Bio
One year ago, Sam Jacobs, performing under his moniker The Flying Change, released his debut album of love, loss, and reckoning titled “Pain Is A Reliable Signal”. The album was a searing and brutally introspective accounting of a family’s journey through hospitals, hotel rooms in Minnesota, emergency rooms on the Upper East Side. And out again. Seeking a series of cures and treatments that might alleviate a terrible condition.
Praise was uniform and glowing for the debut. The New Yorker called it “first rate”, UK-based Drowned In Sound proclaimed that “the rest of the world retreats while it’s playing”, Magnet dubbed it “elegiac”, and Blurt remarked that the record was “deeply felt, beautifully put together, and life affirming.”
Now, one year later, Jacobs says goodbye to all that.
Taking a break from writing and building for the Pain follow-up, he takes a dramatic turn with his new two song dance-inspired EP called “Singer/Songwriter”
“I love the first record. And the follow-up will be an extension of what we were doing with landscape pop,” Jacobs reflects. “But, like everyone I guess, there were other ideas that I’ve had bouncing around. I kept hearing that one phrase, ‘I quit my job’ over and over in my head and needed to do something with it.”
The result is a two-song meditation on escapism. With a tongue-in-check sensibility and playfulness, Jacobs tackles the conflict between what is real and what might have been, the tension between the corporate professional world of stability and the romantic illusion of artistic freedom.
“The songs are about ideas and preconceptions. The songs are about fantasy. And they’re about stealing cars and the children that go with them,” Jacobs deadpans.
Jacobs recruited friend, engineer, mixer and recording artist Nancy Hess to work out the kinks and the sounds around these ideas. He supplied the themes, the words, and the melodic foundation and Hess worked out the beats – layering and mixing the sounds until the songs became something more real. She also added her backing vocals to the songs, lifting them beyond the maudlin into a strange kind of juxtaposed pop exuberance.
The resulting sound is some combination of LCD Soundsystem-inspired dance rhythms and the literate lyrical content that Jacobs displayed to such effect on his debut. Jacobs calls it “escapist electro-pop“. The first song, “Singer” spins a dark and sinister dance beat to Jacobs as the seedy dilettante. A tale that, in a come-to-God dénouement, he admits is fantasy. Throughout, he chants in the background, “I quit my job” – the drone serving both as rhythmic refrain and corporate metaphor.
“Songwriter” changes directions and introduces more narrative sequences of verses, in the vein of traditional Dylan songs ala “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” or “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.” The lyrics a chain of cascading observations and reflections mapped to a series of shifting and skittering electronic beats. Against the sound collage created by Hess, Jacobs weaves a fabric of pop culture references and allusions to folks like David Foster Wallace, Paul Weller and Jack Keruoac. As with “Singer”, Hess uses her production aesthetic (and her voice) to pull the songs back to a toe-tapping hummable groove, injecting whimsy and life into Jacobs meditations.
Collectively, the two song set packs a powerful and surprising wallop. Jacobs has taken the poetry and melodic sensibility that informed his breakout debut, but traded the broken-hearted affection for something crueler, funnier, and more harrowing. The result is energizing.
The Flying Change performs regularly in New York, mainly as a 13-piece orchestral landscape pop outfit. Sam and producer Paul Brill are in the midst of growing the next batch of songs that will turn into the aforementioned full-length follow-up record, “Living At The Movies”.
