Richard Davies

New Romantic

"Romantic" is a word that's almost always used to describe artists of a distant era; a medieval minstrel wandering from village to village, a French poet sipping absinthe by the Seine while pining over lost love, or even one of Jack Kerouac's dharma bums crossing the country with a rucksack and a half-filled journal. While rarely associated with modern indie rockers, the term might even be the best way to describe the passion and timelessness of Richard Davies' songs--and the haphazard way he's stumbled through his career.

"There's no great scheme to it," the wiry 33-year-old Australian says, despite plans to tour behind Telegraph, his second solo album. He smiles impishly. "In fact, there's less of a great scheme than a lot of people, like my label would like. I just want to go out and play as if it's a party and someone embarrasses you by saying, "Well, you write songs and play the guitar, don't you? C'mon, give us a song! And you kind of don't want to, but you do it and you happen to have a couple of friends handy who sing and play and they join you."

Davies started making records in the early '90s as the leader of the Moles, psychedelic garage rockers who came together at college in his native Sydney. Drawn to London by a rave review in Melody Maker for their first album Untune the Sky, the Moles soon found that the majority of English music fans were less enthusiastic, and the group broke up in the face of general indifference.

Undaunted, Davies followed his heart to his girlfriend's (now his wife's) hometown of Boston. There he had a chance meeting with Sebadoh's drummer Bob Fay and Fay's pal Eric Matthews, a classically trained trumpeter who hoped to join the Boston Symphony Orchestra. As Cardinal, the three recorded a lushly orchestrated album of long sensitive songs. In the wake of that 1994 breakthrough, Cardinal was considered to have launched "ork pop", a movement of sorts that has come to include such children of Pet Sounds as the High Llamas and Yum-Yum.

Matthews has since made two ork-pop records of his own for Sub Pop, and grumbles on occasion that he wasn't given due credit for his contributions to Cardinal. Davies isn't all that generous either, mixing a backhanded compliment with false modesty: "I thought Eric was brilliant at making records," he says, "whereas I don't do much besides writing songs. That was what was good about the Cardinal record: it was somebody who was focused only on writing songs paired with somebody who was focused on making music. I'm not interested in being Brian Wilson or Scott Walker. People like Paul McCartney and Paul Simon are my models."

To emphasize the decidedly unhip aesthetic--and focus the spotlight on his gentle melodies and poetic lyrics--Davies pared back the instrumentation for his first solo album, 1996's There's Never Been A Crowd Like This. Yet, on Telegraph, the composer strikes a balance between his more spare approach and the complicated tapestries of Cardinal. Over two months in a studio near his home in Saugerties, New York, he crafted simple but elegant settings for his tunes, with help from a former Flaming Lips guitarist Ronald Jones, and Ultra Vivid Scene's production wizard Kurt Ralske, among others. The resulting music and lyrics create vivid, picturesque scenes such as a dusty Mexican cantina or Disneyland's Main Street Electrical Parade; in the video for "Confederate Cheerio Call", he portrays a free spirit who's always traveling without ever arriving.

So is Davies a Romantic--in the old-fashioned, Byron-and-Shelley-sense? "I wouldn't disagree with that," he says. "I don't write songs because I have a heartfelt urge to purge myself on recordings. I like language and I like sound. I think a lot of the fun I have is writing songs--which is just pure pleasure--and recording them, and seeing how close they come to the original idea, and how they change. And what comes out, comes out.

Written by Jim DeRogatis, Option magazine, May 1998.

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