Franklin Bruno’s work with Southern California’s Nothing Painted Blue, the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle in the Extra Lens and his own Human Hearts has consistently blurred the line between literate indie rock and social commentary. On Faith & Credit (Dromedary), Bruno finds fertile creative ground amid the contradictions of contemporary American life. Tracked and mixed by Mitch Easter at his Fidelitorium Recordings in North Carolina, Human Hearts’ fourth album is also a showcase for a fully realized band. Longtime drummer Matt Houser, guitarist Pete Galub and bassist Brandon Kalber give Bruno’s songs a nimble fluidity that allows effortless movement between post-punk, jangle pop, roots rock, Motown-inspired rhythms and more experimental detours.
Easter, whose many production credits include R.E.M., Pavement and the Baseball Project, helps the disparate elements gel without sacrificing spontaneity. Faith & Credit’s considerable musical reach is also held together by Bruno’s conversational delivery and the chemistry of the players. There’s a restless intelligence at work throughout the 13-track album—but also a willingness to let the music do its fair share of the talking.
Bruno offers his “user’s guide” to Faith & Credit below.
—Hobart Rowland
1) “Still In Error”
“I’m not mainly a confessional singer/songwriter, and I’m not the ‘I’ in most of these songs. But this one’s close. It comes out of the vague sense that I’m perpetually doing something wrong—at least sub-optimally—and falling short of some standard of judgment. In real life, I’ve come to realize that the main judge is me.”
2) “A Different City For A Different Life”
“The title is an English translation of a Situationist slogan of radical urbanism, which was also a piece of graffiti during the May 1968 general strike in Paris. I’ve used imagery from those movements in the past, mainly in the ’90s with Nothing Painted Blue. Explaining exactly what I’m saying about them is harder, of course. But this kind of lyrical material seemed to pair well with a kind of post-punk guitar groove that amounts to sped-up, very trebly funk. I had the Minutemen and 100 Flowers—from my native Southern California—in mind, as well as U.K. bands like Big Flame and Fire Engines. And a lesser-known but very good Chicago band called Toulouse, who also wrote many songs about architecture.”
3) “(Too Many) Illusions”
“There’s a danger in overexplaining this song, so I’ll just say I recently played it before a screening of John Carpenter’s They Live, and it made perfect sense. I think listeners can figure out what I’m on about.”
4) “Cover Your Tracks!”
“This has something to do with moving to New York City around 2008, but it isn’t direct. I don’t make the city identifiable, and the ‘you’ I’m singing about is probably a different kind of laborer—possibly an immigrant. The title and main lyrical inspiration come from a 1926 poem by Bertolt Brecht (‘Verwisch Der Spuren!’), but I don’t recall why I thought it would make a good fit with a guitar riff and groove that sounds—if we’re playing it right—like an outtake from Some Girls. But that’s only one section. The chorus is more like the Fall—and I have to remember not to imitate Mark E. Smith onstage: ‘Covah your tracks-ah!’”
5) “Faith And Credit”
“It’s an odd phrase we don’t think about much. But ‘the full faith and credit of the U.S. government’ is what guarantees the exchange value of money, bonds and treasuries. It appears on many financial documents, and I recently realized it’s also on the welcome screen at my bank’s ATMs. The other key line of the song is probably, ‘It’s more like money in the bank than the money in the bank.’ It’s the voice of someone promising that their love will survive political and economic upheaval. Why we set all this to a Motown-inspired beat I again can’t fully explain, except that I’ve always wanted to have a song in this style.”
6) “Sad And Afraid”
“We tracked most of this record as a full band with Mitch in North Carolina. But a few months later, I went back alone for keyboard overdubs and vocals. I rarely write in the studio, as it isn’t cost-effective. But I happened to finish these lyrics while I was there, so I asked Mitch to record a couple of live piano/vocal takes, which is what we stuck with. The band has since learned to play it live as a two-guitar song—but still a tango. Despite the title, the song is more angry than sad. I was thinking about events like the Charlottesville Nazi rally and the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. I’m glad its despairing quality is slightly less timely after this month’s midterm elections.”
7) “Untimely Beggar”
“I took this title from a book by literary critic Patrick Greaney about poverty and ‘the poor’ in 19th-century literature. I used the title as a pretext to imagine, in good Marxist fashion, the slumbering proletariat awakening to threaten and possibly usurp the bourgeoisie. This one is partly Stax-inspired, and whatever you may think of the theme, I’m proud of the fact that this is the first record I’ve ever made where I fully scored the horn parts myself. I’m not sure they would’ve bothered with the final key change in Memphis, though.”
8) “Our Films, Their Films”
“Another book title. This time from an essay collection by the Indian director Satyajit Ray, who contrasts commercial—Hollywood and Bollywood—filmmaking with the type of art cinema—especially European—he aspired to. All the lyrics track that opposition, which are also about making art on a shoestring. Led by Jean Cook, the string quartet improvised its parts in two takes. I brought them in to play an arrangement on another song we didn’t use for the album. But they were game to come up with something noisy on the fly.”
9) “Guesthouse”
“There was a Nothing Painted Blue song called ‘Houseguest.’ After our bass player, Peter Hughes, joined the Mountain Goats, they frequently covered it live—and I sometimes played it with them. About 30 years later, I decided to write a sequel. It isn’t about the same characters, but they’re involved in a similar power dynamic. In my mind, it’s set in Claremont, Calif., a college town where recent graduates, dropouts and townies rent backhouses while they’re figuring out their next move—which some never do. This song is about finally getting sick of that lifestyle.”
10) “Boring Postcards”
“Named for a collection of found postcards compiled by the late photographer Martin Parr, this song is rootsier and maybe more pop than most of the record. I knew we were overstocked with long, somewhat elaborately structured songs, so I consciously wrote one or two with compressed structures and strong hooks. I’ll also mention that our drummer, Matt Houser, sang most of the backing vocals on the album. But I drafted Mark Spencer for this and ‘The Old Currencies.’”
11) “The Old Currencies”
“The strange fact is that financial value is abstract, but we embody it in the physical form of coins, bills and so on. It’s another recurring theme in my songs—or maybe just a source of language and imagery. For anyone reading who knows my old solo recordings, 1993’s ‘Medium Of Exchange’ is about the same topic. I know this sounds like the least rock ‘n’ roll subject matter imaginable, but we tried to make up for it on the musical side. The band is heading straight for Highway 61 Revisited/Blonde On Blonde territory here, which gave me an excuse to play Mitch’s grand piano and Hammond B-3.”
12) “Shovel-Ready”
“I started hearing this term for infrastructure projects during the Obama administration, but the idea comes from John Maynard Keynes: If you want to stimulate the economy quickly, hire people to do anything, even ‘dig a hole and fill it up again.’ We had fun in the studio on this one. Some guitars were recorded direct into the board; Matt drums on a metal staircase; and we used Mitch’s tack piano for that ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’ saloon sound.”
13) “Enemies Of Song”
“I want to close by leaving this one open to interpretation. The invasion narrative is clear enough, but what each side of the conflict represents is fairly ambiguous—even to me. The main musical model is New Zealand’s Verlaines. Their leader, Graeme Downes, has far more formal training and harmonic sophistication than I do, so I’m not actually capable of sounding like him. But trying to catch some of his lightning always leads me somewhere interesting.”
