juices out.
I had been working on a solo album at that time with Brian Eichelberger. I didn’t want to be a solo act, because at that time it felt inundated with singer-songwriter white dudes, as opposed to band white dudes, I guess. I asked Rhett and Chris, the other members of Barcelona, to join me as a band.
We got a manager, and we were going to sign to a major label, super classic rock band stuff at the time. We toured a bit, didn’t end up signing, got a publishing deal, sort of plundered the early days of Barcelona with that. We were a band for ten years, eleven years.
I didn’t have a plan to do anything after that. It just sort of naturally ended. We had a couple of great tours and a couple of great albums that we went out on.
I think in my mind, I thought having a kid or starting a family was kind of like the death sentence of being in a band, even though I’d seen peers be fine and have families and continue in music. I shifted gears and started making music in my bedroom, instead of relying on other people in studios or producers to collaborate in that way. That’s where the SYML songs started to come from.
A lot of the SYML songs, like “Where’s My Love” and “The War,” could have been Barcelona songs. They were written around the same time, and our sound had just sort of morphed enough far away from that, or to the left of that, to have it make sense. It was just sort of like a not planned natural evolution.
How has your process changed from working with Barcelona to doing more independent work in the studio with SYML?
I’d always written alone, so the writing process has not really changed. With the production, it was a little bit of a necessity because there was no money to hire studios, producers, mixers, or even mastering engineers. So I just sort of faked the whole thing early.
It was great. In hindsight, I didn’t realize I was doing it, but making myself uncomfortable was probably the best thing creatively for me. It made me more meticulous to try to really get under the hood of recording and getting sounds I wanted and shaping it into what was in my head.
I just had the time and the space to be able to do it in that way.
It still cracks me up because people will reference my first EP, SYML EP, and sort of laud it for how good it is and how it sounds. Certain hi-fi listening folks will say that, and I’m like, if you only knew how trashily this was recorded on pirated plugins in a closet.
But I guess that’s the spirit of what makes some music special, is that there’s a different type of care shown to it instead of the more typical classic way.
You recently had the honor of playing with Seattle Symphony. That’s when SYML came on my radar. When a pop artist plays with a symphony, it’s a huge deal. What did you take from that experience to bring into the new album, and what was that experience like for you?
You know, it’s funny. It collided with the new album in the sense of we were working on those charts and preparing for that at the same time we were wrapping up the album.
But this album, in a lot of ways, was a return to that original way of recording for me. It was a lot of me alone, and then also a lot of working with Brian in my studio here. And then we did a bit down in L.A. for some other artists that joined us.
But I don’t know, it was like two polar opposites. It was very intimate, cozy, soft recording. And then how do you translate some of these songs into massive-scale symphonic arrangements? It was cool because they sort of counterbalanced each other with the same thread being, obviously, my songs and bringing intimacy into a big space.
And I guess the contrast to that would be, in an intimate, recorded setting, how do you build worlds that welcome people in on a big scale too? I don’t know, I’m still sort of soaking in that experience. It was really, really wild.
Yeah, so shifting gears a little bit, a little heavy subject, slightly. Your last album, The Day My Father Died. How does that loss impact your current record? Because your current record is a lot more, I feel, about being present and enjoying the moment, and kind of aging gracefully, almost. Or at least appreciating age.
So how did that experience, that loss, impact what you wrote for your next album, for this current album?
That’s a great question. I have been sort of jokingly referring to this album as the post-grief album. But the reality is, there’s still one good grief song on there. I’ve got to get my grief in.
But I think with grieving a loss, you don’t know until way after that moment in time what grief was doing with you in that moment. So it was still very much with me during the making of this album. And of course, themes like time passing and trying to age gracefully or trying to be present.
But at the same time, realizing that you can’t hold onto moments too long because they’ve already passed, and now you’re somebody new. Even though those obviously directly relate to somebody passing away who’s significant in your life. I think it’s more like the embracing of, well, the world’s going to end at some point.
Or at least our existence on this earth is going to end at some point. That’s inevitable. But where’s the beauty in the partnerships or relationships that we have now? Who are the people who are spiraling towards their last day too? I think there’s this sort of harmony that’s ongoing and you actually don’t realize it until it’s passed.
I don’t know, it’s this visual of being in a stream and you’re sort of just looking slightly behind you as you’re both moving on this plane. And yeah, I don’t know. Obviously, having kids has changed me forever.
I just sort of have this, whether I’m talking about existential shit or active romantic love, it’s going to be impacted by seeing these mirrors of myself every day. It’s much less heavy, this album, but there’s still very much, not grave in the sense of sad, but gravity is present in this too. Yeah, you hit that really well.
Could you talk about how raising a family has changed you as an artist?
It’s made me more savvy with my time and the business side of things for sure.
Like I mentioned, having the time and space to just create how you feel. Music as a commodity is such a funny thing, or art as a commodity is such a funny thing. So when you’re three kids in and you’re declaring this is still my job, the biggest shift that it’s made in me as an artist is not taking my shit too seriously.
As you mentioned, I love making music that is heavy and wordy and poetic, and the music is cinematic and it feels like a little mini-movie when you’re in it. But to let it live there, that’s the therapy side of it. And then when I pop out of that, it’s like full on.
My kids love that I do this, but they don’t care. They need a parent and my partner needs a partner and I can’t just think. And at the same time, I can’t just check it off the box that I’ve now dealt with these heavy emotions and I don’t need to talk about them with my family.
It’s the biggest don’t-take-yourself-too-seriously mirror having kids. And then time, being able to say, working hard is really important, but my job doesn’t define me, art doesn’t define me, and having to remind yourself of that every day. Yeah, and definitely time, it goes too fast, man.
As you noted in “Please Slow Down.” So, what inspired “Heartbreakdown”? Because there are a lot of heartache songs, a lot of breakup songs, and this takes a little bit of a different approach as far as defining what a broken heart is.
Yeah, I think some of that’s a little bit like talking to my kid and just being like, you know, your heart’s going to break in just hundreds of ways that you don’t even know yet.
You know, from when you’re young to when you’re in your last years. I mean, I look at my mom, right, who lost my dad, and I’m like talking to her at the same time I’m talking to myself at the same time I’m talking to my son or daughters. And that song is really written in the style of like a classic sort of folk song, right? Like it’s storyteller and it’s … Sometimes I can get lost in like the poetry of writing and singing and performing and the progressions I use and all that, and that one’s a really straightforward, like it doesn’t get in the way of itself and feels very classic to me.
And it’s nice to write about a uniform thing like heartbreak, where everybody experiences it and there’s no rules to it. And the only thing, like no other or partner or kid or whoever or priest or whatever can pull you out of that shit. It’s like literally you have to decide if you’re going to like choose to love the same way so that it happens again, or how are you going to change so that, you know, I don’t know.
No one’s immune from it, but we change how we love and how we love ourselves especially and all that. So there’s a few songs like that on this album too. Yeah, and that also hits a little bit on grief too, right? With heartache comes grief and grief, as you’re aware, kind of just shows up when it wants to.
You can see SYML live in Seattle at Easy Street Records on April 12 where he will be performing an intimate in-store set. Secure tickets by pre-ordering “Nobody Lives Here” from Easy Street.
