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Bastille

Bastille

In a world where we are encouraged to examine our inner selves, what would it feel like to immerse ourselves intimately in the stories of others? To hear about people who have experienced moments of magical connection – poets, artists, anthropologists, trailblazers and ordinary souls among them – and to lose ourselves in their lives as they emerge from spellbinding soundworlds? Welcome to “&” – Ampersand – a beautiful new project from Bastille’s Dan Smith. A collection of story songs that explores the worlds of startling women and men, fed by instinctive collaborations with friends and family, it emerged after Dan found himself with an empty diary for the first time in years. “We didn't have anything booked in. No gigs. No tours. No plans. So, I just started chasing these ideas and scratching a musical itch,” he explains. This itch spoke to the music he listened to as a child – things his parents played like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Simon Garfunkel and Bob Dylan, and the songs his mum used to play for her friends by Joan Baez and Leonard Cohen, which have resonated with him loudly through his life – and to artists he loved growing into adulthood, like Laura Marling, Anohni and Regina Spector. Dan also felt the pull to do something gentler after the more bombastic elements of touring. He wanted to make a record where the writing process took him back to the time before Bastille’s 2013 debut, “Bad Blood”, on which he wrote all of the songs solo and invited in friends for the recording process, in an organic, gentle way. “I wanted to make an album where it feels like someone talking to you, rather than turning up the volume – an album, for me, that was about putting aside any expectations anyone had about the music I make.” It was also about Dan finding a way to learn more about other people, using songwriting as his tool to educate himself and escape into their histories. The result is an album that feel made for headphones and deep listening, existing in a different sonic plain to the world of Bastille – although its melodies and accessibility will still be beautifully recognisable. Dan found the whole process a magical experience. “It’s the first time I've felt totally artistically free.” The roots of “&” began in the 2020 pandemic lockdown when Dan wrote “Leonard & Marianne”, over Zoom, with an American songwriter, Dan Wilson, inspired by the 2019 documentary Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love. Not being in the studio with his bandmates, the song lingered in Dan’s life in a quieter, peculiar way. “The only way for it to exist in the world was if I played it to friends – and I'm quite shy. I'm definitely not the guy at a party who likes getting his guitar out and playing tunes!” When restrictions lifted, and he finally reconnected with his friends, they got him drunk enough to play it. “And then there it was, out there in the world.” Dan loved the idea of writing about moments of connection between people but had no interest in restricting himself to the stories of 20th-century white heterosexual couples. So he burrowed into research and consulted historian friend, Emma Nagouse to broaden his field of ideas. “History, myth, film, TV, pop culture have always offered me canvasses to write on, or an angle into a subject," he points out, "but now I was doing this more deeply, and I loved it.” This desire will come as no surprise for anyone who knows Dan’s film fandom: his David Bowie, he says, with a laugh, "was David Lynch", and he is a patron of the Pilton Palais cinema at Glastonbury. He's also hosted a books podcast for the BBC with Simon Savidge, Turn Up For The Books. But the desire to make an intimate record was growing at the same time that Dan was working on the score for David Attenborough’s landmark series Planet Earth III with composer Hans Zimmer last year – beavering away with his headphones and laptop backstage on tour. The work made him think about music’s power being rooted in a precious intimacy between song and listener – something that had clashed against the experiences of fame he experienced with Bastille – whose debut single, “Pompeii”, was a global smash hit, and who have had three no. 1 UK albums. “Over the years, I’ve always wanted to do everything in my power to try and shift that idea of the fame being about us. It's about the things we've made, rather than about us as people.” In other words, it's about the songs and the stories, magically binding distant souls together. And on “&”, Dan gives himself up almost completely to the stories of others – although he laughs that the first track, “Intro & Narrators”, sets out his thoughts as to what comes next (like opening tracks have before on Bastille records). “I really wanted to say, who am I to tell the story of these other people? Particularly people who have very different lives to me.” So, to gorgeously fingerpicked guitar, he positions himself softly in the background, the stories becoming "a mirror back on everything", the people within them arriving “bigger, bolder, braver” than he’ll “ever be”. For this track, Dan also made a one-take video recently in the Bermuda Triangle, floating in a life jacket as a drone camera pulls away to show what lies outside this human being – the wider earth, the horizon beyond. It's a perfect visual reference to suggest what comes next – and off we soar, rushing into beautiful, disparate worlds, Dan as a presence in the wider picture, as we join him on his journey. “I never wanted to be the main character Pretty fucked up there in the light I’d rather sit at the kitchen table and just start to hitchhike…” And so, we travel. We meet women who have been wrongly framed and misunderstood in myth, culture and society in songs like Eve & Paradise Lost, Emily & Her Penthouse In The Sky (about the revolutionary internal life of 19th-century poet Emily Dickinson) and Marie & Polonium (about the Nobel-winning scientist Marie Curie, a woman rejected by the country she was born in and her adopted France, who save many millions of lives with the work that ultimately killed her). In tracks like Zheng Yi Sao & Questions For Her (about the most successful Chinese pirate), Essie & Paul (about the open marriage of singer Paul Robeson and his anthropologist wife Essie) and Mademoiselle & The Nunnery Blaze (about a 18th- century French opera singer who became a wanted criminal) we meet fascinating individuals neglected by mainstream history. Among other explorations of artists like Oscar Wilde and mythological characters like Narcissus, we also find The Soprano & Her Wanderings, sung by regular Bastille collaborator Bim – a track Dan knew she had to sing, ‘It’s a story Bim told me, a real sliding doors moment.’ Then comes the gorgeous Blue Sky & the Painter, about an artist’s relationship with his depression, the difficult engine that allows him to create. Dan recorded a video of it recently in the middle of the Sargasso Sea, one of the most important marine ecosystems on the planet where he was invited by Greenpeace to raise awareness of protecting our oceans. Then there’s the album’s beautiful closer, Telegraph Road 1977 & 2024, inspired by the poems Dan’s father wrote as a young man. He showed them to his son when Dan was a shy, awkward teenager” searching for inspiration for songs. A poem about homelessness his father observed in America stayed in Dan’s heart – he first turned it into a song as a teenager, before rewriting it several times over the years. This 2024 version acknowledges both how surreal it is to be singing his father’s old words nearly half a century after he wrote them, but also how fortunate Dan has been to travel around America, while seeing, sadly and depressingly, how little has changed. This version also features one of the album’s most precious elements: Dan’s mum on backing vocals, which for him was "a very special moment". It took Dan back to when she would come home from her tiring day job, have her friends round, and how they would encourage her to get out her guitar and sing songs at the end of the night. It made him realise that his relationship with music “came a lot via the folk convention of hearing someone storytelling with a guitar – and that my first hearing of so many songs was with my mum singing them.” They recorded the backing vocals in Northamptonshire on her birthday, Dan says. “And it was really, really nice. It's a lovely thing to have on the record. A love of music as a channel for storytelling, shared in the spirit of gentility and intimacy, is what “&” is about. It being an album performed in organic, natural ways with cherished friends and family only adds to its soul, filling it with warmth and the gorgeous, soft energy of connection.“&” is a collection of songs about looking out at the world, disappearing into other lives rather than into ourselves, and about the humanity that can crackle and shimmer as a consequence. And as Dan sings: "If it's gonna make us happy, if it’s gonna set us free, if it’s gonna hold us steady/ Then it’s what we need."

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About 
Bastille

In a world where we are encouraged to examine our inner selves, what would it feel like to immerse ourselves intimately in the stories of others? To hear about people who have experienced moments of magical connection – poets, artists, anthropologists, trailblazers and ordinary souls among them – and to lose ourselves in their lives as they emerge from spellbinding soundworlds? Welcome to “&” – Ampersand – a beautiful new project from Bastille’s Dan Smith. A collection of story songs that explores the worlds of startling women and men, fed by instinctive collaborations with friends and family, it emerged after Dan found himself with an empty diary for the first time in years. “We didn't have anything booked in. No gigs. No tours. No plans. So, I just started chasing these ideas and scratching a musical itch,” he explains. This itch spoke to the music he listened to as a child – things his parents played like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Simon Garfunkel and Bob Dylan, and the songs his mum used to play for her friends by Joan Baez and Leonard Cohen, which have resonated with him loudly through his life – and to artists he loved growing into adulthood, like Laura Marling, Anohni and Regina Spector. Dan also felt the pull to do something gentler after the more bombastic elements of touring. He wanted to make a record where the writing process took him back to the time before Bastille’s 2013 debut, “Bad Blood”, on which he wrote all of the songs solo and invited in friends for the recording process, in an organic, gentle way. “I wanted to make an album where it feels like someone talking to you, rather than turning up the volume – an album, for me, that was about putting aside any expectations anyone had about the music I make.” It was also about Dan finding a way to learn more about other people, using songwriting as his tool to educate himself and escape into their histories. The result is an album that feel made for headphones and deep listening, existing in a different sonic plain to the world of Bastille – although its melodies and accessibility will still be beautifully recognisable. Dan found the whole process a magical experience. “It’s the first time I've felt totally artistically free.” The roots of “&” began in the 2020 pandemic lockdown when Dan wrote “Leonard & Marianne”, over Zoom, with an American songwriter, Dan Wilson, inspired by the 2019 documentary Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love. Not being in the studio with his bandmates, the song lingered in Dan’s life in a quieter, peculiar way. “The only way for it to exist in the world was if I played it to friends – and I'm quite shy. I'm definitely not the guy at a party who likes getting his guitar out and playing tunes!” When restrictions lifted, and he finally reconnected with his friends, they got him drunk enough to play it. “And then there it was, out there in the world.” Dan loved the idea of writing about moments of connection between people but had no interest in restricting himself to the stories of 20th-century white heterosexual couples. So he burrowed into research and consulted historian friend, Emma Nagouse to broaden his field of ideas. “History, myth, film, TV, pop culture have always offered me canvasses to write on, or an angle into a subject," he points out, "but now I was doing this more deeply, and I loved it.” This desire will come as no surprise for anyone who knows Dan’s film fandom: his David Bowie, he says, with a laugh, "was David Lynch", and he is a patron of the Pilton Palais cinema at Glastonbury. He's also hosted a books podcast for the BBC with Simon Savidge, Turn Up For The Books. But the desire to make an intimate record was growing at the same time that Dan was working on the score for David Attenborough’s landmark series Planet Earth III with composer Hans Zimmer last year – beavering away with his headphones and laptop backstage on tour. The work made him think about music’s power being rooted in a precious intimacy between song and listener – something that had clashed against the experiences of fame he experienced with Bastille – whose debut single, “Pompeii”, was a global smash hit, and who have had three no. 1 UK albums. “Over the years, I’ve always wanted to do everything in my power to try and shift that idea of the fame being about us. It's about the things we've made, rather than about us as people.” In other words, it's about the songs and the stories, magically binding distant souls together. And on “&”, Dan gives himself up almost completely to the stories of others – although he laughs that the first track, “Intro & Narrators”, sets out his thoughts as to what comes next (like opening tracks have before on Bastille records). “I really wanted to say, who am I to tell the story of these other people? Particularly people who have very different lives to me.” So, to gorgeously fingerpicked guitar, he positions himself softly in the background, the stories becoming "a mirror back on everything", the people within them arriving “bigger, bolder, braver” than he’ll “ever be”. For this track, Dan also made a one-take video recently in the Bermuda Triangle, floating in a life jacket as a drone camera pulls away to show what lies outside this human being – the wider earth, the horizon beyond. It's a perfect visual reference to suggest what comes next – and off we soar, rushing into beautiful, disparate worlds, Dan as a presence in the wider picture, as we join him on his journey. “I never wanted to be the main character Pretty fucked up there in the light I’d rather sit at the kitchen table and just start to hitchhike…” And so, we travel. We meet women who have been wrongly framed and misunderstood in myth, culture and society in songs like Eve & Paradise Lost, Emily & Her Penthouse In The Sky (about the revolutionary internal life of 19th-century poet Emily Dickinson) and Marie & Polonium (about the Nobel-winning scientist Marie Curie, a woman rejected by the country she was born in and her adopted France, who save many millions of lives with the work that ultimately killed her). In tracks like Zheng Yi Sao & Questions For Her (about the most successful Chinese pirate), Essie & Paul (about the open marriage of singer Paul Robeson and his anthropologist wife Essie) and Mademoiselle & The Nunnery Blaze (about a 18th- century French opera singer who became a wanted criminal) we meet fascinating individuals neglected by mainstream history. Among other explorations of artists like Oscar Wilde and mythological characters like Narcissus, we also find The Soprano & Her Wanderings, sung by regular Bastille collaborator Bim – a track Dan knew she had to sing, ‘It’s a story Bim told me, a real sliding doors moment.’ Then comes the gorgeous Blue Sky & the Painter, about an artist’s relationship with his depression, the difficult engine that allows him to create. Dan recorded a video of it recently in the middle of the Sargasso Sea, one of the most important marine ecosystems on the planet where he was invited by Greenpeace to raise awareness of protecting our oceans. Then there’s the album’s beautiful closer, Telegraph Road 1977 & 2024, inspired by the poems Dan’s father wrote as a young man. He showed them to his son when Dan was a shy, awkward teenager” searching for inspiration for songs. A poem about homelessness his father observed in America stayed in Dan’s heart – he first turned it into a song as a teenager, before rewriting it several times over the years. This 2024 version acknowledges both how surreal it is to be singing his father’s old words nearly half a century after he wrote them, but also how fortunate Dan has been to travel around America, while seeing, sadly and depressingly, how little has changed. This version also features one of the album’s most precious elements: Dan’s mum on backing vocals, which for him was "a very special moment". It took Dan back to when she would come home from her tiring day job, have her friends round, and how they would encourage her to get out her guitar and sing songs at the end of the night. It made him realise that his relationship with music “came a lot via the folk convention of hearing someone storytelling with a guitar – and that my first hearing of so many songs was with my mum singing them.” They recorded the backing vocals in Northamptonshire on her birthday, Dan says. “And it was really, really nice. It's a lovely thing to have on the record. A love of music as a channel for storytelling, shared in the spirit of gentility and intimacy, is what “&” is about. It being an album performed in organic, natural ways with cherished friends and family only adds to its soul, filling it with warmth and the gorgeous, soft energy of connection.“&” is a collection of songs about looking out at the world, disappearing into other lives rather than into ourselves, and about the humanity that can crackle and shimmer as a consequence. And as Dan sings: "If it's gonna make us happy, if it’s gonna set us free, if it’s gonna hold us steady/ Then it’s what we need."

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