Paul Fonfara and Painted Saints

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Live From Old York: Jim White, Vijay Venkat, Adriano Adewale & Benjamin Taubkin
Live From Old York: Jim White, Vijay Venkat, Adriano Adewale & Benjamin Taubkin
By
MARTIN LONGLEY,
Published: October 14, 2013

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Jim White
Fibbers
September 18, 2013

Three hours of oddball Americana. Well, the evening's opening act was a local songster, but Boss Caine sounded like he was growling deeply from across the Atlantic. He was followed with virtually no pause by Paul Fonfara, who offered five of his very different songs. Then Fonfara returned, only minutes later, as Jim White's versatile sideman. So from 8pm to 11pm, the steadily accumulating audience had a surfeit of songs to digest, with hardly any pause for contemplation. Bargain sonics, yes, but demanding on the concentration. Fortunately, each of the artists were sufficiently individualist to lock horns with this challenge.

Boss Caine's voice lies on the edge of affectation, with its sustained gruff burr, after Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen or even those chaps from Tindersticks and Morphine. He keeps it on just the right side of natural, though, sounding committed in his morose, morbid, wistful and heart-sore material. Caine's acoustic guitar pick-up developed a recurring fault, so Fonfara provided his own shiny red, hollow-bodied electric, shifting the sound-spread mid-set. This allowed the guitar to speak with as broad a tone as Caine's voice.

Fonfara's own set began by layering up clarinet phrases, then slowing each one down with his effects pedal, thickening and lowering the sound as he progressed. He switched to guitar and sang along, higher and more dispersed than Caine. An allegedly samba-derived song called for retuning, forcing Fonfara to speak to the crowd. He admitted that such activity was the forté of the soon-coming White. The next bout of tuning was conducted discreetly under the recorded birdsong of a loon, which laid the foundation for his final loop-building creation, before ending up with the clarinet once again. Fonfara's unique stylings could still be heard as some gentle perversion of Americana into modern, individualist song. - All About Jazz

Fonfara’s magnetic playing provided the evocative embellishment you didn’t realise a song could benefit from until you heard it. The occasional use of looping gave the (mostly) sad songs an otherworldly veneer. - The Scotsman, Glasgow

Paul Fonfara isn’t exactly new, more undiscovered, or even unappreciated, it’s a shame, he’s one of those musical givers, one of those that you digest and it leaves you full inside, a more complete, better person. Sure it’s not earth shattering or wildly original, it’s just better, like buying a car with leather seats or a better stereo. It’s not bigger, frillier, just good, rock done fully, satisfying, care for - understood, solid. In a disposable, flippant and irreverent world Paul, with or without the Painted Saints gifts us craftsmanship, a talent well-honed and god knows we’re crying out for skilled practitioners.

Tell us about yourselves and what you do?
I’m a musician and songwriter. Maybe a bum who is far too old to not yet have a real job, and father to a beautiful three year old daughter, Sadie Josephine. I often tour solo or with my band painted saints. We describe the music as Sad Bastard Chamber Folk/Heroin Klezmer/Spaghetti Western/Dirge Gutter Blues/Shoegaze Melancholia.

How did you get together/start out?
I was playing in DeVotchKa and Woven Hand back in Denver when I decided it was time to venture out with my own songs. Since I play with a number of great bands, I am lucky to have a plethora of fine musicians to fill in the Painted Saints ranks. I now live in Minneapolis and am joined by Chris Hepola drums and piano, Christa Scneider violin and cello, Eric Struve Bass, and Will Dockendorf - slide guitars, Andy McCormack saw and accordion.

What is your current release/future release?
Our last record was ‘No Match for Greater Minds’ including some songs based off of Henry Darger artwork and some heavy string section washes of sound. Our upcoming record ‘Giant’ should be out this coming Spring. This record is a little more on the dirge motown, space folk side of things.

What is the best part of being in a band/singer/song writer?
It’s nice to always have the release to life no matter what else is going on. I like the camaraderie of my fellow musicians and finding a way out of my confined personality trying to talk to people with song writing. I also find the psychology of music and performing to be fascinating. It’s kind of between and art and a science to see what in music gets a reaction from an audience.

What is your most significant moment yet?
I’ve been lucky enough to have a continuous stream of always playing music in my life, so it’s really hard to pinpoint a single moment. It feels great when a performance feels totally in the moment and the outside world drifts away. It’s a rush when you can supersede yourself in music and it doesn’t happen all that often. I’ve played in front of thousands of people at a stadium in Belgium, Royal Albert Hall in London and Central Park in New York which was kind of grand, but I think what felt best to me was one of my first solo shows at a tiny café Mother Fool’s in Madison Wisconsin. My set in Birmingham a few days ago felt really good.

What are your biggest musical influences?
The biggest and most direct influences are the people I play with. David Eugene Edwards was great to learn from and also the efficiency of Jim White’s songs. Jeffrey Paul Norlander from the Denver Gentlemen and the members of the Spaghetti Western String Co. really shaped me as well. I love traditional Klezmer like Dave Tarras, Balkans brass bands like Fanfare Ciocarlia and listen to Venerableradio.com nonstop. Bauhaus and Joy Division really hit me when I was younger. I also really dig clarinettist Jimmy Giuffre, Tin Hat and Ben Goldberg. As far as song writing, I really like Bill Callahan and Joanna Newsom.

What venue/gig do you most want to play?
Outside of Minneapolis is the nearly annual Art Shanty Project which takes place on a frozen lake in the middle of January. Shacks are built on the ridiculously cold windswept ice, and people drink hot cocoa while participating in various art projects. Seems like a good time. I’ve never played in New Orleans, and that seems like one to add to the bucket list.

What is your best/favourite song you have written?
People seem to like The Fat Kid Rides His Bike in the Snow. I’ve been a long winded into to the song lately where I whistle with Loon field recordings, and folks seem to take to it. To Answer Monotone off our first record felt very cathartic to record it publicly. Very nostalgic in a warm way.

What is your favourite album of this year?
Looking forward to the new Bill Callahan record.

What does the next six months have in store for you?
I just got back from doing 14 shows in the UK opening for Jim White, which was grand. I’ll be finishing up touches on the new Painted Saints record, and planning another tour of the UK for the record release. Also playing a ton with my Romanian styled brass band the Brass Messengers, and Bookhouse my twin peaks themed Jazz trio. Try to finish my attic after four years work, and get my daughter up for pre-school every morning.

Where do you se - Americana UK

It's been four years since Denver expatriate Paul Fonfara released his last Painted Saints album, during which time his circumstances have changed dramatically. So perhaps it's not surprising that Painted Saints' third album, No Match for Greater Minds, which comes out Nov. 19, differs dramatically from its predecessors. Those Balkan, gypsy, chamber-folk undertones — which connected Fonfara with his past outfits DeVotchKa, 16 Horsepower and Wovenhand — are mostly missing.

The change is largely tied to Fonfara's 2007 move to Minneapolis, a city that brought new opportunities and allowed him to make music for a living. Well, not entirely — Fonfara does a lot of music instruction, largely on the clarinet — but between the tutelage and gigs with his other bands Spaghetti Western String Co., Brass Messengers, and Dreamland Faces, the new father has been able to afford a house for his family, and the experiences have pulled him in new directions.

"About 10 years ago, you know I was pretty ticked off, but everybody is at that age. I have a kid now, and I can't write about the same things," he says. "I think much of the Painted Saints' gypsy stuff — I found other outlets for that and became more of a songwriter."

Fonfara compares the change to a similar transition made by Beirut's Zach Condon on his recently released third album.

"Their first record just kind of came out of nowhere, and I don't think Zach ever intended it to be a thing," he says. "That's one thing that kind of sucks about doing sounds that are really niche-y. People expect you do it again. Like with DeVotchKa, when people go to a show they know exactly what they're going to get. They have a pretty wide palette and they do a pretty good job of it — better than a lot of people — but you kind of know what you're going to get."

Dream baby dream

Even before Fonfara and his college buddy, violinist Tom Hagerman, started playing in DeVotchKa, they played guitar and bass (respectively) in a number of atmospheric indie rock acts. Between gigs, the two musicians would fool around with clarinet/violin duets, delving into the klezmer and Eastern European music that eventually led them to DeVotchKa. In excising those influences from Painted Saints' music, Fonfara's gone back to an even earlier musical touchstone.

"It was this process of going back more toward the original stuff, when we were first doing this, when we played in these bands in college, and it was total shoegazer kind of space rock stuff," he says.

You can hear faint echoes of Painted Saints' earlier style in the bluesy stroll of "Whimsy" or on "Water Street," its shimmery melody supported by a loping rhythm and an arid spaghetti-western vibe. But for the most part No Match for Greater Minds explores feathery melodies that drift like cumulus clouds and burbling beats insistent as a telephone solicitor. It's a dreamy effort with a watercolor imprimatur and a warm orchestral mien.

While the album features the same bassist and drummer as 2007's The Bricks Might Breathe Again, Painted Saints remains a loose cooperative with a rotating cast of musicians. Fonfara does all the writing and the songs are pretty well sketched-out in advance. "We were going to do a double album," he says. "We had 10 more songs, we just never got them all done. So we're hoping to go to the studio fairly soon and try to get another record done."

Cost of living

Though Fonfara loves the fact that Minneapolis has given him a chance to put music at the center of his life, he misses Colorado, particularly the milder weather and the rock scene.

"As a musician you can make a living here, but I think there's a cost to that: I don't think a lot of the popular music is as creative as it is in Denver," he says. "Slim Cessna, DeVotchKa and 16 Horsepower is, in a conventional sense, pretty odd stuff. And something like that would never happen in Minneapolis, because people here talk about making it, and care about what Pitchfork says. Denver has less of that stuff and tends to be odd whereas Minneapolis is a little more conventional."

Although he moved to Minneapolis with "a music degree and no job prospects," Fonfara is managing to make some headway by putting his head down and continuing to do what he does, albeit from a slightly different perspective.

"I've been teaching like mad to have a kind of legitimate job, enough to pay for a house, and try to do the real responsible adult kind of thing," says Fonfara, who's hoping to get the self-released No Match for Greater Minds picked up by a more established label. "I'm going to send it to labels and get that going on, but it's really hard to tour. I have a kid, I can't really afford to. I can't couch surf like I used to." - Colorado Springs independent

If Disney's Fantasia grew up and released an album, if Golgo Bordello mellowed out and accuired an orchestra, if Morrisey was actually as deep as he wants to think he is, you would have somewhat of an idea of the sound of The Painted Saints.

In short, The Painted Saints are pretty damn good. Their sound is somewhat small orchestra-like and I could of sworn that on some of them that I heard a theremin in the background. All of them are very dark sounding but not in a lame Goth kind of way, they don't make you want to smoke cloves and worship Johann Vasquez or anything. The closes they come to 'rock' on this album is the song, 'Tinder,' which has more of a guitar part than most of the songs on the album but still stays true to The Painted Saints' dark orchestra sound by retaining the same instruments, cellos etc. "For the Brokers of Bottles," takes on somewhat of an eerie marching band sound kind of tone.

The best song on the album I was pleasantly surprised with was The Painted Saints covering Neutral Milk Hotel's "Oh, Comely." They seem to slow it down just a tad more than Neutral Milk Hotel originally does it and naturally they throw in a cello. Also theres no mistaking the theremin in this one now. All of these songs all show off how wonderfully The Painted Saints can have their own distinct sound while not recreating the same song again and again.

The album is good, period. I have no constructive criticism this time around and await the instructions telling me where I could buy it. Well done, Painted Saints. Well done. - Hot Indie News

In all the bands I’ve been in, I’m the side guy who plays a ton of instruments," says Paul Fonfara, who played clarinet, cello, and guitar in DeVotchKa’s early years in Denver before forming his current band, Painted Saints, in 2001. He started with songs intended for DeVotchKa, and his sound shares that band’s penchant for Balkan brass, spaghetti-western scores, and klezmer, but his songwriting pulls it all in a particularly cryptic direction. (Fonfara’s also a painter, so his lyrics often emerge from bizarre imagery.)

In Painted Saints, Fonfara’s now the front guy who still plays a ton of instruments, looping his own guitar, bandoneon, viola, clarinet, and whistling, even when there’s a full band with him. Focused as it all sounds, the band’s never been Fonfara’s full-time project: The years have found him touring and recording with eccentric singer-songwriter Jim White, journeying to Spain, and living in Eau Claire. Recently, he’s found a more stable base in Minneapolis, along with a hectic schedule of gigging and teaching sax and guitar lessons. Out behind Painted Saints’ second album, 2007’s The Bricks Might Breathe Again, Fonfara told Decider about being in lots of bands and how songs can sound like antlers and rust-red.

Decider: You also play in the Minneapolis band Spaghetti Western String Co. Do you ever get burned out on playing so much spaghetti-western- and Balkan-inspired stuff?
Paul Fonfara: I guess so. I mean, Spaghetti Western is good, because they’re into a lot of stuff that I never even really got into. They’re into, like, bluegrass, and more intricate versions of it. I play in a brass band in town, the Brass Messengers, that does Balkan, gypsy stuff, and it’s fun because it’s kind of a drunken mess. I think a lot of people just scratch the surface of it. I’ve been listening to a lot of Romanian brass bands. Back in the DeVotchKa days, we didn’t really listen to that. We were getting it from Tom Waits, or learned a few harmonic-minor scales and just made it up. When you do get into the real thing, there’s a lot more to it.
D: Do you see Painted Saints as a band with a clearly defined vision, or is it more open-ended?
PF: I’m pretty defined about it. I guess the biggest problem is just trying to find a steady band. I’ve always had really good people in the band, which is great, but then they’re always playing in five or six bands, so it’s always difficult for us to play a lot of shows together. I’m actually playing in seven bands right now. I literally play all weekend. A typical Saturday is at least three gigs. I like to write songs, and [Painted Saints] is the only place I get to do that.
D: How did this album title come about?
PF: I’ll play a song for a while, I’ll be singing a melody, and usually I’ll get some sort of visual image of what it feels like, and that becomes the story behind it. Like with “The Fat Kid Rides His Bike In The Snow,” I just felt like it had this triumphant kind of feel to it, and I just had this visual image of this heavy snowstorm and a fat kid riding his bicycle. [Laughs.] It’s a really lonely song, I think, just this kid who wants to get away from everything. [The song] “The Bricks Might Breathe Again,” it felt like an assembly line, kind of a work song. When I wrote that, I’d been spending all this time waiting tables and paying off all this debt, and I was working 60 hours a week, and I felt like it was wasted time. That song just made me think of an assembly line and brick dust, so it’s kind of like breathing in this decaying, red-brick dust. All the songs felt really red to me, for some reason, like a rust kind of color.
D: You’ve said that your song “Tinder” is about taxidermy.
PF: Well, sort of. For some reason I saw a record cover on it with an elk head and antlers, so [the melody] sounded like antlers to me. I just got this image of a deer head on the wall, and the idea is basically it’s a stuffed deer head on the wall, and it’s basically the deer trying to find out where its legs are. [Laughs] I don’t know how most people write songs.
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- The Onion

Lead by multi-instrumentalist Paul Fonfara, a virtuoso clarinet player with a handle on just about any music-making device you can throw at him, Painted Saints are perhaps the most accomplished local band you've never heard of. A transplant from an incestuous Denver music scene, Fonfara possesses a technical prowess that has been on display for years; he's a former member of Devotchka and touring sideman to Jim White, but it's his songwriting and orchestral creativity that get the limelight with Painted Saints. Live, Fonfara layers guitar, clarinet, strings, an archaic Colombian squeezebox, and whistles that would make Andrew Bird blush, resulting in a self-described "spaghetti western-heroin-klezmer-chamber country-sad-bastard thing." Also a talented painter, Fonfara pens lyrics that detail the kind of dark and vivid imagery one could imagine Hieronymus Bosch creating, were he raised in modern-day rural America. - city pages

A Painted Saints song is first an image in Paul Fonfara's mind:

Allen Beaulieu

Saints on the Tracks: Josh Granowski, Paul Fonfara, and Chris Hepola
"A stuffed deer on a wall, wondering where its legs are."

"A folk-y Mexican tin painting of the Virgin Mary with bright red and yellow halos faded from years of sun."

"A gypsy reading tea leaves to tell you your fortune, a guy eating apples doused in gasoline, and a puppet made out of junk like black coat buttons for eyes and razor-blade teeth."

Fonfara, the group's leader and creator, cites the above imagery as inspiration for songs in the Painted Saints' canon. They are the visions of a dark and skeptical man attempting to make sense of reality, a spirit tempered by the dizzying highs and frightening lows of existence, a battle-worn troubadour still reeling from the last crash.

It's the week before the release date for the latest Painted Saints album, The Bricks Might Breathe Again, and last-minute business is on the Denver transplant's mind. He slinks down the hallways of the Bakken Library and Museum, an Elizabethan-style mansion near Lake Calhoun filled with oddities of electrical and magnetic studies, and worries that his CDs won't be printed in time for the release show.

"I've been on two record labels—David Byrne's Luaka Bop (as a touring member of Jim White's band), and Glitterhouse, in Germany, when I was with 16 Horsepower. All I know is that when I was on a label I got treated well. Now that I'm not, I spend all day on horseshit emails." Such is the burden Fonfara bears as a bandleader.

Back in his Denver days, the versatile multi-instrumentalist didn't have to deal with such headaches. He played with a number of bands—Devotchka, the Denver Gentlemen, 16 Horsepower, and Woven Hand—but never had to be the motivating force behind a project. With Painted Saints, he is both visionary and practitioner.

Fonfara was a clarinet student at the University of Colorado, but he's one of those people who could pick up a wet noodle and find a way to make music with it. In addition to his formidable chops on the clarinet, he also sings, whistles, and plays guitar, cello, viola, violin, saxophone, and bandoneón with considerable proficiency. At one point during the interview, he pauses to fiddle around with the vintage theremin the museum has on display.

At the helm of Painted Saints, where he's aided by the current lineup of Jonathon Kaiser, Josh Granowski, Chris Hepola, and Kelly O'Dea, Fonfara uses a variety of orchestrations to create symphonic landscapes for his oddly evocative visions. On The Bricks Might Breathe Again, Painted Saints' sophomore effort, Fonfara has crystallized his dark and bitter outlook into 10 memorable songs that bridge the gaps between klezmer, jazz, folk, rock, and Southern gothic sensibilities.

Although it's difficult to finger, there is a sense of commonality that runs across The Bricks Might Breathe Again like warm wind over the open prairie. While the disc's strongest tracks stand on their own, an overarching chiaroscuric aura provides the cohesive appeal of an Ennio Morricone Spaghetti Western soundtrack. The death-toll rocker "Tinder," for instance, is built around a clanging, open-string guitar strum that's like nothing else on the record, but the ethereal whine of layered strings places it firmly within the rest of the album's oeuvre.

Among the album's highlights are the opening number "Ipsifendus and Introductions," a beautiful instrumental piece built around a climactic clarinet solo, and "Oh, Comely" a Neutral Milk Hotel cover filled with droning, otherworldly saw sounds.

Opening with the line "God she only knows how to follow," Fonfara's voice is drenched in bitter despair from the outset. Both the title track and "For the Brokers of Bottlecaps" paint frightening pictures of factory workers trapped in a life of backbreaking labor, a reference, no doubt, to Fonfara's experience rupturing a disk in his back while on tour with Jim White. After struggling to finish the tour, Fonfara caved in to his body's pain and his doctor's recommendations, opting for the necessary surgery—an expense that led him to file for bankruptcy a year later.

"I think because I've been very poor for the past few years, I've been thinking all human energy is driven by economics," Fonfara states while looking over a frightening eye-magnet contraption invented to remove metal particles embedded in eyeballs. "The whole record is about human nature. It's about money," he explains.

Having experienced the music world as a student and teacher, academic and performer, Fonfara has a bleak view of the biz. He speaks of downloading not as toppling the industry, but of ruining the art form. "I read something in the City Pages about a record label here in town that was just giving their stuff away for free. That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard!" he laughs, though visibly upset by the idea.

"I sent it [the new rec - city pages

A Painted Saints song is first an image in Paul Fonfara's mind:

Allen Beaulieu

Saints on the Tracks: Josh Granowski, Paul Fonfara, and Chris Hepola
"A stuffed deer on a wall, wondering where its legs are."

"A folk-y Mexican tin painting of the Virgin Mary with bright red and yellow halos faded from years of sun."

"A gypsy reading tea leaves to tell you your fortune, a guy eating apples doused in gasoline, and a puppet made out of junk like black coat buttons for eyes and razor-blade teeth."

Fonfara, the group's leader and creator, cites the above imagery as inspiration for songs in the Painted Saints' canon. They are the visions of a dark and skeptical man attempting to make sense of reality, a spirit tempered by the dizzying highs and frightening lows of existence, a battle-worn troubadour still reeling from the last crash.

It's the week before the release date for the latest Painted Saints album, The Bricks Might Breathe Again, and last-minute business is on the Denver transplant's mind. He slinks down the hallways of the Bakken Library and Museum, an Elizabethan-style mansion near Lake Calhoun filled with oddities of electrical and magnetic studies, and worries that his CDs won't be printed in time for the release show.

"I've been on two record labels—David Byrne's Luaka Bop (as a touring member of Jim White's band), and Glitterhouse, in Germany, when I was with 16 Horsepower. All I know is that when I was on a label I got treated well. Now that I'm not, I spend all day on horseshit emails." Such is the burden Fonfara bears as a bandleader.

Back in his Denver days, the versatile multi-instrumentalist didn't have to deal with such headaches. He played with a number of bands—Devotchka, the Denver Gentlemen, 16 Horsepower, and Woven Hand—but never had to be the motivating force behind a project. With Painted Saints, he is both visionary and practitioner.

Fonfara was a clarinet student at the University of Colorado, but he's one of those people who could pick up a wet noodle and find a way to make music with it. In addition to his formidable chops on the clarinet, he also sings, whistles, and plays guitar, cello, viola, violin, saxophone, and bandoneón with considerable proficiency. At one point during the interview, he pauses to fiddle around with the vintage theremin the museum has on display.

At the helm of Painted Saints, where he's aided by the current lineup of Jonathon Kaiser, Josh Granowski, Chris Hepola, and Kelly O'Dea, Fonfara uses a variety of orchestrations to create symphonic landscapes for his oddly evocative visions. On The Bricks Might Breathe Again, Painted Saints' sophomore effort, Fonfara has crystallized his dark and bitter outlook into 10 memorable songs that bridge the gaps between klezmer, jazz, folk, rock, and Southern gothic sensibilities.

Although it's difficult to finger, there is a sense of commonality that runs across The Bricks Might Breathe Again like warm wind over the open prairie. While the disc's strongest tracks stand on their own, an overarching chiaroscuric aura provides the cohesive appeal of an Ennio Morricone Spaghetti Western soundtrack. The death-toll rocker "Tinder," for instance, is built around a clanging, open-string guitar strum that's like nothing else on the record, but the ethereal whine of layered strings places it firmly within the rest of the album's oeuvre.

Among the album's highlights are the opening number "Ipsifendus and Introductions," a beautiful instrumental piece built around a climactic clarinet solo, and "Oh, Comely" a Neutral Milk Hotel cover filled with droning, otherworldly saw sounds.

Opening with the line "God she only knows how to follow," Fonfara's voice is drenched in bitter despair from the outset. Both the title track and "For the Brokers of Bottlecaps" paint frightening pictures of factory workers trapped in a life of backbreaking labor, a reference, no doubt, to Fonfara's experience rupturing a disk in his back while on tour with Jim White. After struggling to finish the tour, Fonfara caved in to his body's pain and his doctor's recommendations, opting for the necessary surgery—an expense that led him to file for bankruptcy a year later.

"I think because I've been very poor for the past few years, I've been thinking all human energy is driven by economics," Fonfara states while looking over a frightening eye-magnet contraption invented to remove metal particles embedded in eyeballs. "The whole record is about human nature. It's about money," he explains.

Having experienced the music world as a student and teacher, academic and performer, Fonfara has a bleak view of the biz. He speaks of downloading not as toppling the industry, but of ruining the art form. "I read something in the City Pages about a record label here in town that was just giving their stuff away for free. That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard!" he laughs, though visibly upset by the idea.

"I sent it [the new rec - city pages