Thatâs something I wanted to achieve in this album. His music has this beautiful melancholy - itâs funny and joyful in its own way - and, although he gets labelled as depressing, I think thereâs something uplifting in his music despite that melancholy. He died around the time I was finishing the record, and I was listening to his last album You Want It Darker. Thereâs definitely a tilt of the hat to Leonard in this album. Those three are the ones that keep coming back. LC: Who are your biggest influences as a songwriter?ĬF: They always change, but the core few are Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Lou Reed. Sometimes you need a shift to help re-discover your passion. I realised itâs what Iâd do even if I was stranded on Mars - itâs just what I do. This project really helped me fall in love with song writing again. In that way, my lyric writing is whatâs evolved the most. Repetition in pop songs is great - here comes the chorus, letâs join in - but in theatre once youâve heard something twice you want something new. I feel that, in theatre, unless people are getting new information they drift off a bit. LC: Has the process of writing for theatre changed your approach to songwriting?ĬF: It has - I think writing for theatre is very different because of the level of storytelling. Itâs the same, to a certain extent, with Cover My Tracks as, although Iâm singing the songs, theyâre written for a character rather than me. Writing songs you sing yourself is loads of fun, but to write for someone else was something totally new. Itâs also fun to write in a different voice having spent ten years with the band. With The Lorax, which was a sort of-musical, everyone had to be telling the same story and I really loved that level of collaboration. Then I fell in love with the process of collaboration, and the people Iâd worked with, and I was very keen to do more. LC: Was theatre ever something you planned to do?ĬF: It wasnât really. It was something David and I first talked about: we shared our enthusiasm for folk music and, importantly, for storytelling in folk music. Thereâs a part in the show that talks about how all folk music is utilitarian - it always serves a purpose.
Folk music comes from that story-telling tradition. Itâs quite a traditional way for people to tell stories - people round the campfire, with a guitar - so it felt like a natural thing, in a strange way, to go between songs and music so fluidly. They weave in and out of the text and, although some songs stand alone, we wanted the music and words to be as seamless as possible. We had some workshops to develop a story, and then the songs were written around that. Itâs a story about what it means to disappear in a digital, interconnected age, and what it means to make music in that age.ĬF: I worked with David and Max on The Lorax, and this all came from conversations we had when making that. The songs give information and clues as to what might have happened to him, and throughout the play there are flashbacks showing their time together in a band and what drove him to disappear. Itâs the story of a songwriter who has gone missing, and the play follows his former bandmate and her search for him.
The two were conceived together so all the songs from the album appear in the show and serve as part of the storytelling. Could you start by telling us a bit about the show?Ĭharlie Fink: Cover My Tracks is both a theatre show and an album. London Calling: Hi Charlie, thanks for chatting to us. His new show, Cover My Tracks, again created in collaboration with playwright David Greig and director Max Webster, is opening at the Old Vic on June 5. We spoke to songwriter Charlie Fink about his new theatre show Cover My TracksĬharlie Fink, former frontman for noughties indie rock/folk group Noah and the Whale, has been working in theatre since writing the music and lyrics for The Lorax at the Old Vic in 2015. An interview with songwriter Charlie Fink.An interview with songwriter Charlie Fink
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