After his first two albums sold next to nothing and his music career sputtered out in the early 1970s, Bill Fay settled into what you might call a normal life. He worked as a groundskeeper for a London park, then as a fish packer in a supermarket, all the while raising his children. He never tried to launch a comeback, but he did keep writing and recording songs with a keyboard and a small 8-track. Between Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow, his unreleased studio album from the late ’70s, and Life Is People, his comeback album in 2012, Fay wrote hundreds if not thousands of spare hymns about the world around him and his place in it, with no other audience in mind beyond himself. “I’m thankful that side of my life has continued for all my life,” he told the New York Times recently, “finding songs in the corner of the room.”
Countless Branches, his third album since being coaxed back into releasing music, hints at what those unreleased recordings might sound like. Compared to Life Is People and 2015’s Who Is the Sender?, both of which fleshed out his songs with folk-rock accompaniment, this album adds so little that when a simple timekeeping beat arrives on “Your Little Face,” it feels almost deafening. The palette recalls Nick Cave’s The Boatman’s Call, another album whose austerity makes the songs sound louder, their sentiments thornier, their melodies more elegant. Producer Joshua Henry, who brought Fay out of obscurity nearly 10 years ago, keeps the focus squarely on the singer-songwriter himself and his troubled relationship with the world. His time-tempered voice may have lost the accusatory power it had on 1971’s Time of Last Persecution, but it has gained a tenderness that imbues even the smallest moments with immense gravity.
The spare palette also heightens the conflicts Fay addresses in his lyrics. They’re essentially the same ones he’s been singing about his entire life, at least on the songs that he has released: the individual versus the community, the draw of other people versus the need to escape in nature and solitude, and his own wavering faith in humanity. “Yeah, everyone knows it, it’s self-evident,” he sings on opener “In Human Hands,” “this world ain’t safe in human hands.” And when he’s overcome with awe on “Filled with Wonder Once Again,” it’s accompanied by the horror of “how this world sure can keep a man in chains.”
The album is beautifully and judiciously arranged, but a collection of bonus tracks on the expanded edition show how Countless Branches might have sounded with more instruments and more people. The music is lovely and lush, but these band versions of “How Long, How Long” and “Love Will Remain” point more to Henry as a producer than to Fay as an artist. They’re a useful point of comparison, showing just how complex this album is, how tender and forgiving and wonderstruck. That quiet corner of the room affords him an inspiring view of the world.
Buy: Rough Trade
