Ed Harcourt
Folk / Indie Rock
Since being Mercury Prize-nominated for 2001’s Here Be Monsters, then winning innumerable accolades with last years From Every Sphere, Ed Harcourt has been falling in love, striding through Swedish snow in search of wild boars, recording with crack-addled cultish American rockers, touring U.S. arenas with R.E.M. and Wilco, rapping in karaoke bars, getting beaten up and almost run over by Mexican skinheads for accidentally throwing gravel at their car in Colorado, performing at tributes to Gram Parsons, Jeff Buckley, Randy Newman, Neil Young and The Beatles, and deciding that every moment of every song should be the most important thing you’ve ever done.
In the past, Ed Harcourt, has been described as a highly talkative bundle of contradictions, crushingly self-deprecating one minute, verging on arrogance the next. And he still is. Ed’s generous, racing, scurrying mind and Schumacher-driven mouth will give you pathos and morbid obsessions in one breath, cheery and earthy humour the next. He still loves Salinger, Tom Waits, Chet Baker, Shakespeare, and The Kinks. He adores movies from Lynch and Jarmusch to Milos Forman and Coppola. But as he says now, “You can live with these worlds, explore them, but although you have your inspirations, you always write differently to everyone else.” There’s a feeling that he’s known exactly what he’s shooting for this time around. The man who once said, “The phrase singer-songwriter makes me sick to my stomach, I don’t understand why that should make you Mr. Sensitive - you should be aggressive and angry and pissed-off and happy and melancholy, you should run the entire gamut of emotions, there have to be equal amounts of beauty, violence, humour and pathos”, now adds an appendage. “It’s a cliché you fall into the category of the dark, gothic, lonely, lonesome, drunken songwriter. I still feel like I’m starting out, a whippersnapper, a terrier snapping at the heels of every artist that’s come before. I’m still trying to make my mark.”
If there is an emotional storm brewing, Ed Harcourt’s advice is to tackle it the best way to tackle it head-on and push through to the other side. Rousing, visceral album-opener “The Storm Is Coming,” was one of the first songs written. “Maybe the best way to deal with your problems is head bang into the storm and confront them. I have a thing about the elements and nature, I often seem to write about fire, whirlwinds, the earth, rivers, rain, monsoons, snow. It’s a song about being a strong, fearless motherfucker and not caring what people might say.
So Strangers is Ed Harcourt at his intimate, intricate, infuriating and exhilarating best. Who will become friends of Strangers? “Oh I’m not going to say my music’s for all the lost souls out there or something like that. Love can make you happy, and this is a concerted effort to make a more immediate, upbeat album or at least I try. I’ll make music till my last breath, and it’s for everyone, really. Everyone with a soul, anyway.”
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