Fences
Seattle, Washington, United States | MAJOR
Music
Press
Mansfield, known for his brevity, wastes no time crafting an intro to "My Girl the Horse." Instead, the song begins with a slow fade straight into the familiar guitar strums that form the bedrock of the song. A sparse piano melody wanders in, too — an optimistic tune offering hope that Mansfield's characters might just "make it down this hill alive." Still, the rest of the words, few as they may be, convey more defeat than triumph. ("Every day, we fuss and fight," he sings.) - NPR
With his sorrowful, self-deprecating, and charming pop-folk songs with catchy keyboard melodies and lyrics about squandered love, Fences, aka Seattle troubadour Christopher Mansfield, found a fan in Sara Quin of Tegan and Sara, who signed on to produce his self-titled debut. "Everything that Chris writes, melodically and lyrically, has that rare balance of patience and urgency that I love in honest, haunting pop songs," Quin told SPIN. Agreed. - SPIN Magazine
“Shoegaze,” “grime,” “sorrowful,” “self-deprecating” — these are amongst the labels attached to the self-titled debut album by Christopher Mansfield, the Seattle-based singer/songwriter better known as Fences. Fences is an introspective collection gathered from Mansfield’s repertoire, from which ten songs were specifically chosen to create a lyrical and melodic tapestry. The disc, recorded by Ted Gowans and Sara Quin, of Tegan and Sara, and produced by Quin and Futcher, who also mixed, began making headlines and earning rave reviews shortly after its release. It also collected the aforementioned labels and has painted a picture of the artist as an acoustic-guitar-strumming balladeer.
- The Examiner
Tour Diary: Fences
Hitting the road with our newest blogger, Christopher Mansfield.
January 24th, 2011
Hello.
I write this from a crowded backstage area in Huntsville, Alabama. Everyone is strangely calm most of the time. So far tour has been a very grown up experience. Play music, sell merch then drive away into the sunset. You hit a stride and it becomes a job. The moments when you walk on stage and the crowd roars like lions...these are the moments when your job gives you the Big Christmas Bonus. - NylonGuysMag.com
Sara Quin knows a thing or two about witty yet winsome, deliriously self-deprecating, and achingly pretty songs. So when a friend passed along an EP from Fences (aka Seattle singer-songwriter Christopher Mansfield) to the Tegan and Sara star, she fell for it instantly, and, after a year of correspondence, ended up producing his self-titled debut album (out Sept. 28). Hear a song from it, "Girls With Accents," below.
"Everything that Chris writes, melodically and lyrically, has that rare balance of patience and urgency that I love in honest, haunting pop songs," Quin tells SPIN.com. And "honest" and "haunting" absolutely describe the vibe of "Girls With Accents," a lament about squandered romance from Mansfield (one of our artists to watch at last year's Sasquatch fest), with its over-the-top but true-as-hell chorus: "I'm fucking up, I'm fucking up, I'm fucking up everything."
"Guess I got just what I wanted," begins each verse, in which yet another missed opportunity is described, like the inability to talk to someone in the hallway, or getting drunk and passing out after finally getting a potential lover alone.
"I love 'Girls with Accents' because it reminds me of high school, but also resonates with the adult me," says Quin. "It has these tough slacker lyrics but also a super hooky melodic line that is really upbeat. I asked Chris to holler the background vocal parts, which I don't think he generally does, and that was fun."
Mansfield felt a definite songwriting kinship with Quin, even though many of the songs on Fences were conceived before he met Sara and her band's guitarist, Ted Gowans, for some overly-caffeinated recording sessions over eight days in Victoria, British Columbia. "She waves her hands around and sings ideas right off the cuff," he says of Quin. "Any idea she had without fail would be the right direction for a song. It was completely fulfilling in every possible way... I didn't once feel like someone was changing my art to fit into something else."
Adds Quin: "Chris is a one-take wonder when it comes to capturing terrific performances. I wanted to record the songs simply, wanted them to feel intimate but also atmospheric. The extremely quick session and extremely modest budget worked very well! We didn't over think anything." - SPIN Magazine
Through the ten songs that make up the self-titled full-length from Fences, the 27-year-old musician’s band, the singer and songwriter sings, in his resigned baritone how he just can’t seem to get it right – love, life, family – again and again. - Absolute Punk
Discography
Fences/ Self-Titled (2010, Onto Entertainment/ADA)
Fences/ The Ultimate Puke EP (independent)
Photos
Bio
Christopher Mansfield is Fences. Don’t let the brevity of that sentence deceive you; it contains universes.
Fences is not merely the recording alias of the Seattle songwriter. It is the distillation of Mansfield’s entire aesthetic. “I’ve tried to take everything in the world that I love, and turn it into this thing that’s Fences,” says the straightforward 27-year-old. Fences starts with Mansfield’s life experience to date, and ends… well, when he says so. Hopefully not for a long time. Because right now, Fences is just coming into its own, with the release of a stunning debut album, entitled, naturally, Fences.
Fences is the culmination of Mansfield’s songwriting to date, stretching back to the project’s inception in the Boston area circa 2004, and continuing right up to songs written shortly before recording. “Hands,” carried by hypnotic finger picking and a gauzy vocal performance, is among the oldest selections in Mansfield’s catalog, while “From Russia With…” and “Sadie”—a standout that stakes out the treacherous terrain between emo and Americana with quiet confidence—are newly minted. Longtime fans will find polished renditions of concert favorites “The Same Tattoos” and the musical dialogue “My Girl The Horse,” the latter’s haunting refrain “neither one of us will make it down this hill alive” lingering long after the fade. Mansfield jokes that he traffics in “wussy pop music,” and his full-band live performances are more upbeat than novices might anticipate, but as Fences attests, beneath his sing-along hooks and charismatic performances are songs with a steel core.
The ten-song set was co-produced by Sara Quin of Tegan & Sara, who Mansfield credits not only with helping him sculpt the most fully realized expression of his music to date, but also giving him impetus to forge ahead before they’d ever collaborated artistically. “I was just working as a breakfast cook, spending my money at the bar, and playing songs with my friends in my kitchen. It was no big deal. And then when she contacted me, I remember thinking, Whoa! My life might be a little different from now on.” Not to exaggerate the impact of her interest—this isn’t The Blind Side, folks—but encouragement from an established recording artist went a long way towards making Mansfield take his music more seriously.
“Everything that Chris writes, melodically and lyrically, has that rare balance of patience and urgency that I love in honest, haunting pop songs,” says Quin. And she did her homework before arriving at that laudatory conclusion. Prior to recording Fences, Quin requested that Mansfield send her everything he’d written to date. From those forty selections, they winnowed the choices down. “Both of us wanted to capture the most potent Fences, the thing that sums it up as a whole, song-wise—especially since this was a debut.”
Fences summarizes Mansfield’s music in succinct, compelling fashion—no simple feat, considering that his sound doesn’t fit neatly in any single box. He speaks with audible affection of ’80s innovators like the Cure, Kate Bush, and Morrissey, icons who created a consummate, all-encompassing aesthetic, just as he aspires to do with Fences. A close listen to the rhythm tracks on several cuts also underscores Mansfield’s love of down-tempo classic country. An anthology of Johnny Cash’s Sun Records sides was one of his constant soundtracks while working as a dishwasher. “The tempo of that material just has a unrelenting drive,” he reflects. “It carries the lyrics from start to finish before you even realize what has been said.”
Further enriching his sound, Mansfield also has a powerful affinity for jazz, citing John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Wayne Shorter among his favorites. “Sometimes that music is just so chaotic, which is what growing up feels like,” he observes. “I always wondered why more confused teenagers didn’t listen to jazz. The girl you’re in love with doesn’t love you back? Go home and put on Charlie Parker playing ‘Embraceable You.’” Later he studied at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Sometimes Mansfield’s jazz background is reflected in something as simple as augmenting a minor chord with a major seventh, but Berklee also sold him on the value of commitment and discipline. Hence Mansfield’s laser-like focus on achieving his goals. “I appreciate the workmanship, the dedication required to get the art to where it should be.”
Like the aforementioned Morrissey, Mansfield’s involvement in Fences extends well beyond the music, to the accompanying record sleeves, promotional photos, and videos. The cover of his self-released 2008 Ultimate Puke EP may have seemed better suited to a sludge or speed metal band, with it’s well-executed cartoon of a grizzly bear regurgitating a half-digested Fences logo, but Mansfield commissioned that imagery for specific reasons: “That EP was a mix of all these demos and shit on my computer,” literally purged from his hard drive. Plus he wanted a sleeve
Links
