Andrew Spencer Goldman’s Fulton Lights project returns with the four-song EP Well the Night Has Come. Written and produced by Goldman and mixed by Grammy-nominated Tony Maimone (Pere Ubu, Book of Knots) at Studio G, the EP comes after a long fallow period and marks the first Fulton Lights recordings since 2018’s Moonwalking into the Future.
“There were whole years here where I just found myself with song ideas piling up, but I couldn’t finish them. Or maybe just wasn’t allowing myself to.” Returning collaborator TJ Lipple (Aloha) helped snap Goldman out of it. “I was bitching about feeling stuck and he was having none of it.” Lipple suggested matter-of-factly that they just book a day or two in the studio. “A welcome slap in the face from an old friend,” says Goldman.
The songs that came out of those sessions feel characteristically adventurous and varied, and richer for the break. There are themes of preservation and protection throughout, of fighting off encroaching threats in various permutations – to attention, to creativity, to self, to family, to the future – revealing a songwriter and producer finding new depth with age.
As with previous Fulton Lights releases, the songs sonically differ one to the next while having a common attention to texture with layers of acoustic and experimental sounds, and a devotion to the unexpected.
The Well the Night Has Come EP shows Fulton Lights continuing to find ways to surprise and innovate while aiming for the heart.
Today, Glide is premiering the album’s title track and video. “Well the Night Has Come” flips some of the lyrics of Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me” into a dark lullaby, a father’s song to a child in the face of something terrifying. While the sleek indie soul production may not bring to mind its inspiration at first listen, the song carries some similar elements of the classic – vibrato electric guitar, cabasa, triangle, a string arrangement from Karen Waltuch (75 Dollar Bill, Wilco) – but it’s an intentionally disguised and subtle homage. The drums rumble and echo disquietingly, the distorted casio feels simultaneously out of place and also very obviously the right thing. The result is a song that feels unequivocally new yet warmly nostalgic in a strangely pleasing way. The combination of orchestral textures with expansive and enchanting sonic landscapes gives the song a pleasant and dreamy groove that pulls you into its embrace.
Andrew Goldman adescribes the inspiration behind the song and video:
“I used to sing ‘Stand by Me’ to my older child as one of a handful of greatest-ever kind of love songs almost every night at bedtime, and the repetition of the act really drilled the song into me in a way that it hadn’t previously. Twisting the words around here, it carries a lot of my own fears about the future, but the song is still full of love.”
Video director James Thacher adds his commentary on the trippy visuals:
“The video was built frame by frame using a mix of inkjet printing and hand painting, a process that let me explore how layered textures could respond directly to the layered sound of the song. I printed each frame on a single sheet of paper in grids (sometimes up to 100 per page) with many no larger than a fingernail. Scanning them at high resolution revealed the fibrous texture of the paper and unpredictable artifacts of the printing process, which became part of the animation’s movement. The song reminded me of a journey over water, of being submerged, something between swimming and dreaming, so I wanted the visual language to drift, fragment, and recombine in a way that felt tactile and dreamlike.”
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