Album bio: MF Tomlinson - We Are Still Wild Horses
“In the darkest months of winter, I felt these worlds open up within me. In them, I walked free through sometimes wonderful, sometimes terrifying, uninhabited landscapes that teetered on the edge of nothingness. As you listen, maybe you’ll recognize yourself as that solitary figure on the abyss. This is the sister record of Strange Time - another diary of a plague year. It is of a time but I do not think it is tied to it. In the end, we will always feel despair, disillusionment, hope, longing, insanity, rage, frustration, helplessness, and resignation. Through all of that, we are still wild horses.” - MF Tomlinson
London, January 2021; the gloom of winter seemed darker than ever in the midst of a never-ending lockdown. Trapped and separated, overseen by an incompetent government, a fog of desolation loomed in everyone’s minds. Christmas had been canceled, hospitalizations from Covid had reached new peaks and our screens were filled with images of insurrectionists storming the Capitol.
“That’s when I realized how low I really was, how much I needed to make some music,” MF Tomlinson remembers.
The Australian-born London-based troubadour hadn’t been playing or recording since completing his debut album Strange Time. Like so many of us, he was living in “survival mode”, and knew that the only way to stave off the depression that had coiled around his consciousness was to combat it head-first through music.
“I called up the MFs and asked them if they wanted to come into the studio. Before, there had been an abundance of caution, but this time there wasn’t any hesitation. Everyone felt the same - ‘yeah, I really need this too’.”
What poured out of them over the next few months became We Are Still Wild Horses, a continuation of Strange Time – but also its inverse. Where the former album documented a world in turmoil, with Tomlinson feeling cautiously optimistic about what was to come, We Are Still Wild Horses finds him lost in isolation, embarking on a journey into the self in search of hope, catharsis.
Inspired by the processes of audio visionaries like Phillip Glass and Jon Hopkins, the songwriter wanted to build the songs in three-dimensional aural space, bringing musical light to the big black cavern inside himself. After covid testing to form recording ‘bubbles’ and cycling through the snow to the studio, Tomlinson compares the first of these skeletal sessions with drummer Ed Grimshaw to an exploratory expedition; “each drumbeat was like putting a point on a map,” he recalls. “Before there was nothing, then slowly the wireframe of this world started to appear”.
Subsequent sessions, following the same precautions and staying within guidelines, saw the additions of Ben Manning’s bass, Joe Connor’s piano, and Allexa Nava’s sax and piccolo flute to name just a few. “These elements became the other features of the landscape - cliffs and ravines, color and shade,” Tomlinson describes.
The instrumental exploration that yielded the lush sound world of We Are Still Wild Horses links perfectly with the album’s lyrical themes, which also detail a quest into an unknown landscape – that of the songwriter’s deep and dark unconscious. It’s structured as a journey, with each of the four exploratory tracks getting progressively longer, reflecting the depth to which the songwriter has dug, culminating with the 21-minute title track, the apotheosis of Tomlinson’s internal trek.
It all begins with “A Cloud”, where the songwriter is still looking outwards, picking up from Strange Time’s finale with the exact same tuning. It’s a snapshot of Tomlinson's life, looking for inspiration in every crack, observing people in the street, staying up into the night and wishing “to be a part of the midnight salon” of chatting strangers across the road. It all seems rather quaint until the titular cloud comes along, offers an olive branch, and tempts him into a pit of gloom. Following it blindly, he soon discovers the world as he knew it is gone, and who knows what horror waits with each new sunrise. He decides to hide away and head inwards.
The carefully plucked notes that introduce “Winter Time Blues” are the songwriter’s first tentative steps into his psyche – and it’s a rocky ride ahead. Like a Leonard Cohen or Richard Thompson completely shorn of hope, Tomlinson describes his daily drudgery, his voice audibly sagging at his powerlessness to carry the weight of the world’s issues. Spooky synth swells, tense strings and twirling brass leer up out of the shadows like psychedelic spectres welcoming him into the grotto of his unconscious. “Underneath the slow energy of the song is this feeling of wanting to punch the wall and tear everything down,” Tomlinson explains. One second he’s rolling oats, the next he’s in the midst of a firework display of indescribable anguish, a duo of explosive guitar solos fiercely interlocking in an expression of the songwriter’s pent up despair and anger. “It’s like a dangerous animal inside of a cage and someone’s kicking it,” Tomlinson describes.
Having acknowledged the fury written across his unconscious, Tomlinson heads deeper in, looking for some optimism. He duly finds it in the magical realist hymn for the end of humanity that is “End Of The Road”, a paean to the hope of community and the hopelessness of humanity. Inspired by Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion protests, the songwriter envisions a place where all the progressive, moral and righteous can convene and enjoy the apocalypse in unison – a bucolic vista resembling End Of The Road festival in Dorset, one of the last transcendent communal experiences he had before the onset of the pandemic. With baroque arrangements and luminous vocal imbuements from Connie Chatwin, Tomlinson verbally paints this paradise under silvery starlight. Protesters and friends all gathered together, crooning with open hearts for the darkness to sweep them away to whatever awaits on the other side. It’s a breathtaking vision of the human spirit, filled with love, compassion and beauty until the very last breath.
What comes after the end of everything? The songwriter’s consciousness is not extinguished; “We Are Still Wild Horses” is the final bubble of life at the core of his being. The song beckons us into this surrealist big top with delicate ease, flickers of melody lighting the path until a stepping-stone pattern of piano notes guides us gliding forward, buried truths emerging out of the ether. Soon, Tomlinson finds himself in the midst of Lynchian circus, lion tamers and acrobats explaining the secrets of the universe in a way that transcends language. The Fat Lady steps into the spotlight and fixes him in her gaze, challenging him to believe that he is still a wild horse; he is still beautiful and powerful and free. Can he live with that? Can he take that back to the surface and keep it within his grasp as he continues about his days? Can he use it to guide him on his creative and moral journey as he returns to life?
The very creation and shape of the epic “We Are Still Wild Horses” seems to be Tomlinson reckoning with these questions. Once the Fat Lady disappears, we are set off on a 10-minute instrumental voyage that feels like being slowly sucked back out of the depths of the singer’s mind and towards the surface. An array of synths, flute, piano, drums and much more spiral in amorphous glee as we cross the barrier between unconscious and conscious. It sounds fluid and dream-like, as if captured in one inspired jam session between close collaborators simultaneously achieving a state of ‘no mind’. But nothing could be further from the truth – with it still being the height of the pandemic, he was not able to convene groups of collaborators to help him illuminate it all at once. Instead, he had to painstakingly put it together through a series of one-on-one recording sessions. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he reflects. “I worked on it for 24 hours straight on more than one occasion. By the time I was in the middle of it all I realized how difficult it was going to be - I had to keep going. I cried on many occasions - I guess a from a combination of exhaustion and emotion. When I had finished there was nothing left.”
But, of course, that is not the end of the journey. The album has inspired two sister works. The first is the cover art by Chiara Baima Poma, which is as captivating as the album itself. The artist describes the painting as possessing a “wild, primitive energy”, and it indirectly but undeniably captures the spirit and vitality that the album insists we all possess.
The other sister work to spawn from We Are Wild Horses is a short film made by director and choreographer Daisy JT Smith in collaboration with MF Tomlinson. It will be shared in episodes as each new part of the landscape of We Are Still Wild Horses is unveiled. “Daisy’s vision is beyond what I thought possible - I’m so excited for everyone to see it,” Tomlinson says. “Like everything else to do with this project, the treatment had an irresistible gravity and what followed was wildly ambitious, difficult and incredibly rewarding.”
By facing those darkest of feelings, Tomlinson was also faced with a challenge - to live up to what the album’s title insists we must be. He met that challenge by giving everything he had, he channeled his entire mental and physical being into creating something that staved off his pervading depression and destructive tendencies. And, in doing so, he delivered the boldest, most powerful and most resonant version of MF Tomlinson there has been – so far.
