Jerskin Fendrix on Grief, Working with Yorgos Lanthimos, and Embracing Big Swings
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You've already heard Jerskin Fendrix's music even if you didn't know you were hearing it: The British songwriter and composer has been the musical right-hand-man of Yorgos Lanthimos across this decade, nabbing a friggin' Oscar nomination for his Poor Things score and lending his talents to Kinds of Kindness and the upcoming Bugonia (which, as a Lanthimos fan, I'm very excited for). His solo music is no less adventurous and fascinating; his new album Once Upon a Time in Shropshire, which sees release this Friday, is totally energizing and one-of-a-kind, the type of music that borders on indescribable—which, of course, keeps you coming back to it. I had a really good time talking with Jerskin a few months ago about the new record, his career, and a wide array of other topics. Check it out:
Talk to me about how this record came together. As someone familiar with your score work, some of it is very identifiably "you."
I struggle very much to make something not sound like me, even if I'm deliberately trying to do the opposite—which is probably very helpful as an artist, but it also means that there are certain jobs which I'm unsuited for.
The record has been a very long process for various reasons. This is an album about many things, but chiefly it's about Shropshire, which is a county in West Midlands of England, where I grew up. I've always had a very profound affinity with the nature and landscape, and there's a certain emotional resonance with a remote rural place, which is a bit different to how I feel about urban places.There was something artistically related to that when I was very young, moving past the nature and more abstract feelings towards it—all the relationships I built up with friends, and early romantic relationships. There are so many things about this county and environment that I feel very sensitive and emotional about, in a lot of different directions.
After I'd finished my first album, I was in lockdown. I spent a lot of time at my parents' house in Shropshire, and this was the beginning of wanting to really feel like I was equipped to actually capture and manifest how I felt about this place artistically. This was related to a number of events: I had a close friend of mine take his own life in early 2020, and then a lot of family and family-adjacent deaths within the period of a year or so after that. This album felt like a framework to not just investigate, think about, and process these deaths, but also to think about them through the relief of this whole experience. It felt like a way into thinking about this experience as a whole‚—and if you live in the countryside, life and death is a part of it even before it hits you in a close-to-home way. The life cycles of animals, you're so attuned to nature, and you see a lot of death in a very certain kind of way. You get used to it as part of how this whole system works.
The album took a very long time to put together for two reasons. In early 2021, I was asked to start work on Poor Things, and during that I was also asked to work on Kinds of Kindness. That work was fairly constant for a number of years, and I found gaps in between production schedules to continue work on this album. In that period as well, unfortunately, my father very suddenly passed away. Out of all the events related to what I was thinking about, that was definitely the most shocking and the severe for me. My father was a huge part of why I became a musician in the first place. I wanted to process that grief and commemorate that person through song, and by chance the work I'd done about Shropshire and death had, by coincidence, built up to this testament to really explore that.
Talk to me more about the aspect of working through grief. There's obviously the truism that it feels like time stops when you encounter loss and tragedy—but, also, things just continue to move apace, and people find themselves moving through life while dealing with grief in ways that are hard to explain to those who are not.
Well, one interesting thing is, when you're a songwriter, necessarily a lot of what you write tends to be autobiographical. There are exceptions to this, but either overtly or metaphorically, it tends to be very autobiographical writing. It's very difficult to predict what you might write a song about. A song in the context of relationships—I might've written songs about breakups or relationships that were very big and important to me and my life, but I've also written songs about things which, in the scope of my life, aren't as big and important—but, for some reason, they just felt like things I wanted to write about.
On the opposite end, there have been relationships and people who I've cared very deeply about that, for some reason, it doesn't feel like I need to write about it. It's a kind of black box as to what seems to be something that you decide you want to investigate, process, or put into this art form.
While working on this music, did you ever find yourself heading in a direction of expressing vulnerability where you felt like you needed to pull back?
Probably the opposite. I mean, in terms of writing about grief, a lot of people have done it well. In a lot of media, it's actually unhelpful. I've spoken to a lot of people who have also gone through similar or greater levels of grief, and one thing that often happens is this guilt about not feeling the right thing. If you watch a film where someone dies, or you listen to a song, it's often very one-dimensionally sad. You imagine, when someone dies, that it starts raining and there's a string orchestra playing a minor chord, and you cry for as many months as necessary until you're over it.
As much as art, to some extent, should be a helpful thing for people to understand the complexity of their own lives through, I don't think that's very helpful. If you find a joke funny at a funeral, sometimes you don't feel completely sad. You might find something a bit trivial or funny or in some circumstances—relieving, or positive. Those are all really valid feelings around deaths in all of their multiplicities, and people are led by media to think that this is a one-dimensional experience, but it's absolutely not. What I felt was really important on this record is that it's not one hour of just minor-chord-crying. There are bits which are really stupid, surreal, funny, or dumb. I felt it was really important to capture that wide array of things that happen around death. In a lot of ways, it's as complicated and as multifaceted as life is—which is why a person is so important.
There was a really difficult point in the record—basically the 12 months after my father died—where I was finishing all of the lyrics. I spent a really long amount of time trying to make sure the lyrics were accurate—that these were true things that happened, no bromides or clichés. I basically had to lock myself away for roughly three months to record all the vocals, and I did that by myself. I'm being very honest and quite open with the lyrics, and if I was being kinder to my mental health, I wouldn't have done that. That was an extremely tough thing to do to myself—but I did think it was worthwhile.
More so than the artistic achievement of the record, whatever that is, I'm very proud of myself for having been able to make what I think is a really accurate testament to that place and long period of my life—and, hopefully, to the experiences of a lot of people close to me and to those people lost. It's definitely a tough thing, but I'm glad I made it a bit tougher for myself for what ended up being a more honest and accurate—and, I think, to some extent, respectful—commemoration.
When it comes down to being kinder to your own mental health what what helped in terms of letting some steam off?
I mean, as much it was a tough thing, it wasn't a depressing thing, necessarily. There's something cathartic about it. I had a student once who said that no matter how sad, depressing, or traumatic it is, the act of making art has to be an optimistic thing. It's impossible to create something without optimism, no matter what the circumstances are. It wouldn't have been possible if I didn't think that this was a good thing to do. It's a great privilege of people who make art. If I was a molecular biologist, a lawyer, or a high school teacher and something bad happens, what you have to look forward to is pushing through the grief. In a lot of cases, it probably makes you a better person, and your character and soul develops as a result. It's a kind of perverse privilege that breakups are not an obvious example, because a lot of people write breakup songs.
You have a weird superpower, where something that's meant to weaken you and deplete you of energy and positivity can then be actually transformed into something which is very widely respected and appreciated by the human population. I feel very lucky to be able to do that. A lot of friends and family don't have that right in their pocket. And, again, this isn't just an album about death. It's a large catalyst to what it's about. But I'm trying to create a testament to this entire beginning period of my life, and this place—and so much of that is so positive.
It's like the Kurt Vonnegut thing about how, when you're writing, you have one person in mind. Being able to have my family or friends—often a single person from that group—in mind per song, lyric, or production choice, felt really good. It's a hard balance, making sure you don't indulge so far that you're distorting someone else's experience or speaking on someone else's behalf—but knowing that this is something I could share and that this was a shared thing with so many people I'm close to, was the main factor that motivated me to complete this.
Tell me more about the role that your father played in terms of you becoming a musician.
He was a professor. He taught English literature and a lot of theological literature, and he worked in the church as a lay preacher. There was a wide variety of musical stuff I was exposed to from a really early age—classical stuff, a lot of baroque stuff and Bach—and he was also really into writers like John Berryman, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Warren Zevon, and Nina Simone. Because of his activity in the church, he was also into how serious and dramatic a lot of clerical music is. These were really great counterpoints—having one kind of musician who was a bit glib or humorous, and then one kind where it's really heavy and serious. The village church's organist was also very into extremely dramatic music. He'd have one verse that was extremely hushed and a capella, and then he'd explode the organ out into the next bit—which, I realized later in life, isn't the normal thing the church organists do.
As an artist and musician, one of the most formative memories I have is my father showing us a video of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performing "Jungleland." I was pretty young at this point, and people have different father figures and ideas about what it means to be a man, or an adult. Seeing the expression on his face while watching Clarence Clemens' saxophone solo—just complete unabashed awe and wonder, being overtaken by the sincerity and beauty—was great. You can make art where you don't have to be ironic, removed from it, or embarrassed about how much you can completely be openly engulfed by something this big and seismic. This is the effect it can have on people, and you have permission to make stuff like that and be moved by stuff like this without any qualifier. The pureness of that emotion from him has allowed me, at any juncture in my life artistically, to not hold back from that and to not be embarrassed about something like that.
Talk to me about the album cover.
A colleague of mine who I met while making Poor Things, Shona Heath, I spoke to a lot about it. She grew up in a very similar circumstance, and she's an amazing artist. Her brain works in a way that is unfathomable, which is why she's so respected. Her and her husband Tim Gutt very kindly agreed to do all of the photography, and I think they really got it. It's me holding a lamb, which is shot on location at Beth's Farm, which is the title of the first track. The centerfold is a giant model of a lamb that Shona created, which is basically eating me.
When it comes to my upbringing with the church, the lamb has a very obvious symbolism—so many ideas about life and recurrence. There's a part on "Together Again" when I'm thinking about my father as my father and as his mother's and father's son, and the cyclical nature of how the seasons work—how life and death works. That was a really important part of the album's core—not just a finite end to something, or a nostalgic thing where that part of my life's over. It's a wider lens on what all of these things mean for people, how things continually happen, how permanent they are, and how they constantly come up. It's a more optimistic and and objective viewpoint on these themes, rather than a small set of finite, discrete episodes in my life.
You came up while playing the Windmill, which has become a nearly mythical scene when it comes to the last eight or nine years of left-field British artists. Talk to me about your experience coming up in that scene and your perception of how people view it.
A really cool thing about the Windmill scene is that there are some bands which are slightly similar to one another, and some who are massively different. Tim Perry—the programmer of the Windmill—chooses who goes on, and when you're starting out as a small artist, if you just moved to London or aren't even there yet and you're doing something a bit different, it's often very hard to get a gig at a respectable place. But Tim is extremely open-minded. He doesn't care if you don't have a single audience member coming. He'll pick the right night and right environment for you, and he will champion something that he thinks has worth, regardless of whether it's something that would commercially make sense for the venue or for him. He's very supportive in a genuine way.
A lot of musicians there really respect one another. They're not genre heads, they don't give a shit if it's like the same thing that they're doing or not. Geordie Greep, I can't think of anyone who has as diverse a taste of music as he does. People will be really impressed and inspired by other people doing well. Really weird, difficult new ideas are very competently followed through, and a lot of artists at the Windmill egg each other on. I don't think people felt they'd be comfortable performing something that was a bit bland, mediocre, or derivative.
Honestly, the range of talent that's come out of that neck of the woods reminds me a lot of the early-to-mid 2000s, where there was this feeling that people were doing literally anything with their music and it wasn't arriving fully-assembled in terms of media packaging.
It's been really amazing, and it can't be overstated how much Tim's a part of this. Within my first year of doing Jerskin stuff, I was still finding my feet. The Windmill is very popular for international artists because of its reputation. A lot of people do warm up gigs there, but I just want to play there because it's weird. Tim will insist that the support acts for really big artists who play there have to be chosen by him. I supported Japanese Breakfast when I'd been gigging for six months, which was a great experience because you have a crowd there who isn't there to see you. They're really discerning, and if you fuck it up, they'll tell you about it.
Your music sounds so perfect alongside what Yorgos does that it's honestly kind of shocking. Talk to me a little bit about that working relationship.
I was first contacted by Yorgos' team, and it continues to be a very surreal thing which I'm grateful for on a daily basis. I don't think I've particularly gotten used to it, even. I knew about his films a long time before he got in touch, and I've always really loved them. In the earlier stages of when I was getting to know him, his process, and how I should interlock with it, he said the two times he'd use music in a film would either be as a juxtaposition to what's happening on screen—which isn't an uncommon thing to do—or, which I think is a lot rarer, or to have music which is emotionally consonant with what's happening in a scene but is so exaggerated and melodramatic that it adds another dimension. One thing I've done in my own writing is to melodramaticize to a really great degree—to over-concentrate an emotion and see what happens. So, by coincidence, we both had very similar ideas about that side of art and how music should function to serve something outside of it.
He's an amazing person to collaborate with. He gives a great amount of trust, compared to what I'm aware of with other directors. He gives a huge amount of freedom—never any references, never sitting next to you and saying, "Maybe more like this." He does this with everyone—art departments, actors, writers. He'll make a really firm decision on who he wants to work with, and he doesn't want to know how the sausage is made.
He doesn't want to tell you how to do it, or even help guide you—which makes you work a lot harder than if you have someone coming in when you have a quarter of a draft, because then you're basically half-assing it since your boss is gonna come and point you in some direction. You put a lot more pressure on yourself, because he says "Yes" or "No" if it's in the film or not, but he won't help you make it better. He won't point you in the right direction. You have to ensure that it's the best it possibly can be, because he won't help you with that—and it makes you work so much harder and create such better art as a result.
Any movies you've seen that you recently enjoyed?
I'll be honest. I'm a big fan of a pop chorus with straight-up emotions and chords that hit a really high note roughly 75% of the way through the sequence. That song "Golden" from K-Pop Demon Hunters—great, great fucking piece of songwriting. Kind of in the category of like Sia's "Chandelier," just pushing the range of a pop chorus far more than it necessarily needs to be.
I haven't watched that yet.
I mean, between you and me—and it obviously isn't, because we're on the record—but I've not seen it yet either. I liked Eddington a lot. Ari Aster's also a producer on Bugonia.He's a great fella. We also have a great shared love of Adventure Time, which I think may have the best television score of all time and maybe one of the best scores full stop. It never gets talked about, and if you listen to the music by itself, it's so different, bizarre, and effective. It gives you just enough emotion to really feel a scene without ever becoming saccharine, which is a really hard thing to do.
Did you like Beau Is Afraid?
I really like it.
Me too. It's one of those things where, 20 years from now, I think people are going to be like, "Wait, people didn't like this?"
I love it when people take a big fucking swing—biting off more than you can chew and then proceeding to chew it anyway. For the same reason, I really adored Megalopolis, which was probably my favorite film of last year. With Beau...there are a lot of words that really piss me off when people use them for films, like "pretentious" or "indulgent." It's like, of course it is. There's nothing about film, music, or art which is necessary to be alive. It's the equivalent of being at a dinner party, and someone's getting really excited making jokes, and then someone says, "Stop showing off." That's my biggest fucking pet peeve. For maybe the only time this month, this person's allowing themselves to actually be really excited and exuberant, having fun with people, and then you just cut them down in such a malicious way.
Why would you make a work of art if not for trying to inflate the balloon as big as you possibly fucking can? Ari Aster does that. Megalopolis does that. And I love it when that happens. I love to see that complete unabashed exuberance. I'd rather watch that than 98 more goddamn social realism films about a farmer. Who cares, man? Real life is bleak. Why wouldn't you inject something different into the art you consume?
Let's talk about the financial aspects of being a musician.
It's a very complicated issue. It can be very opaque, especially, for people starting out, so it's great to be able to publicly discuss it. Right now, I know certain bands or artists who might tour a lot or sell a lot of merch, and I think that used to be a slightly more viable way of making money. There's various venues taking merch cuts, which is gross. You have the amount of money it takes for transport and administration visas. It's extraordinarily tough to make a living out of it, but it's putting off a lot of people, and it means you often get a certain class of people who are able to live independently in a big city—like London, or New York—without much of an obvious income. It's tough. It really sucks.
There is a lot more money in film and advertising right now. It is, comparatively, a
black hole of money, and I have a lot of friends and peers realizing that it's a lot more stable being an artist working in film or advertising than it is trying to make your indie albums, tour and promote them, and sell your merch. And it's a lot more adult of a structure, in a way. There's also the obvious about Spotify. A lot of people have talked about having the change where what you pay then gets divided up into the artists you listen t,o rather than just whoever gets the most plays overall. That would be a good change.
The financial stuff is really tricky. I see a lot of artists and bands have to stop because they can't support themselves, and it's a real fucking shame. I don't know enough about economics and stuff like that to know what the best solution for all of it is, but Spotify is one massive gaping hole in the whole thing.