Let Em' Talk - Drew Friel guides us through the songs from his debut E.P 'Toby Carver'

 

Balance is as important for the soul as much as it is the body. Nature and art craves balance - Yin and Yang, dark and light, sweet and sour, Morrissey and Marr - balance is at the core of everything we are and everything we do. 

Drew Friel is a songwriter that understands the importance of an even keel.  The Birkenhead-based artist has just released debut E.P Toby Carver; a set of songs that offers a vision that is designed to be listened to from the beginning to the end -  The theme of the album is the continued back and forth of the responsibilities of adult life, but it's done with calculated sense of subtlety and humour that underpins his work. We got Drew to take us through Toby Carver track-by-track and he gave us these insights into this finely crafted work.

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1)   Breakfast Bar

The EP opens with 'Breakfast Bar', which is also the first Drew Friel song I wrote back in 2019. I wrote it after me and my mate went on a trip to Seattle. It was a novelty that weed was legal over there; we both took a strong edible and things quickly went south. The song comes from waking up in the morning and trying to figure out what the fuck just happened. It was the first time I’d ventured into really abstract territory with songwriting (the weatherman, the couch etc). Navigating that territory of the song felt like re-establishing some order and coming to terms with a complicated experience that couldn’t be grasped in a straightforward way.

Being in the USA at the time, I was getting into artists like Frankie Cosmos and Lomelda. There’s a certain tenderness to their writing that I found very charming, and I some of that makes its way into 'Breakfast Bar'. There’s also a lightness and a humour to the song that has become something I look to include in all my music.

2)   You Never Give Me Ur Money

The production (Rob Whiteley) and musicianship (Olly Gorman) on this one is immense. The drums and bass are just stunning, especially in Verse 2. Lyrically, I like the sequencing because this feels like a sequel to 'Breakfast Bar'. The tune is filled with paranoia and a fear of exposure. Again, the song is moving in an abstract terrain, and trying to grasp for some meaning in that world. In a way that whole song is building up to the explosion that comes at the very end. I always found the song 'You Never Give Me Your Money' so poignant and affecting, so it was fun to play around with that main line, repeating it until the point of shouting.

3)  Don’t Run For Office

This one was a lot of fun to play with in the studio, making full use of the rack of synths in Whitewood Studios. The transition from the synthy verses to the walking basslines of the chorus is satisfying.

Lyrically, DRFO feels again like it’s one step beyond the previous track. It’s still in the abstract territory, but there’s more confidence and more fun in the singing. It’s about the choice of whether and how to re-enter the world. There’s this push and pull between engagement with an increasingly fucked-up world, and retreat into hedonism. The song concludes with this sad 3/4 outro which suggests that the retreat is ultimately futile.

4)  Your Top Ten List

This closing track opens with a long instrumental, and it reminded me of a review of Bowie’s 'Sound and Vision', which said that throughout the long intro, Bowie was working up the energy to sing the opening lines. Any gravitas the song might pretend toward is then undercut by the reference to a Toby Carvery. I was raised in Salford and have lived in Merseyside now for a long time, so the M62 that links the two has a resonance.

Production-wise, we opted for experimental drums here - partly inspired by Snow Globes - to give the back half of the song a restlessness. It’s apt to be the concluding song, partly because the “welcome” is slightly jarring at the end of EP, and also because it feels like a questioning of the entire project. I threw a lot of emotions at the EP, ventured in a lot of uncharted territory, and all of that becomes exposed to the audience and also acts as a mirror. I had in mind the line - “I cower at the thought of other people’s expectations, and yet still hand over mine to them”. But tenderness is good.

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You can find out more about and follow Drew Friel on social media at Facebook, Instagram and X

As always, we recommend you buy Toby Carver directly from the artist at Bandcamp

If you're feeling so inclined, you can Buy NNWNF a coffee at the QR code above.