Songs of Fortune, Songs of Pain is the debut album by London based singer and multi-instrumentalist Gary Lover, the alter ego of Gareth Hoskins, singer with cult London band Tangerines. It’s due for release via cult label Some Other Planet records on 28th May 2021.
For the inspiration behind the music of Songs of Fortune, Songs of Pain Gareth cites his major influences as a mélange of cult and obscure country singers that he hears through his ceaseless crate-digging as he regularly DJs across London under his Land of Luck moniker.
Songs of Fortune, Song of Pain was performed and recorded by Gareth at home in London during a two-year period between 2017-2019. The album is released this Friday on Some Other Planet records which is run by Mexico based producer Salvador Garza Fishburn and is the label home for a truly diverse international roster of artists such as the acclaimed Berlin-based artists 3 South & Banana and Bü alongside Mexican bands PJAMA, Abraham Gü, and Becerros and Portuguese band Not A Citizen.
Pre-Order via: https://garylover.bandcamp.com/
Listen to the album in full below and read Gary’s Track-by-Track guide to the album.
Gary Lover on Songs of Fortune, Songs of Pain
London
I think I wrote this song when I’d had a bad couple of weeks and London made it hard for me to think about what was going on in my life, I think this city can do that to you, especially how fast-paced and political everything can seem to be right up in your face, all the time, non-stop. I guess it depends how you take it and that’s if you take it at all. But I was just getting pissed off with a lot of many different things, both internal and external and the whole “I miss the beat of London” line that rings through the chorus’s was just me looking ahead (or backwards) to a better time/place/feeling that’s always no doubt on the horizon.
I loved making this song though, had a lot of fun with those hi-life, African, Caribbean, slippery tropical guitar spasms backed with a shaker and a pretty simple samba beat.
Supreme Matcha and Coffee
I wrote this song about my girlfriend at the time (we’re no longer together now), it was just a love message to us. I was always drinking a lot of Coffee and she used to drink a lot of those Matcha teas and that’s pretty much the basis of it all, a cup for a cup. I like the beauty of the track though, it’s ridiculously simple, I’d just recently bought a very cheap keyboard and this was the first song that I wrote with it, so it’s a special one I guess as it was the beginning of making this entire album (not that I knew that); at the very beginning of the track, there’s actually a phone recording of me messing around with the bare bones of the idea, probably a few minutes before that I hadn’t even had any concept down at all.
Born and Feathered
Born and Feathered was a nod to a lot of country/folk singers I love, Eddie Noack, Sanford Clark, Vernon Wray, Jimmie Rodgers, Michael Hurley etc. It’s essentially a drinking song, I used to drink a lot of beer down in my shed and get pretty wild on my own. Maybe the lyrics come across a little pessimistic (?) in that sense how you’re born, you conform, you go through life having to be a certain way, but there’s always music, friends and there’s certainly always beer. I wanted it to have that saloon/pub feel to it, a choir of vocals, the banjo, the snare and all the silly noises thrown in there.
There’s also my German Shepard at the time, Juke, he’s featured at the beginning of the track, he used to bark outside my shed (where I recorded everything).
Diana Check The Weather
The song came out of nowhere, I had this repetitive rhyme going around my head for some time and ended up sticking it to a very uncomplicated structure composed of just 4 lines of lyrics, giving each their own verse. I loved the name Diana for the song in hand, and something came from it that attracted me to it. The song has a very naive, straight down the road kind of setup, guitar, cowbell, harmonica and a string of vocals, that’s all that’s in there.
I Want It
Another love song, a bit different in message to Supreme Matcha, you have the good days and the bad days. Sometimes you can’t have what you want when you want and the best thing to do is stick it in a song, so there it is. I had fun with the structure and build-up of the song and all those strange Hosono/Magnetic Fields type of keyboard sounds that enter in and out. Mainly only putting in a couple of acoustics and a beat, again I kept it fairly clean and simple, not to interfere with the bones of the track. It has a very Springsteen outro, I love such simple keyboard chords that take over and put you in your place.
Song For Dad
I started writing and recording this album not long after my father, Richard (Dickie, as I call him in the song) had passed away, so this is the track that I gave to him, and it’s not all bleak, to be honest, I’ve always felt the lyrics are quite the opposite, more a remembrance. But I was struggling to deal with what had happened at the time as it was all very sudden and my whole mental and physical self was completely thrown out of balance, I’d never felt anything like that in my life before. It tore me right through, having something or someone you love taken away in an instant, a thumb click, and then what are you supposed to do with that!?
It took me a while to confront it and address it, but making music and writing about either it, or just anything, really helped. And I really didn’t want to write a totally depressing song about it at all as my father was such a spark of energy in my life, not to mention how much of a comedian he always was, so there’s this healthy balance of sadness and having fun with the memories.
Thousand Places
This track was always intended to follow the track “Song For Dad”, it’s those feelings and issues that followed all of the events after he passed away and that feeling of wanting to be somewhere else, anywhere else, so in the lyrics, I did actually go to Paris and Sicily, but sadly not the Pyrenees. It’s always that notion in travelling heals the mind and I think sometimes you just need to reset everything going on around you and in your life, but not to run away from things, just to weigh up all the shit and re-jig it so you can continue to function like a normal person, which I think I rarely ever am haha.
With my father, there’s obviously my mother in the equation too, so there’s a lot of her scattering around in this song, in how brave and strong she had become and I never wanted her to feel like she wasn’t doing enough or did enough for me and my two sisters around that time; a load of personal, strange yet funny memories in the lyrics that maybe only I would understand, I guess I like writing songs for myself, above everything else.
I always felt this track had a Leonard Cohen thing about it, never intentional, but it’s those nylon acoustics and the reverb/echo twiddly guitars, that and the vocal is pretty much all that goes on in this track, it really didn’t need anything else, I’d painted the picture I wanted and why mess with that
Excited For Something
Driving further out of a hole, walking around town, observing people, working my job, smoking, drinking, a lot of loneliness and taking on a few new traits passed on from my father. I wanted to write a lyrically uplifting song and how you know something’s coming, with every step you take you’re one step closer to something good happening, I hope.
The more pretty side of what The Velvet Underground influence had on me, in terms of those guitar sounds in how I stuck that electric guitar that rides right through this track. I’ve always loved that sound, The Velvets had that droopy, sweet and beautiful guitar thing floating around effortlessly, whilst on the flip side, they could also be totally rock n roll and grab you by the heart. I feel like there’s a bit of a David Kilgour sound that attaches itself to this track too, maybe it’s the vocals. Oh and I stuck a stomping African bongo at the end, yeah I like that.
Hotter Than a Canteen
Probably the most outlandish track on the album, I don’t even know how the lyrics came about, picking apples? eating baked beans? A song for the foodies maybe. I had a problem with the cost of living, and the high price of just buying the things you needed to survive, against the mirroring of how ridiculous the material world has become, nothing never seems to be enough, just give us more more more, it doesn’t matter what the fuck it is, just make it, we’ll buy it, stick it in the machine and let it work on everyone. “When you’re pointing arrows, when you’re killing thieves”; people around the world dying just trying to get a decent meal. Ah, I don’t know, there’s something not right going on in this world if we find it ok in wasting money, effort and time on a shitshow like Brexit when really there’re so many more important things to be addressing. A simple waltz beat, 80s keyboards flying around, and a guitar riff I fell in love with right away, it’s all just so odd but nevertheless, I found it the most amusing backing piece of music for the lyrics I had put together.
Wearing The Wrong Clothes
A silly number, but this is a favourite of mine, I think you have to realise that I don’t always know what I’m writing about until after I’ve written it. It’s maybe about trying to find a disco, it’s maybe about dancing, it’s maybe about not being sure what you want to wear half the time, that with a load of magical nonsense chucked in for good measure, I can’t really say much more on the writing of it haha. I’ve always loved Wreckless Eric and his childlike attitude to songwriting, so I stole a little from him in that sense. I had to balance out the more serious songs with the more humorous ones too. It just felt like a good way to end the album.
Pre-Order via: https://garylover.bandcamp.com/