Fenne Lily: 'I struggle with the idea of something being sad'

“I think I needed something completely different after Covid, I was so understimulated,” says the 26-year-old, explaining how she settled into life in the Big Apple last September. For a while she found herself in “a stressful part of Bushwick” but has now moved and turns the camera on her laptop to reveal her new surroundings in a tree-lined avenue bathed in spring sunshine. “It’s kind of a bit like Bristol in my house, which is exactly what I wanted,” she says.

A change of “scenery” was what she felt she needed after lockdown. “If Covid showed us anything, it was that you don’t need to be anywhere in particular to do the job that I’m doing,” she says. Big Picture, her third album, out tomorrow, was written in Bristol and recorded in the US. “I feel like I’ve exhausted that pool of inspiration now from Bristol, so (the move) was more for me and to feel more part of the world,” she says.

Lily forged a connection with the States when she toured there with Lucy Dacus back in 2018 and is now signed to the American indie label Dead Oceans. “I feel that the kind of people that are making the kind of music that I’m making are primarily Stateside,” she says. “I’m so grateful to the music scene in Bristol, it’s non-competitive, everyone’s helping everyone out, it’s very community-minded, but the music that was coming out of Bristol while I was making music there wasn’t really similar to mine, so I wanted to be somewhere that was more often than not guitar music of a singer-songwriter ilk that I was hanging out with and watching the shows.”

Big Picture is Lily’s attempt to make sense of the breakdown of her own relationship during the pandemic. “I don’t do therapy, which I probably should, but the way that I know that something is wrong is if I’m writing songs,” she says. “It’s kind of always been my last resort to figure out what I should do about any given thing. Over the course of 2020 and 2021 I was living with somebody; I’d never lived with a person I was dating before, that was hard, because I never really had space, so to take space I was like ‘I’m working on some songs, you can’t come in to the bedroom that we share’.

“It was a crutch in that way because it allowed me to have time to myself, and then during the writing process for every song I was recognising a common theme, which was I feel trapped but I also feel weirdly too free, I don’t have any responsibilities, which is kind of stressful in a way. I need to care about something or be more scared about something to make me feel like I’m spending my time in a way that is worthwhile.”

Like millions of others, she found lockdown claustrophobic. “The whole time that it was happening I was feeling like if only I could drive it would be different, if I was better at exercising more regularly I would be happier,” she says. “I was constantly making myself feel bad for the way I was exisiting, and then when lockdown lifted I realised that wasn’t special to Covid the way that I was thinking about myself; that was just how I dealt with things before that as well, so maybe that was part of the reason why I decided to move because living your life saying if I was in a different place I would feel different, if I looked different I would feel different, it’s really tiring and unhealthy.

“The coolest person I know is my Nana, I don’t think she would be doing that or at least she wouldn’t be talking about it.”

Big Picture isn’t the first record that Lily wrote in isolation. She penned her previous album, Breach, alone in Berlin. “Being alone is really helpful for me to focus on something or maybe not even focus, maybe just have a paralysing fear of going outside – that was the case in Berlin for the first week, I was so frightened because I’d never been alone in a foreign country before, and the the same for Covid, because I was scared that I would die if I went outside. I feel like that’s a pressure cooker for me making stuff, to be alone and have an element of fear that leads to introspection or discomfort. Feeling a little bit uncomfortable is good for me to make things. Maybe it’s like a fight or flight thing.”

In the song Lights Light Up, Lily is conscious of her relationship being transitory, long before it actually ended. Neverthless she says she finds her writerly voice taking over “less and less” these days. “I felt with that song it achieved what I was trying to do, which was to pinpoint the landmarks of the relationship – the very beginning, the first kiss, the first time that I realised I was with the right person and then the first time I realisedI was with the wrong person,” she says. “I feel like every relationship has those parts to them, maybe more than once. I feel like you can fall out and back in love with people without breaking up, without separating. I really wanted to remind myself how that relationship had played out​​​​​​​ because I think in retrospect it’s easy to see a relationship, a time, a period of life in a linear way.

“Even if you’re writing about an illness – I was well, I got sick, I got better – there’s so many different ups and downs in those ​​​​​​​time chunks that you’re laying out for yourself, and this relationship that I was writing about was like 12 relationships in one. I think probably all Covid relationships were like that, where it was suddenly ‘OK, I guess we’re married, now I guess we get a dog, I don’t really know how I’ve become this person but here I am’. But that was kind of like a monthly cycle, so I wanted to solidify the main reasons why that relationship was real love, and it did end, but it ended loads of times and it started ​​​​​​​loads of times. The song is like a sketch of the whole shape of that love, I guess.”

She contrasts Big Picture with her two previous albums. “​​​​​​​For the last record, ​​​​​​​it was about being alone but not being lonely. For the first record, it was like straight up a break-up record or many break-ups. But I feel with this one​​​​​​​ it’s maybe best defined by the space between being comfortable and uncomfortable ​​​​​​​in terms of a relationship and in terms of being a person in the world that’s alive. I think we all struggle withthinking ‘Am I in the right place? Am I being a good enough person? Am I doing the people that love me justice​​​​​​​? Am I doing myself justice​​​​​​​?’ All of those quandaries.”

Despite the emotional tumult, Big Picture is not a sad-sounding album. Lily says her intention was to frame the songs brightly. “I struggle with the idea of something being sad, I think it’s an easy way for somebody to minimise soemthing and take it for face value immediately,” she says. “I think if people use the word thoughtful instead of sad I don’t know if it would change anything, but it would make me feel better.

“I was gravitating towards records that didn’t shout to be heard while I was making this record in lockdown. I think there’s a really cool thing happening in music now where of course there’s TikTok songs and The Killers still but there’s also the Big Thiefs of the world and Phoebe Bridgers and Christian Lee Hudson, who worked on this record with me as well, that old-fashioned focus on instrumentation and building a scene.

“When you put on a Big Thief record or a Phoebe Bridgers record or a Christian Lee Hudson record, you know the space sonically that you’re making for yourself. It’s not so dynamic that they’re trying to prove that they could be loads of different people in this record, it’s like you choose to put this record on because you want to be in that headspace.

“I wanted to make a record that was consistent in that way and not a record where there are two upbeat singles and the rest are like filler tracks. I don’t f*** with that, I wanted to make something that was a world in itself. That’s probably not going to be a headspace that everyone wants to be in all the time, but you know that it’s there if you want it.”

Big Picture is out on Friday April 14. Fenne Lily plays at Brudenell Social Club, Leeds on Saturday April 15.