After releasing Guesswork in 2019, Lloyd Cole continued working on new material for the next album. At first, the extension of new songs was meant to be a continuation of Guesswork but soon morphed into another line of stories. “It was clearly a kind of a big jump for me to try and join the two aspects of my work into one,” Cole tells American Songwriter. Years after the release of his 1993 album, Bad Vibes, which he called “kind of a disaster,” he enforced a “demarcation rule” on his music after his first attempt at fusing more synthetic soundscapes and songs.
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“It didn’t go very well, but then I found myself thinking, ‘I want to see if I can make something using my aesthetics for songs, and also for sound, as much as music,” says. Cole. “One of the reasons it took me so long to get started on ‘Guesswork’ was because I was obviously frightened and overawed by the fact that I knew it was going to be incredibly difficult, and I knew it was something that I had to do in this room that I’m in now on my own because it wasn’t collaborative.”
Produced by Cole, executive produced by Adam and the Ants drummer Chris Merrick Hughes, and mixed by Olaf Opal, Guesswork was the beginning of something more explorative, says Cole. “I only knew that I had to trust my aesthetics and see if it could be possible,” he says. “Then when we’ve got about halfway on thirds of the way through the project, and we knew it could be possible, then it was just a lot of work.”
For the next album, Cole insisted on not working solo and planned to decamp at Hughes’ studio in Wiltshire, England. Shortly after reconnecting with the producer, Cole was forced to return to his home in Easthampton, Massachusetts, when the pandemic hit. There, he sat alone again, with his songs for On Pain.
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“There’s a remove from spontaneity working in this manner,” said Cole of the mostly solitary work around his 13th album. “The ideas come spontaneously, but we have much longer to think about them because of the delay going back and forth. Had we made a record together in Wiltshire over a couple of months, it could have been a completely different album because this [solo] process gives you longer to mull over things. Even if you don’t want to, you have the time.”
Recorded inside Cole’s Easthampton attic studio, The Establishment, On Pain was still a collaborative effort with four tracks co-written with his former Commotions bandmates Neil Clark and Blair Cowan, who also collaborated on Guesswork.
Ruminating on a more remorseful turn of events, Cole embraces some of the sorrow on the opening title track Oh, you can trust me with your sorrow / And you can trust me with your pain / And I will bury them deep down / We’ll never speak of them again.
Like something out of a J.G. Ballard novel—or not—“Warm by the Fire” approaches more universal inequalities and imbalances. We got dead television pyres / Scraping up to the sky / Monuments to our ingenuity / We got our mojo working / We got kerosene working / Behold the fruits of our industry sings Cole on the “more aggressive” tracks, and one his son likened to David Bowie.
“When my son was listening to the record, he said ‘Warm By the Fire’ sounds like Bowie,’” says Cole “I was like ‘Really? Well, that’s cool.’ I’m hoping it sounds like ’77 Bowie.”
Cole takes another swing at Bowie on two buddies’ vagabond tale of “The Idiot.” The song serves as an homage to Bowie’s Berling Trilogy era, 1976-1977, his pilgrimage away from drugs and move to Berlin with Iggy Pop. Next time you’re turning blue / We’ll move to Berlin / Stop being drug addicts / We’ll cycle and swim sings Cole channeling an imagined conversation between the two.
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Throughout On Pain, Cole is making peace with some of the harsher realities on the hypnotic synth-dipped “This Can’t Be Happening,” playing solely on its chorus alone—You can’t believe it / It can’t be possible / But it’s happening now—through the more uptempo “More of What You Are.”
Closing On Pain is Cole’s seven-plus minute saga “Wolves,” inspired by the notion of a pack of wolves learning about humanity by listening to an old transistor radio set to AM radio. “Wolves” was accompanied by several remixes, including one by Cole and Hughes, along with Martyn Ware (The Human League, Heaven 17) and composer Charles Stooke, Mogwai multiinstrumentalist Barry Burns, and Guesswork co-producer Opal.
Cole credits Hughes with helping him follow through with On Pain. “Without Chris, I think I probably would have second-guessed myself,” shares Cole. “I probably wouldn’t have been able to complete the project, but because he is such an amazing producer … he really makes you feel like you’ve got what’s needed to get the job done. He makes you feel good about your abilities, but he’s also incredibly exacting, and he’s smart enough not to ask you to do all of the things that he thinks might be possible in a song, but he’s very sneaky.”
By the time the album was ready to mix, Cole returned to Wiltshire where they ended up adding on more overdubs that Hughes had been thinking about, including the strings on the On Pain track “More of What You Are,” which weren’t in Cole’s original arrangement.
“I wasn’t expecting that at all,” says Cole. “He’s very proactive, but at the same time, he’s very conscious of not messing with the basic aesthetic of the record. The basic aesthetic of the record is still mine.”
To complement his work on the album, Cole also started using Patreon, which stimulated another creative side to On Pain with the extension of his Notebook Project. Using the platform to connect with fans, Cole shared live performances and also traced back to the writing of individual songs, sharing notebooks of notes, photos of lyric pages pulled from any given year, and the backstory of some older tracks. In the process of divulging the roots of his catalog of songs, he also found the title for “More of What You Are,” which he wrote nearly three decades earlier.
“I was looking in this notebook from 1994, and I found a note that said ‘More of What You Are,’” says Cole, “so I’ve actually had that idea for almost 30 years, and I finally got to use it.”
When it comes to lyrics, Cole admits that he only allows Hughes and longtime collaborator Dave Derby to discuss his songs with him. “He [Hughes] understands how my lyrics work, when they do and when they don’t, as well as anybody,” says Cole, “So if he makes a suggestion for a lyrical change I’ll take it seriously.”
“For the [‘On Pain’] title track, the first time the chorus came along I had ‘But you can trust me with your sorrow,” and the second time I sang ‘Oh, you can trust me with your sorrow,” and Chris said that the ‘oh’ was so much more lovelier than the ‘but,’ because it was more romantic. It’s things like that that you don’t see when you’re when you’re so close to it.”
At first, Cole wanted to call the album Pain and the Untrained Heart before his son said it sounded like a “late-period” Paul McCartney album title. “I immediately emailed everybody and said the album’s now called ‘On Pain,’ and everybody just went ‘That’s much better.’” He adds, “I like the title of the album because I like the idea that we sing on pain as opposed to the song being about pain. It’s presenting the aesthetic that I like.”
Nearly 40 years since he and the Commotions debuted with Rattlesnakes—and released two more albums before they disbanded in 1989—it’s taken Cole some time to generate the type of music he’s always wanted to create. That momentum began, Cole says, with his sixth album Music in a Foreign Language, and through the present.
“‘Broken Record’ (2010) was the right record for me to make at the time,” he says, “but I’m not sure if I want to make a record that could be called Americana ever again. I was really into learning to play the banjo and I was really into 1960s country music at the time, so it made sense.”
Cole’s tenth album, Standards, released in 2013, was also a “surprise,” since he was not expecting to make another rock album. “I didn’t expect to write any more rock and roll songs, and somewhere in the middle of the writing process, I just thought, ‘Shit, I’m writing rock songs,’” says Cole. “I didn’t mean to do it, but to be able to get back together with Matthew [Sweet] and [drummer] Fred Maher the same rhythm section that I had fun as early solo records was great fun.”
He adds, “I’ve been feeling good about the records that I’ve made. I’ve felt like I was lost in the mid to late-’90s, and I’m lucky that the records I made aren’t worse than they are.”
Then again, there’s nothing wrong with being a little “lost,” says Cole. “He [Bowie] was lost for 20 years, so I never feel too bad about the fact that I’ve been lost now and then,” he says. “In the mid-’90s, I was pretty lost. For me, the ’90s and 2000s, I’m not excited by any of those records. They’ve got some good tracks here and there but overall, it wasn’t really until the last two records that I thought he found himself again. So if somebody that great can get lost…”
Cole continues, “Prince was the same. Prince was amazing from 1980 to 1990, and he was lost as well, and [Bob] Dylan went AWOL for very long periods. It’s hard to maintain. Everybody gets lost at some point. Hopefully, you can find your way back.”
Photos: Mark Dellas / Courtesy of Vicious Kid PR
