‘Oh…what a mess we made.’ - Conn Thornton
It’s wonderful to watch a writer and musician develop in real time. Often it’s too easy to compare the works of classic artists in context with each other, to have it all laid out like a history book, but to have little to go on, and especially not know what’s coming next is so exciting. With that in mind, Conn Thornton has released their debut album just months after putting out their first EP. This album is called ‘Destroyer’.
Image Credit: Conn Thornton
We actually wrote about Conn Thornton’s debut EP, ‘Abraham’s Daughter’ back in January. In terms of arrangement, the songs were all performed on piano with Thornton singing their evocative lyrics, and is an excellent place to start when discovering their music. By the time I got to write about the EP, it had already been out for several months and Thornton had just released their first single from Destroyer. The full album followed in early February.
Destroyer picks up where Abraham’s Daughter left off. ‘Creation Myth’ has that sound of an upright piano that hasn’t been serviced a while, perhaps a couple of the keys are sticking, it’s totally full of character, as is the melody Conn weaves through the piece. Am I reminded of the opening music to Final Fantasy X? I’m not at liberty to say. But this is the perfect introduction to Destroyer, leading into…
…‘City Song’. The transition is perfect, and for the first time we get to hear Conn playing guitar. I couldn’t imagine this one being composed on piano, the chord progression was meant to be played on an acoustic guitar, and that finger-picking style compliments Conn’s vocal well. It’s also a great choice for the first single. On Thornton’s Bandcamp, they give a brief description below each track - this one says, ‘a song for a man’. Conn does add piano too most notably between verses, which totally opens this track out. Speaking of verses, Conn sings their heart out on this song, listen to their cry at the end with tasteful reverb. These minute production choices are all examples of Thornton’s evolution as their own producer, with much more to come on Destroyer.
‘Down By Writer’s Square’ is lifted from the Abraham’s Daughter EP, an example of Conn Thornton’s descriptive lyrics that also works well both in it’s original context, and as part of the larger narrative of Destroyer. Interesting to note that the mixing by Lewis Murray places the piano as if you’re standing in front of it, watching Conn play rather than mixing it from Thornton’s point of view as if they’re sitting at the piano.
I love the dreamy feel of ‘She Hangs Brightly’, played on guitar and sounding like it’s lifted straight out of a shoegaze track. Thornton’s vocal however is far more rooted in reality, perfectly audible unlike most vocals in the shoegaze genre. Conn performs some gorgeous, delicate backing vocals here too in harmonic ‘Ooo’s’, especially the last one which is held out as the track comes to a close. Their note on Bandcamp dedicates She Hangs Brightly to two people who greatly influenced Destroyer.
‘Wednesday Night Bar Scene’ is the only other song on Destroyer that’s taken from Abraham’s Daughter, which showcases more of Conn’s expressive piano playing. As told by Conn in our piece on the EP, these songs were recorded on a Steinway Concert-Grand from the 1950’s, and the quality here is evident. Thornton striving for perfection makes these songs timeless.
‘Chrysalis’ is one of the shorter pieces on Destroyer, and is full of ambient keyboard sounds, a break from the more straight-forward piano pieces that serves to sonically change the album up. Despite it containing none of Conn Thornton’s lyrics, the sounds on Chrysalis are just as effective at conjuring up the images they do so well in their vocal numbers. This ambient piece is dedicated to Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, who also creates beautiful cinematic pieces just like this one in his film-scoring work with Atticus Ross (The Social Network, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl, Bird Box, Watchmen, Mank, Soul, etc.)
The piano is more distant for ‘The Russian Doll and the Jack Of Hearts’, as well it sounds like the dampener pedal is down. Conn Thornton deals once more into delicate background vocal textures, blending very well with their piano playing on this track, which is more basic than some of their solo offerings. But to me this song is all about the vocal and lyric. This track contains some of my favourite words on Destroyer, the entire first verse is just perfect poetry:
‘Withered roses fall apart, the King has taken the Jack Of Hearts, the Russian Doll looks out to sea, the vultures circling over me. Laying in his bed, he passes the hours while his garden grows with someone else’s flowers. He looks to the window, then to the wall, are you lonely yet, little Russian Doll?’
The second instalment in the City Song saga comes in the form of ‘City Song II (You Won’t Get Away With This)’, and is my favourite song on Destroyer. Conn Thornton is at their most confident vocally, dipping in their lower register. The whole track is treated with a layer of reverb which does little to remove the anger you can feel in Thornton’s voice and lyrics. Indeed, their dedication on this track goes to ‘someone who I vowed to destroy’.
The whole lyric flows incredibly well, with my favourite line being: ‘You’re not the God you thought you were back when you were sixteen, well neither am I, but at least I know that.’ Finishing the verse in silence with ‘You won’t get away with this’ followed by a piano solo is a refreshing alternative to perceived anger in music. Anger in music is usually interpreted by loud and angry sounds, but this? This almost gets the point across more, because Conn Thornton isn’t willing to sink to the level of the person they’re talking about.
‘Isaiah’ is by far the longest track on Destroyer. Here, Conn Thornton explores more of the shoegaze guitar sound they delved into on She Hangs Brightly. The sound is smooth, like multiple guitar effects have been used to turn the chords into water. There are yet more layers in Isaiah, with Thornton adding percussion and acoustic guitar. The additions are simple, as are most of their arrangements, but the focus in Conn’s music is always on the song and the message, there is no overcrowding, nothing overdone in these compositions. Towards the end of the track, Thornton steps it up a gear, playing the electric guitar with more force, and adding more emotion to their vocal. This one is ‘a song for the man I loved.’
The title track of the album begins in the same way Creation Myth does, with piano, but this time, vocals join quite soon afterwards. I like the padding piano chords, like they’re walking towards you. Interestingly, the chord progression seems more optimistic than the lyric, like the two don’t go together, but how many upbeat pop songs are there with lyrics that go in the opposite direction? Conn Thornton adds guitar to the piano sound. A low drone can be heard under the piano, though I’m unsure if this is a product of the reverb on the piano, or a keyboard added to it. It’s a really foreboding way to end this record, making you wonder where Conn Thornton will take their music next.
Read on for our Q&A with Conn Thornton, who explains more about the stories around Destroyer, their production on the tracks and the stripped-down recording methods used. Since the release of Destroyer, Conn Thornton has put out a small EP of 2020 outtakes called ‘Eight Millimeter’, which, like their other works, can be found on their Bandcamp page below.
Image Credit: Conn Thornton
1. Your new album 'Destroyer' follows up your 'Abraham's Daughter' EP from last summer, where does the name of this album come from?
The term ‘Destroyer’ kind of came from several places. It was spawned from the whole idea of myself being my own biggest critic and the only person I can count on to really beat myself down at my lowest moments, which was of course the case with a lot of people’s declining mental health during the past year. Part of it might have come from the title of Michaela Coel’s incredible series ‘I May Destroy You’, which I think is a totally arresting and captivating title, so part of it might have been a subconscious riff off of that too.
2. For the most part, you recorded and produced this whole record yourself. Tell me about the recording process and the gear you used?
The recording process was done on a shoestring budget. For the most part I used a relatively cheap USB microphone I got in November coupled with the free version of Ableton I got along with a 25-key synthesiser, so obviously everything was on a very tight budget. I kind of saw that as a challenge to see what I could make with these incredibly limited resources, and I think I managed to succeed in realising the vision that I had coming into the whole recording process. Before I got the mic ‘She Hangs Brightly’ was recorded on my phone in a disused cabinet in a barn to try and soundproof it, which was then subsequently filtered and reverbed into oblivion to remove all the white noise a phone mic creates, which shows just how limited everything was.
3. It's great to hear you playing other instruments on this album in addition to piano, was it all composed on piano originally?
It actually wasn’t - I decided to try and challenge myself to write stuff for the guitar and about half of the songs were written on the guitar and the other half on the piano. Some songs that were recorded on the piano were done on the guitar originally, like ‘Writer’s Square’ and ‘Russian Doll’. What made me want to try and write stuff on the guitar was the fact that guitars can offer some really nice chordal structures and harmonies that would be harder to work out on the piano. For example, the little piano riff on ‘Russian Doll’ was a result of using one chord position in the guitar strings in open tuning and sliding it up and down the frets without changing the hand position. It was easy enough to write and it gave it some nice harmonic colour that would be more difficult to write for on the piano.
4. You decided to include a couple of tracks from the 'Abraham's Daughter' EP on this album, what led to that decision?
‘Abraham’s Daughter’ was like an exercise in storytelling, whether it was from personal experience or just fiction. ‘Writer’s Square’ and ‘Wednesday Night’ encompass both of those things and are probably what acted as the launching pad for how I ended up writing songs on ‘Destroyer’ - they were written long before ‘Destroyer’ was even conceived but they felt so connected to some of the material on ‘Destroyer’ that it felt natural to put them on, even though they were recorded in a different setting when I was in a totally different state of mind.
5. Were you tempted to re-record any of your 'Incomplete Tragedies' demos for this album? Or is the narrative for those incompatible?
I had considered it but I didn’t know how I would have put them together or how I would rewrite them – any old material that ended up on ‘Destroyer’ was rewritten in a moment of spontaneity so I’m just waiting for that moment to strike for any of the other songs. I’m waiting for it particularly for ‘Starless’ because I really liked the lyric for that and I had come up with a killer drum track but I’m not particularly happy with the chorus yet, so I’ll need to put my mind to remaking that one.
6. You dedicated 'Chrysalis' to Trent Reznor. What's your favourite thing Trent has been involved in?
As a film composer, I really love Trent’s film scoring work and I really first fell in love with his stuff when the soundtrack to ‘Gone Girl’ came out. I was also kind of aware of Nine Inch Nails not long after that, but I had no idea that Trent was the frontman, so to hear both sides of this man’s music was really cool and when I found out it was the same person who made the sabre-toothed insanity of ‘The Downward Spiral’ and they would go on to make the really calming ambience of ‘The Social Network’ and ‘Gone Girl’, I was floored. He’s just a really versatile and brilliant musician to me.
7. Tell me about 'The Russian Doll And The Jack Of Hearts', what's the story behind that?
Funnily enough, ‘Russian Doll’ was written initially as a rumination about how I felt that my life was stagnating, but the original lyric was awful and I scrapped it. Not long after it I had this romantic interest in this guy who then turned me down and in my moodiness following that I wrote the final lyric to ‘Russian Doll’ about him and I. I don’t even think he knows. ‘Russian Doll’ was also kind of a love letter to Belfast at night, because I loved going on walks alone around the city at night to clear my head and that’s what I felt like the instrumental captured, especially when it was played on the piano. It felt a lot more melancholy and isolated. There’s even references to the area we both lived around to kind of make it more personal and intimate. That’s just a side effect of me being an over-romantic person.
8. Have you considered making any music videos for this album?
I would really love to make a music video for ‘City Song’ or ‘Russian Doll’ in Belfast at night just as an excuse to experience the city at night again, and I also feel like they have the most potential to have visual accompaniment. Maybe I could just do what Lana Del Rey did on ‘Video Games’ and record a few scenes of me on my phone and cut some public domain stock footage in there and call it a day. God knows I don’t have the budget to hire a camera or a whole film crew to get a professional video filmed just yet so I’m really gonna have to go with the whole ‘self-made’ vibe of ‘Destroyer’ and make my own videos.
9. The artwork for 'Destroyer' is curious as it doesn't feature you on the cover this time. Who does the artwork depict?
The artwork depicts Caitríona Fitzpatrick, who I’ve known since I was about 9 or 10 and I’ve collaborated with musically on our own projects for maybe two years. She’s a really great singer and photographer and she was the one who edited the cover for ‘Abraham’s Daughter’, as well as doing this one herself too. I had my own idea for a cover originally with me on it but the pandemic got in the way of shooting it, so I might have to save that idea if I ever make another album like ‘Destroyer’ again.
10. Since gigs are still a way off, have you considered livestreaming live performances from this album?
I had considered that, but I don’t quite have the money to get all the gear for a home livestream performance. I did one in October 2020 with a local artist collective which went absolutely terribly on my end because of nerves, but I really enjoyed it nonetheless. I’ve reached out to other collectives like that to try and get other live stream gigs but they haven’t even been able to accommodate anybody because of the pandemic so all there is for me to do is keep on writing.
11. Was there any material leftover from 'Destroyer'? Something that you're saving for the next project maybe?
Pretty much everything written for ‘Destroyer’ made it onto the album, save for two songs - ‘Janet, Fetch the Revolver!’ and ‘Runaway’. ‘Janet’ is another storytelling exercise about a mental breakdown personified as a home invader – it’s a lot grittier than anything on ‘Destroyer’ so I don’t think it really fit at all. ‘Runaway’ however would have fit perfectly but I can’t write a chorus for it. The verse is absolutely brilliant but I simply can’t find any way to continue it. But I aim to finish it and have it on the second album, which I’ve already written about 5 songs for and I hope to have it out next year or maybe even later this year.
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Purchase ‘Destroyer’ by Conn Thornton on their Bandcamp page, as well as their latest collection of songs called ‘Eight Millimeter’.
Follow Conn Thornton on Twitter @carrymeoutt, on Instagram @conn_thornton and on Facebook @connthorntonmusic.
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