You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Hirwe. Fenn Lilly is a singer and songwriter from Dorset, England. She released her first album in 2018, but I didn't find her music until 2023, when she put out her third album, Big Picture.
The album that she released in between those two was one that got a little lost in lockdown when all her touring plans around it got canceled. And all that plays in the story that she tells in this episode about making her song Lights Light Up. I spoke to Fenn in front of a live audience at WBUR CitySpace in Boston. Coming up, you'll hear how Lights Light Up evolved across different versions of demos and then later in the studio with Grammy-nominated producer Brad Cook.
My name is Fenn Lilly. I released a 2020 record called Breach, and I was meant to go on a Waxahatchee tour and another tour with Lucie Davis, and then COVID hit and I found myself at home for a year and didn't write a single thing in that year. I was in Bristol with my boyfriend at the time in a one-bedroom house. And one of the rooms that was meant to be the bedroom was just crumbling wall made of what looked like cheese and what's not like mold.
So it was really cool and fun and healthy. And that was the headspace that I was in. I wasn't listening to any music because I was so sad that I couldn't tour my record that had taken three years to make. So I was in a hole of just listening to crime, kidnapping, murder stuff.
This hole of only absorbing content that was so much about pain that I hit a wall and I was like, what's the nicest thing I can think of? And calligraphy was what I decided was the most innocent, uplifting thing. My Nana has really beautiful handwriting. I was like, I want to learn how to improve my handwriting.
So I bought a journal and I started writing prose. I've never done that before. Would you mind reading out loud the first thing that you wrote in that journal? Well, first I wrote my contact details in case it got lost.
I didn't leave the house, so it never got lost. All right. February 13th, 2021. It says, before I started learning French, I memorized one phrase, I love you, but I can't.
This is true. Je t'aime, je ne peux pas. It felt good to say. I just was doing kind of stream of consciousness and fully intending for it to just be a practice space for conversing with myself.
So I think buying this journal and not having to worry about whether I could write another album, whether my life was going to be different to how I imagined it, was really helpful. And I think it just unlocked something. I started writing Lights Light Up the next week. That first demo is from the first day of me figuring it out.
Me and my boyfriend had had a big fight and he'd left and went and stayed with a friend. And I really thought that that was going to be the fight that ended the relationship. So I thought, if this is going to be the end, I'd like to try and map out the start because when something bad happens, the temptation is to dissolve the good parts because it makes you too sad to think about the good parts when you're sad. So I thought, I'm going to start this song with me alone as I was before I met him.
And then the next verse will be me meeting him. And then the third verse will be us together. Traffic lights light up as we stand kissing and the car horns play along. I'm talking about the traffic lights light up as we stand kissing.
We had our first kiss at traffic lights. I had had a long string of small, painful flings. And I was apparently failing to do something that I really wanted to do, which was be in love with somebody in a real way. And then this brilliant person shows up.
You said, well, do you ever want to leave here? And I said, well, that depends on the day. And you said, oh, I haven't figured out this line yet. And I said, well, that depends on the way.
All I had to do was say what I actually was feeling, which was the most difficult part because I'm scared of what I'm feeling, which is maybe this has reached an endpoint that we both need, but neither of us want. So I wrote those three verses and that chorus and forgot about it, I think, for six months until the next big, big fight with my boyfriend. The writing process is very much punctuated by desperation, fear and loneliness. I think those are the three ingredients for a good song.
Yeah, we had a big fight and I thought, now I have the end of my story. I wrote the end of the song as if the relationship had ended. He didn't listen when I told you I'm not a dancer. I'm not a dancer, I'm alone all the time.
But also between February, March, and when I picked it up again, someone in my family was diagnosed with cancer. And I took it so badly, worse than I should have considering it wasn't me that was sick. I made it all about me. I was really scared because I'd never had somebody that I loved close to being lost in a real way.
And the same room where I lived about the cancer, and you just had to give it to mine. It honestly just has a fleeting mention, and that felt like enough. Each verse of the song has four lines. Trying to fit two years of experiences into a very limited number of words is actually really liberating and easy because you can't waffle.
You just have to hopefully do a big feeling justice with a few small words. And then COVID was partially lifted in the UK. So we went out and did a few shows in December and Lights Light Up, I would play it in soundcheck. At this point, I broke up with the person that the song is about.
This recording is the first and only recording from the immediate aftermath of the breakup. Joe plays guitar with me, my bassist, Kane, and drummer, James. They have such clear identities as musicians. And I wanted to take this song from a place of sadness and helplessness to a place that sounded uplifting as much as my dulcet tones can allow.
Traffic lights light up as we stand kissing, when the car horns play along. And through that, we kind of pieced together different ideas that worked. It finally has momentum, and I think the songs that are being written about being stuck, that is a helpful thing to have and is also so much more fun to play faster. So I had the arrangements.
And then we flew to North Carolina to record the record. I knew that I wanted to work with Brad Cook, that Waxahatchi record, Saint Cloud. He produced that. That's a very poetic record, and it's perfectly executed.
And I needed somebody who could give us the space and permission to take the songs in directions that we hadn't thought to take them before. And that's exactly what he did. I think Joe's guitar part has become the main character in this song. I say really annoying things when I'm giving direction in my band.
I'll say something like, play a guitar part that sounds like you were looking for something and now you've found it. And he was like, say no more. Please say no more. He knows when to not play, which is as important as knowing when to play, leaving space, letting there be room.
My instruction was to keep everything moving because I felt like the vocal part is very static. I wanted everything else to be swirling and moving. That like close mic way of recording drums really helps to feel like there's something happening all the time that none of it's too much. So the bass has the job of gluing everything together in a melodic way.
When I went to record the lyrics, it's the first time that I'd really saw it as a story that wasn't something that was being figured out anymore. It wasn't like a puzzle to play with. It was like an exact description of this entire relationship that had now ended and we were on different paths. And you said so?
Do you ever wanna leave here? And I said, well, that depends on the day. Yeah, I started crying. And I'm not a crier, ever, really.
I'm very uncomfortable with other people crying, so I try not to do it myself. Yeah, I cried. And you said, oh, do you even wanna be here? And I said, well, that depends on the way.
That's Kane playing bass chords. We put those bass chords in and thought, we'll never use them. And then when we got to mixing, there was a space that needed filling and that was it. Phil Cook is an incredible pianist.
He's also Brad's brother. I did six years of piano lessons, can't play piano. Brad was watching me frustratedly try and put piano on a lot of the songs and gently suggested maybe we get Phil. So yeah, we got Phil over to be better at piano than me.
I think the first band demo where we're figuring out the parts, I was just excited that it had come together in a cool way. So after I finished singing the first chorus, I just went, yeah. And then I thought, that's actually kind of cool. Maybe it's a British thing, but saying something sincere that you mean and you feel has to kind of be followed by a word that undoes some of the sincerity because it's so embarrassing to be so serious.
So to have a song that's about love growing and falling apart and someone maybe dying of cancer and then to be like, yep, that was that. So that has to happen. And I recreated the spontaneity, which is always a very smooth and cool move. And I said, well The really exciting thing about making music, aside from people hearing it, is if you ever want to hear where your head was at at a certain point in time, you can.
It's all stored there. This is like a time capsule, pre-falling in real love for the first time, all the way to the dissolution of that love. It feels like a time that was really important and precious. Recording in North Carolina, that was the happiest I'd been up until that point.
I was living in the studio, so I just felt really at peace and I trusted everyone I was working with. And after a year and a half of living in the same room with a person who, at the same time as they're holding me together, they're also tearing me apart, to be in that environment with Brad and the guys was so amazing. I think part of the reason why I cried was because I was like, I did it. I found what I wanted, which was to feel light and free and be with people again.
Coming up, you'll hear how all these ideas and elements came together in the final song. And now here's Lights Light Up by Fen Lily in its entirety. It took a lot of me to get back up from sleeping. On the way, the pressure and the floor.
There is a noise in the waking day than dreaming, so that's the rule. You came to me at the speed of a bad decision, just the speed, the bad, not so much. We held each other while everything bind the ground under us and inside of me too. That's called love.
The traffic lights light up blue as we stand kissing in the corns play alone. And the other signs are stopping like a listen. We don't do that shit anymore. And he said, sir, do you really want to leave here?
She said, well, that depends on the day. And he said, oh, do you really want to be here? She said, well, that depends on the way. I guess we don't really get that much in common.
Said the days, the nights and the corn. And though we don't really talk about it often, the fear of this getting old. You didn't listen when I told you I'm not a dancer, not a dancer. All the time in the same room where I learned about the cancer.
You just held your head to mine. And he said, sir, do you really want to leave here? And I said, well, that depends on the day. And he said, oh, do you really want to be here?
And I said, well, that depends on the way. To learn more, visit songexploder.net. You'll find links to buy or stream Lights Light Up, and you can watch the music video. This episode was produced by Craig Eley, Theo Balcom, Kathleen Smith, Mary Dolan, and myself.
The episode artwork is by Carlos Lema, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Thanks so much to Stephen Davey and everyone at WR CitySpace. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm.
If you'd like to hear more from me, you can sign up for my newsletter, which you can find a link to on the Song Exploder website. You can also follow me and Song Exploder on Instagram, and you can get a Song Exploder T-shirt at songexploder.net/shirt. I'm Rishi K. Shearway.
Thanks for listening.