Envoy It While You Can

"A messenger sets out from his own small planet for another immeasurably distant one. But the message he carries is written in a language he doesn't understand. All he can hope is that when he finally hands it over it will turn out to mean 'love' or something close."

Sometimes our past selves send letters that may not arrive for years. The above epigraph appears on the sleeve of Nine Lives, the new album by Alien Envoy, the latest project from ex-Fat Lady Sings frontman, solo artist and filmmaker Nick Kelly. It derives not from some Nic Roeg vision of David Bowie as extraterrestrial emissary, but a song on his first band's 1993 album Johnson. The resonances have carried – new tunes like 'Donnybrook' and 'Christmas In the City' suggest some metaphysical intelligence surveying lost city souls a la Wenders' Wings of Desire.
"That's a film I've seen bits of," Kelly admits. "Weirdly I talked about it today to somebody. It's in black and white, in Berlin, which is a beautiful city. It's very interesting: people have this sense of the countryside as really beautiful and that the city is the bad place, but I always think cities are incredibly romantic. I think the idea is that the city is where anything is possible and when you leave the city it's when everything closes down on you. Donnybrook is where I grew up; it didn't feel like Dublin 4. All the stealing horses or whatever you do when you're thirteen or fourteen, that's where it all happened, that's where I'm from. I made my Holy Communion in Donnybrook Church and my father was buried there.
"It's funny when you live for a while," he reflects, "you realise how temporary things are. The first ten years you think certain things have always been and will always be. People write angsty songs in their teens and 20s, but the big changes in your life happen when people start dying on you and people get sick."
It's those old mid life crisis blues again. A man's 40s, we suggest, are like a reprise of stripped-nerve adolescent intensity, except with more at stake.
"Well, I think In your 20s and 30s you build a persona or cover story and then the cover story is blown," Kelly surmises. "You have an idea about yourself and think you can carry that through, and depending on what happens to you, there comes a time where that becomes harder and harder. That Jewish thing about if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. I think in your 40s God starts taking a serious look at your plans."
And sends the bailiffs around. The mid-life bottleneck is when you get the bill for every decision you made – or didn't make – throughout your 20s.
"Oh yeah. And everybody's urgent in the sense that suddenly people who have been doing something for a long time get a sense of, 'If I'm doing the wrong thing I'd better stop' or, 'If I'm waiting I'd better start.'"
Which is all too evident in new songs like 'Anaesthetic' and 'Everything's Wrong'.
"'Everything's Wrong' is my making-God-laugh song," Kelly chuckles. "Especially people who are in rock bands! I always think if you move with energy you do get somewhere, but it's rarely the place you set off for. And I think the difference between happiness and sadness in life is probably your ability to be interested in where you end up, regardless. That you can accept that thing and be excited, as opposed to, 'Oh no, it's not supposed to be like that.' I always have to tell everybody not to take that song too seriously. But I like it, it's got some truth in it."
Before we take our leave, we should explain the rather innovative process by which Nine Lives was recorded. In September 2009 Kelly began a nine month 'Gestation' project, performing a series of Whelan's shows once a month in order to road test and record arrangements of his new songs, with help from a cast of Dublin musicians that included Ann Scott, Joe Chester, Emmaline Duffy-Fallon, Binzer and Pete Pamf, plus Briana Corrigan and Boo Hewerdine. Audience members were invited to give feedback via Kelly's website. The plan was that he would take those comments on advisement and then re-record the songs in a studio. As it happened, the end result ended up way closer to John Cale's Songs From A Rainy Season.
"At a certain point quite late in the process we were listening to the live recordings, and Boo Hewerdine, who was hired to produce, said, 'Is this not the record?' And the more I listened to it and thought about it, it was actually kind of an obvious thing. There was something quite tyrannical about the process too, because there were songs I thought were really strong and we did really interesting things with them, but when I listened to them they didn't crack it. Some things really grew. You have to respond to what is really working as opposed to what you thought would work. So it ended up being the nine things that worked best."

Nine Lives is available in record shops and also from www.selfpossessedrecords.com. Listen to Alien Envoy's 'Infrastructure' on hotpress.com