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 Impressively bearded folk multi-instrumentalist WILLIAM FITZSIMMONS tells JODY MACGREGOR about how the end of relationships have inspired his albums.
William Fitzsimmons’ music is intensely autobiographical. His previous album, 2006’s Goodnight, was about the effect his parents’ divorce had on him. It ended with a song called Afterall, which he revisited with the first track of his new album, The Sparrow And The Crow, in a song titled After Afterall. "That’s because it was such a bad song," Fitzsimmons jokes. "No, it was because – that’s a good question – it’s because I wanted to connect the two albums. Since that song was about my parent’s divorce, that whole album was, I wanted to link it to my divorce, which was the subject of this album."
So, that’s two albums in a row about divorce then. "Breakup albums are one of my favourite kinds of album," he admits, "which I think may have been part of the problem in the relationship." You’d be forgiven for thinking that his second album about the subject would be a glum affair – the kind of thing you have to lock yourself away in a cabin in the woods to create. Instead he went into a professional studio, working with a producer and sharing the instrumentation for the first time. The resulting collections of songs, though their lyrics contain some confronting moments, are musically a joy to hear. "I knew that these songs were going to need something to sweeten them so that people would actually listen to them. I didn’t want everything about them to be dark, so it was a conscious decision between me and the producer, going into the studio, to give the music more sweetness."
By all reports there’s plenty of that sweetness in evidence at his live shows. Rather than suffering through an hour of weeping into your beards with William Fitzsimmons, the audience usually comes out smiling. "I’m not a comedian, as you may have noticed, but people have always said to me, right back at the start people would say, ‘I loved your show, I laughed a lot.’ And some people would say they loved it, but they were crying. It wasn’t until my friends told me how I was making light of a lot of these topics by the way I talked about them I realised I was being funny. Now I do it on purpose."
Now that he’s moving on with his life – he even gave a copy of The Sparrow And The Crow to his ex-wife – Fitzsimmons has stopped listening to the breakup albums that were his bread and butter at the time. (He cites Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks and Beck’s Seachange as the main ones.) What’s he listening to now, something a little more upbeat? "That Bon Iver album, when it finishes I just press play again." Maybe not.
Before he gave it up for life as a musician, Fitzsimmons worked as a therapist. There aren’t many people in the folk world with a degree in Counselling, but he’s one. It’s entirely appropriate; given how much his songs sound like a kind of personal therapy. "They are in a way," he says, "but I’m not sure if they’re a very good one. I hope they help other people because I’m never sure to what degree they help me."
WILLIAM FITZSIMMONS’ album THE SPARROW AND THE CROW is out now on Mercer Street/Downtown through Inertia. www.myspace.com/williamfitzsimmons
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