By The Fireside - The Greatest Show on Earth
The Dwarf caught up with Daniel Lea a.k.a. By The Fireside to discuss the history, recording and the circus.
The Hartford Circus Fire occurred at an afternoon performance of the Ringling Brothers Circus in Connecticut in 1944. One of the most known fatalities was a girl named Little Miss 1565 (called so because of the number assigned to her in the morgue), she was referenced by The Offspring in 'Jennifer Lost the War', and now By The Fireside, Daniel Lea, has used the event as the muse for his new album, aptly titled The Great Hartford Fire.
The inspiration initially sparked because “I work part time at this film shop which specialises in classics and world cinema, it’s a really really good film shop, and I started watching a lot of films that were based in the circus for some reason, a film called Nightmare Alley, a 50s film which is based in a carnival, and also La Strada, which is a Fellini film. Then I was just in a bookstore in town and I went into the circus section, after watching these films I wanted to buy some books of imagery and stuff, which is where I found this book The Circus Fire [by Stewart O’Nan] which was an account on the Hartford Fire in 1944. I bought the book and finished reading it in my girlfriend’s parent’s summer house in country Sweden, and I was just blown away by the story, mainly because there’s so much imagery within the story and the guy, Robert Segee, who started the fires”. Having said that, “no one ever knew [if it was Segee who started the fires], because he suffered from a lot of delusions”.
Mostly, the story became the inspiration because “there was just so much imagery to draw from, from the circus and the character [Segee] and all the characters around the circus, and the music and everything. I kinda started writing all this stuff to do with that and then it just naturally” became the album. “For me it created this little world that I could live in for a while, and there was so much to draw from it that I kind of revelled in it. It’s easier for me to work like that, I normally work like that, if I can really get into a subject or a story then I can get lost in it, and then the album kinda fits together as a whole, and I kinda like when that happens. I know it’s a strange thing to write about but when it’s a tragic thing there are a lot of beautiful things to draw from it.”
The Great Hartford Fire was recorded by Lea at Golden Hum Studios, his own studio in Stoke Newington, London. “The process for me is my favourite bit. Writing the albums and doing all that basically.”
The self-recording process for this album was different to your standard production because “I never rehearsed these songs, I just kind of wrote them and then recorded them with about 6 different musicians. It would just be me in my studio with a drummer, or you know, showing them the little song basically the demo and where I wanted it to go, then I’d do the drums and everything would happen like that over the course of a year and a half".
“I normally work on the songs by myself, and then when the song’s kinda ready to go, I’d record the drums over whatever I had as a guide track and then I’d go away and edit what we did and then I’d play a lot of the instruments over the top of that.” As the songs develop, Lea finds that “they all kinda go in different directions; it starts in one sort of thing and goes somewhere I completely didn’t know it was going to go. That comes with playing with people, I normally edit it all and produce most of it, so whatever anyone played I can kinda edit all the pieces I like from what they played and do it like that”.
This process means that some of the tracks “are happy accidents”. For the next record (yes he’s started thinking about it already), “I don’t want to do it like that because I’ve done it like that and it’s great, but it takes a lot of time. I’m going to try and do it different next time around. I just want to strip it back a bit and do just a guitar, piano, drums, and bass record. I’ll be making a lot of different sounds with those instruments, but I kinda want to make it more sort of played in live, most of it. I want to see if I can do a record in a month this time”.
The Great Hartford Fire is a deeply layered, somewhat epic, album which translates to a live show through a five piece band. There’s “Jeanette, [who] plays violin, a keyboard, like an organ sound, a piano sound, and a sampler. Then we’ve got a drummer, a bass player, a guy that plays guitar and a synth, and then I sing and play guitar, and that’s it really. It’s a lot like the record, but we don’t play the whole record live”. Set list selection is really “a matter of what’s going to work live, and what I can actually play live. Not every song I can actually play live on that record, I suppose you just rehearse everything and some come more naturally than others live”.
So will the follow up to this record have such a strong theme? “I have no idea! I’ve only just started writing some music for the next record and thinking about it. Normally, I’ll kind of start writing the music for the record, and I’ll have a few ideas and then I’ll start watching loads and loads of films and reading lots and then something comes out of that. [It’s] just like research before starting any big thing.”
The Great Hartford Fire is out in Australia now through Rogue Records. Fingers are crossed for a tour in 2008.
