Fable today unveils new single ‘Onion Brain’, the latest offering from her much anticipated debut album Shame, due on 29th July via Naim Records. The new music follows her previous single and album title track ‘Shame’ being playlisted on BBC Radio 6 Music and her striking cover of Talking Heads’ ‘Road to Nowhere’ being used in the Official Trailer for Prime Video’s new series The Devil’s Hour, starring Peter Capaldi.
With its delicate piano and softly treading bassline, ‘Onion Brain’ has a timeless feel to it, echoed in Fable’s contemplative lyrics about loss and suffering; a subject she discusses with a reassuring acceptance, Fable explains:
“‘Onion brain’ came to be one of my personal favourite tracks on the album. The main theme is the acceptance of loss, and the inseparable relationship of life and death. I titled the track ‘Onion Brain’ with a hint to the Buddhist idea that the suffering we perceive is caused by there being a sufferer, a noun. We believe ourselves to be nouns, static and separate, but as we peel away the layers we realise we are but verbs – living, breathing, digesting our experience, always flowing and affected by the world around us.
“I wanted to capture a feeling of helplessness in the opening line, ‘tied to a lamppost barking at strangers’; a metaphor for how little free will we actually have in our lives. But it’s not about trying to fight this, instead the song breathes a sigh of contentment with the worst to come. Coupled with a musical nostalgia for the Beatles and maybe a little flash of Fiona Apple, I wanted the music to invoke a kind of lugubrious joy. I wrote the track on an upright piano in my producer’s second bedroom. If you listen closely you can hear an Amazon van reversing in one of the verses, but the take had so much truth in it, we kept it in.”
Having last year relaunched an impressive fledgling career that had already included performing at Glastonbury and collaborating with Orbital, Fable’s second coming has been met with enthusiasm from tastemakers, including NME, 6 Music, CLASH and The Independent, notably for the trip hop and neo soul blending ‘Orbiting’, which has racked up over a million streams, and the emotionally introspective ‘Womb’. Signed to Naim Records, the label wing of the award-winning premium audio brand, and an ambassador for mental health charity My Black Dog, Fable has recorded a debut album of genre-fluid, searingly honest and darkly beautiful music that spans from urgent post punk to introspective electronica, whilst posing questions that are both timely and personal, yet timeless.
