Fenne Lily - Hollywood and Fear
British singer/songwriter Fenne Lily, who these days calls New York her home, manages to make a banjo sound beautiful and “just right” in the sparsely instrumented “Hollywood and Fear,” a new bonus track from the upcoming expanded edition of her April 2023 album Big Picture. The restrained production provides all the more space for Fenne’s mesmerizing and warm vocals to shine and invites us to really listen to what she has to say. Of course, there’s a lot going on in “Hollywood and Fear,” as Fenne Lily explains:
“Growing up watching movies where love is shown to be a game that’s either won or lost gave me an unrealistic idea of the way people fall in and out of it. In actuality, the daily practice of learning how to be someone to someone without losing who you were when you found them is more scary and less sexy than any movie about this stuff. I wrote this song after an argument with the person I loved, an argument that boiled down to whether loving each other was enough to keep us together, when we seemed to bring out so much bad in each other. The question of whether I “want to be right or to be kind” is something I was thinking a lot about afterwards; it’s something my mum asked me constantly when I was a kid — I would argue until I lost the thread of the argument, when I could have easily let it go. So Hollywood and Fear is about figuring out when to hold on tightly versus when to let go.
We couldn’t figure out this one’s identity when we tracked Big Picture, and the person I was seeing at the time didn’t think it was one of the stronger songs. I kind of always disagreed but couldn’t work out how to make it work. I think I just needed time to remember why I wrote it in the first place. I mean it again now.”
Listen to “Hollywood and Fear,” our Song Pick of the Day:
Connect with Fenne Lily and add “Hollywood and Fear” to your playlist as we add it to our #glamglarepick playlist on Spotify and YouTube:
Photo Credit: Michael Tyrone Delaney
If you’re in New York in December, you’re in luck as the tickets to Fenne Lily’s three-day residency are not yet sold out, but her London shows are! So, get your tickets now and see you at Fenne Lily’s three Brooklyn shows (The Broadway, Purgatory, Union Pool) when she plays one of her three albums at each event. This will be epic!
Tracklisting of Big Picture (Expanded Edition)
out on November 10 via Dead Oceans
1. Map of Japan
2. Dawncolored Horse
3. Lights Light Up
4. 2+2
5. Superglued
6. Henry
7. Pick
8. In My Own Time
9. Red Deer Day
10. Half Finished
11. Dial Tone (Bonus Track)
12. Hollywood and Fear (Bonus Track)
13. Cathedral (Bonus Track)
14. 4 (Bonus Track)
15. In My Own Time (Demo)
