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Band Members
- Joe Sumner - Bass & Vocals
- Seton Daunt - Guitar
- Pete Wilhoit - Drums
Discography
Albums
- Left Side Of The Brain
- Everything Will Never Be OK
Singles
- Two Sisters
Tour Dates
While lyrically, Fiction Plane’s second full-length, Left Side of the Brain, covers themes as varied as the anguishing death of a loved one, war and nepotism, musically the disc marks the group’s rebirth, or rather, the rise of a whole new band.
Produced by Paul Corkett (Radiohead, Björk, The Cure), it is the formal debut of the band as a three piece—Joe Sumner on bass and vocals, Seton Daunt on guitar and Pete Wilhoit on drums—and the first release since keyboardist/bassist Dan Brown bowed out of the group to raise a family.
While going from a quartet to a trio is definitely a rare move, in so doing Fiction Plane has birthed its inner rock god. While there are fewer instruments the groups sound is larger and heavier, in the main due to Daunt delving earnestly into the role of soloist for the first time. “In a way, this album is about us letting it all hang out,” he says. “It’s a bit more bold and obnoxious, guitar wise. It’s louder and prouder.” “It’s sort of a coming out party for us,” says Wilhoit. “We sort of unleashed the animal within.”
Ironically, when Sumner hunkered down in London earlier this year and began writing some new tracks for the disc, a mightier sound was the furthest thing from his mind. The session had come after a frustrating period when the band found themselves in label limbo, moving from major U.S. label to major U.S. label trying to produce its second full-length album. Just before Christmas 2006, Fiction Plane became a free agent, and Sumner began playing guitar all day and all night, shutting out friends and family, while testing out material in various London bars. “That was a good gauge,” he says. “Without any production or anything, if you play a song at a bar and people get into it, you’re on the right track.”
From that batch of songs came several new additions to an album that Daunt, Sumner and Wilhoit had been writing for some three years. Along with these songs, the band members re-approached some ideas they had been kicking around for a while and even wrote on the spot.
What emerged were tracks that talk of being in love with the wrong person and knowing it (“Cold War Symmetry”), the slow decline of a loved one (“Left Side of the Brain”: “When you sit there and watch them, you can’t say anything. It’s almost like, ‘Just die, so I can be sad, or don’t die and get better immediately.’”), alienation (“Anyone”) and, as Sumner puts it, “loving too much in kind of a dirty way” (the album’s first single, “Two Sisters”). “Death Machine” is about war: “I really understand the desire to protect your country, and the desire to fight for what you believe in, but I just don’t trust the people who tell you what you should do in order to do that.”
Nepotism, meanwhile, is at the heart of “Running the Country”: "It discusses how unqualified and possibly unsuitable people can be, who find themselves in positions of power because of who they are." It’s a track that surely has relevance to the precarious position he finds himself in being the son of one of rock’s biggest superstars: Sting. That lineage is one that Sumner has grappled with all his life, trying to establish himself as both his own man and his own musician.
“I spent many years lying about it, and avoiding it,” he says. “Even if I took a job in a pub in the middle of nowhere, someone would figure it out.” His desire to step out from that shadow loomed large in the band’s decision whether or not to take the offered opener’s slot on this summer’s massive Police reunion tour. To be blunt, in the end, Sumner just said fuck it: “I just figured if it’s gonna happen anywhere, I might as well take full advantage. I think we’re ready, we’ve got a great band and great songs.”
“The lyrics offer a real small window into Joe Sumner,” says Wilhoit (the lone American in the group, which is rounded out by Brits), “one that you won’t get even on a personal level. So it’s an interesting way for him to have sort of group therapy for himself.” Says Sumner: “I’m crap at talking, which is why I write songs.”
Left Side of the Brain is Fiction Plane’s debut for Bieler Bros. Records, founded by Jason and Aaron Bieler, early industry supporters of the band, who were actually involved in recording some of the band’s earlier demos. “It’s definitely our most honest work,” says Daunt. “It was mainly done live with minimum overdubs, and is definitely rougher around the edges. There are some very fat sounds, massive drums sounds.” Says Wilhoit: “We’re a smaller band with less constraints, so it actually sounds bigger. We kind of let loose and use a lot of dynamics.”
The seed for Fiction Plane was planted in London more than a decade ago, when Sumner and Brown began conjuring Mr. Bungle and Faith No More with their first project. Several years later Daunt was added to the fold almost immediately after guesting at a couple shows, where he lathered some needed atmospheric sounds over Sumner’s guitar.
Culling such influences as the Pixies, Radiohead and especially Nirvana, the band was without a full-time drummer until 2002, when Indiana-born Wilhoit drove 13 hours to New York and got the gig immediately following a brief audition. The chemistry was in fact so immediate that the four-piece played CBGBs two days later!
Fiction Plane formally took flight in 2003 with MCA’s release of the lauded Everything Will Never Be OK, produced by David Kahne (Sublime, the Strokes, Regina Spektor). Propelled by the addictive, rollicking title track, the disc scored Fiction Plane tours with Lifehouse, Sting and Switchfoot. When MCA folded not long after the album’s release, the band’s label woes began, as it was passed around the Universal Records label system. In 2005, it issued the four-song EP Bitter Forces and Lame Race Horses.
After a long period of inactivity, regrouping as a trio and recording Left Side of the Brain was like going “Zero to 60 in 3.5 seconds,” says Wilhoit.
In a word, the new record and line-up are quite simply “good,” says Sumner: “It’s fucking good,” he says, laughing, at his inability to pick a better word. “It’s the closest we’ve ever been to what we want to be. We’re ready to destroy and work as hard as we possibly can.”.