At 50, Fran Healy, frontman/rhythm guitarist of the band Travis however appears every single bit the rock star, even when he does not really feel like one particular.
His neon-orange dyed hair, hoop earring, wiry frame and monochromatic black outfit distinction with his deferential demeanor as he humbly rejects the rock star label. “I definitely really do not see myself that way,” he states in his thick Scottish accent even though sipping tea in the kitchen area of his 115-yr-outdated L.A. Craftsman home in Venice. “I imagine narcissists generally see themselves like that. They are drawn to our business since of the character of it, but I’m producing because I want to categorical myself. It’s therapeutic.”
The introverted Healy prefers his songwriting to direct though he continues to be nearer to the shadows. His unassuming mother nature is mirrored on the protect of Travis’ new album “L.A. Occasions,” its 10th whole-length release, developed by Tony Hoffer (Belle and Sebastian/The Kooks), options the downtown Los Angeles skyline illuminated at evening and attributes Healy and his bandmates (direct guitarist Andy Dunlop, bassist Dougie Payne and drummer Neil Primrose) standing on a dimly lit street in Victor Heights.
Even so, Healy notes, he “can change ‘it’ on” for stay performances. His striking hair color, he clarifies, follows cogent suggestions he received extended ago. “Someone as soon as instructed me, ‘Look the aspect, develop into the component,’” he remembers. “We’re putting out a new report, and it is an critical record for us, so I required a hair color that would be eye-catching onstage.”
Until finally a short while ago, Healy wore a mustache and beard and retained his predominantly gray hair in a ponytail. Just after yrs of experimentation, he stopped fussing with his hair after his son Clay was born in 2006. It prompted a change in his priorities. As a substitute, Healy thoroughly devoted himself to fatherhood and being “the dad I under no circumstances had,” he says.
Born in Stafford, England, Healy was raised by his mom in Glasgow, Scotland, after his mom and dad split up. Healy’s mentally sick father was primarily absent from his daily life.
Healy humbly rejects the rock star label. “I seriously don’t see myself that way,” he suggests in his thick Scottish accent. “I imagine narcissists typically see by themselves like that.
(Christina Household/Los Angeles Moments)
But what served Healy’s romance with his son inadvertently impacted his partnership with songwriting, which, he admits, was not his very best on several Travis data after his son’s start. “I was totally dialing it in, and it reveals in the high-quality of the function,” he claims, whilst noting that it’s a summary he arrived at in hindsight.
Nonetheless, when Clay—who turned 18 before this year— entered his afterwards teens, Healy felt comfortable to loosen the reins of fatherhood which gave him sufficient time to devote to tunes, yielding the 10 music on “L.A. Instances.”
With infectious melodies and unbridled humanity, “L.A. Times” recalls the potent songwriting that designed Travis superstars in the U.K. in the late ‘90s.
The album’s title, “L.A. Periods,” blends Healy’s previous in Glasgow, where a newspaper seller stood outside to hawk the night version when regularly shouting “Final Instances,” with his current daily life in Los Angeles, exactly where he moved in 2017 with his then-spouse Nora Kryst. The pair split a number of yrs later right after 23 many years with each other.
Their parting and the dying of Healy’s shut buddy Ringan Ledwidge (to whom “L.A. Times” is committed) left Healy with considerably to ponder on the new file. Remarkably, he predominantly celebrates life in his songs as an alternative of succumbing to cynicism, regret or fear.
On the personal “Live It All Once more,” Healy grieves his previous marriage with heartfelt vocals accompanied by an acoustic guitar. Amid confusion and strife, he honors Kryst and their connection, which birthed their only kid, singing, “In spite of all the ache, if I could switch the clock back again I would are living it all all over again.”
Acknowledging the fleeting mother nature of everyday living, on the anthemic “Alive,” published soon after the decline of Ledwidge to most cancers, Healy reminds himself not to just take his health and fitness for granted or dwell on life’s trivia. “What’s the use in worrying before the program is set? … Be sure to do not neglect we are alive,” Healy sings with his characteristically earnest and emotive vocals.
Continuing in the vein of not losing time in daily life, Healy commemorates extricating himself from a harmful circumstance on the plucky “Gaslight,” and on the mellow, mid-tempo “Raze the Bar” Healy beautifully memorializes the now-shuttered New York Metropolis bar Black and White, along with its homeowners. “So here’s to a new day. To hell with the earlier,” Healy sings, supplying a farewell toast to the institution in the song’s uplifting bridge. “Here’s to the long term as very long as it lasts. Raise a glass.”
The album’s title, “L.A. Moments,” blends Healy’s past in Glasgow, where a newspaper vendor stood exterior to hawk the night version while regularly shouting “Final Instances,” with his recent everyday living in Los Angeles.
(Christina Household/Los Angeles Instances)
The bar’s camaraderie resonates additional owing to backing vocals contributed by two of Healy’s famed longtime good friends, The Killers’ Brandon Bouquets and Coldplay’s Chris Martin. The latter has famously identified as himself a “poor man’s Fran Healy” and has credited Travis as “the band that invented my band and others.”
Fashioned in Glasgow in 1991 and named just after drifter Travis Henderson (portrayed by actor Harry Dean Stanton) in Wim Wenders’ 1984 movie “Paris, Texas,” Travis released the reasonably successful rock-infused debut studio album, “Good Experience,” developed by Steve Lillywhite (U2, Dave Matthews Band), in 1997.
But the melancholic and sweeping “The Man Who” two decades afterwards, was Travis’ industrial breakthrough document. The chart-topping, Brit Award-winning album, created by Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, Beck), spawned 4 strike singles: “Why Does It Constantly Rain on Me?,” “Driftwood,” “Turn,” and “Writing to Attain You.”
Healy demonstrates on the late ‘90s, when an unanticipated rainstorm 25 a long time in the past at the Glastonbury Festival — or, as Healy places it, “the freak weather celebration that improved everything” — catapulted the band to stardom.
In 1999, the then-midlevel band’s long term seemed as vibrant as the sunlight that shone upon them as they took the stage at the famed audio function in England. But halfway as a result of the established, as Healy crooned “Where did the blue sky go / why is it raining so?” from the band’s music “Why Does It Generally Rain On Me?” the lyrics proved to be disarmingly literal. Instantly, the skies darkened and it started out to pour.
Healy remembers looking at disappointment on the crowd’s faces as the temperature turned. What’s extra, he and his bandmates felt deflated after the performance. “We assumed we played the worst show of our life,” he states. “We have been driving back to Glasgow sensation like our profession was about.”
Having said that, to Healy’s shock, Travis’ Glastonbury overall look was highlighted on BBC Television. “I read my name on tv and it was the weirdest and most surreal matter that could at any time happen,” he says. “And there was [BBC broadcasters] Jo Whiley and John Peel hailing us as the band of the festival.”
In The usa, Travis’s journey has been much less dramatic. The band’s achievements in the U.K. has never been matched on this facet of the pond. Nonetheless Los Angeles has been another tale.
(Christina Property/Los Angeles Moments)
With the extra media exposure, “Why Does It Usually Rain on Me?” became Travis’ initially top 10 hit. Healy notes the irony of the song’s achievements as he relays his then-manager’s unsuccessful endeavor to dissuade the band from releasing the song as a one. “‘Nobody needs to listen to a track about the bloody weather,’” he said.
Although Healy was thrilled about Travis’ promptly increasing lover base — “The Gentleman Who” invested 9 months at No. 1 on the U.K. Albums Chart — he was disoriented by the meteoric leap to stardom: “I felt like from time to time we were like a single-propeller aircraft traveling at 60,000 feet, and bits ended up traveling off.”
By 2001, fame experienced taken its toll. Although Healy was checking out his mother, she expressed concern about his psychological state. The line among Healy’s skilled and individual lifestyle experienced become so blurred that he unwittingly experienced been speaking to her as if a journalist had been interviewing him. He broke down and started sobbing when he realized that he had been overthinking every term that came out of his mouth as if he have been conversing to the press.
He suggests his watershed instant was partly a consequence of accomplishing unlimited media interviews. It was also owing to the shock of likely from anonymity, walking down the street completely unnoticed, to substantial stardom, with everyone staring and whispering as they passed by.
As unsettling as it was at the time, Healy is grateful for his “moment of reckoning.” It enthusiastic him to seek qualified assist. A dozen hypnotherapy periods led to his recovery and motivated Travis’ 2003 album “12 Memories.”
In America, Travis’ journey has been significantly less remarkable. The band’s results in the U.K. has by no means been matched on this side of the pond. But Los Angeles has been a further story. “Something about L.A. related,” Healy claims. “We were being this odd very little band from Scotland that L.A. fell in adore with. There was this appreciate affair that we had and we nonetheless have with L.A.”
Healy beams as he remembers Travis’ jampacked, star-studded debut concert in Los Angeles in 2000 at the legendary Troubadour, and looks incredulous as he reminisces about headlining the Universal Amphitheater the subsequent year.
But executing in Los Angeles is one particular matter and building it one’s home is another. Just after Glasgow, Healy, who has lived in New York, London and Berlin, states he appreciates the warm temperature and proximity to the ocean, and also the artwork galleries and dining places, but multiple bedeviling ordeals in the City of Angels have rattled him.
Fran Healy is photographed on a hill overlooking in Los Angeles.
(Christina Home/Los Angeles Situations)
He relays a terrifying anecdote about nearly becoming carjacked and also describes remaining the concentrate on of a frightening street-rage episode. Then there was the time he came residence from a journey and found a person residing inside his home. He experienced broken into it when Healy was out of town.
As he recounts a devastating incident that he knowledgeable, Healy’s emotions are palpable. He shares that he witnessed a person get struck by a car. As Healy waited with and consoled him until eventually paramedics arrived, the target, who was Black and unhoused, expressed his anxiety that he may possibly be discriminated against at the medical center. Unfortunately, Healy acquired that the gentleman later on died.
A photo of the guy that is saved to Healy’s phone is a haunting reminder.
The juxtaposition among haves and have-nots was starkly illustrated to Healy one particular afternoon in the vicinity of his studio on the edge of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, in which he noticed a bright yellow Lamborghini driving previous an encampment of unhoused people today. The driver was wearing high-priced aviator sun shades, and his forearm, hanging outside the window, was adorned with significant jewellery.
The impactful scene sparked the album’s title observe, “L.A. Times.” The music, which closes the record, opens scenically with just the sounds of rotating LAPD helicopter rotor blades and a siren followed by tunes and then Healy’s voice: “I search close to and all I see is soreness and suffering mirrored on the 50 sides of a diamond ring,” he says.
With vocals composed completely of spoken phrase, besides for the occasional melodic “la-la” sung in the background, the unique composition departs from Healy’s generally tuneful fashion, and has extra in widespread with hip-hop. It was after he struggled to obtain a melody that Healy alternatively observed himself unleashing a cathartic stream of aware rant about Los Angeles’s socioeconomic ills, climate alter, and the at any time-looming risk of a catastrophic earthquake together the San Andreas Fault.
“I’d been wanting to let off steam and have a large moan about all of the things I’m surrounded by,” he claims. “I bought a whole ton of stuff out like I had lanced a boil and sucked the poison out of some thing.”
Ahead of the release of “L.A. Times,” Healy will soon head abroad to tour in guidance of the new history. He pauses momentarily, nonetheless, lamenting the digital era and suggests nobody buys documents anymore. However just as swiftly, he regains his cheerful demeanor. “I do not treatment,” he suggests. “I’ve put in the very last 4 several years recalibrating and refocusing, and I’ve gone back to my hole where by I dig for melodies. I have a history now that I think is one particular of our finest. I have accomplished my little bit. I’m producing songs.”
