Liner Notes: Frank Turner, 'Poetry of the Deed'

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THE LAST TIME EXPRESS spoke with British songwriter Frank Turner, the punk-inspired folk singer was touring with The Offspring and in the middle of filming a "24 gigs in 24 hours" stint that would eventually become the video for "The Road," the first single off "Poetry of the Deed" (Epitaph).

Mostly recorded with a full band in studio, "Poetry of the Deed" finds Turner writing strident political songs ("Sons of Liberty") as well as tender love songs ("The Fastest Way Back Home"). That's one of the biggest changes from 2008's "Love, Ire and Song" — Turner is now in love (with a woman named "Isabel," if the song title doesn't lie), and he's moved past some of the romantic angst of of his previous albums.

"Leave Kerouac on the shelf," preaches Turner on "Poetry of the Deed's title track, which urges people to go out and live what they believe, instead of just writing about it. It's somewhat of the record's manifesto, which Turner explained in a track-by-track tour of "Poetry of the Deed." Click here to stream the whole album as you read Turner's commentary.

"Live Fast Die Old"
That was kind of the first song on the record that really came together, and it's a kind of philosophical jumping-off point for the record. My friend Jay, who's a good old friend of mine, another singer-songwriter, took me to task for the lyrics to one of my other songs, "The Ballad of Me and My Friends" [which questions even being an artist and states "We're going nowhere slowly"]. He asked me, "Why do we have to give up on this?" ["Live Fast Die Old" is] a statement of intent, it's a manifesto, it's a "This is what this record is about." It's about finding interesting ways of being reckless and romantic when you're old. He gets a name-check in the song.

"Try This at Home"
"Some rock stars are people just like you and me / And some of them are dicks ..." [laughs] Yeah, thereby removing it from the list of radio singles. It's a song about something that's really important to me and something that I think that punk rock is excellent on: removing the divide between performers and audience. I just never really understood why it was that the fact that you play in a band means that you have to be an asshole.

At the end of the day, there's no exceptionalism to being a musician, and, more to the point, everybody has something to contribute. If you ask at a show for the people to put their hands up who play in a band or an instrument, most of the people there do; everyone does their own thing. I just don't buy into the exceptionalism argument about musicians. ... The minute that a show is over, you're on level with everybody else, because you're no longer doing your thing.

"Dan's Song"
Dan is a guy, a friend from London, and there was a song on "Love, Ire and Song," that name checks a lot of my friends, [called] "I Knew Prufrock before He Got Famous." Dan didn't make the cut for no other reason than the fact that it didn't fit, it didn't scan or whatever. When the song came out, he was real pissy about it, so I promised him that when the new album came out, I'd write him a song all his own. So, I stuck to my promise and it's a song about drinking beer in the park and why that's considerably more important than most other things.

"Poetry of the Deed"
[Anarchist philosopher Mikhail] Bakunin had this idea about "propaganda of the deed," and not writing pamphlets and actually doing things with your life, and I wanted to say something similar about poetry and reading Kerouac books and going out and being the sequel. It's about the fact that I'm a firm believer that life is what you make of it, and that you can seize life by the horns. There was an amazing thing in the London Underground where they occasionally have some advertiser's space where public art goes up sometimes, and they had this really trippy piece of multi-colored backing that had in the middle, "If you don't like your life, you can change it."

I always thought that was excellent, and I really enjoyed being part of the commuters bow and traveling around London seeing this excellent statement on the walls, so that was part of the inspiration for it. ... There are limitations to that, who your parents might be, or whatever, but generally speaking what riles me is people complaining about facets of their life they could change if they were just prepared to put in the hard work and have the courage to do it.

Here's another anecdotal backup for this: I was hanging out with this kid last time I was in New York City, on the "Revival Tour' with Chuck Ragan, and he was an English guy in the audience. After my set he kept rattling on about how he loved the stories in my songs. He kept saying, "Aw, man, I wish I could live the life along those lines," and I was like, "You fucking cad. ... Just do it."

So later that evening we were all piling in a cab to go to Jesse Malin's bar to get hideously drunk, and he was hemming and hawing about getting in the cab, and I was like, "Get in the cab, man." And he had the time of his life and ended up meeting Max Skiba from Alkaline Trio, which I think made him literally pee his pants.

"Isabel"
There's not much to say about this song except that since my previous record my love life is a little more stable, and I figured it'd be nice to write a song to my better half, a love song about wanting to be an astronaut. It's all rosy.

"The Fastest Way Back Home"
This is a similar kind of deal. One of the things about that song, musically, is that I really wanted to write a straight-up country song. And I feel like a lot of the time, I start writing songs that are going to be straight up-country songs and I end up messing them around and end up throwing in little extra angles of weirdness. [This song] was a case of sitting down and being like, "This is going to be a simple verse / chorus / verse / chorus / end" and simple lyrics about a simple kind of subject.

"Sons of Liberty"
The issue that arouses my rage and action, at the moment in the U.K., is civil liberty and we've been cursed with a government for the first while who doesn't seem to understand what liberty is. And I think that it's a shame because, without wanting to be exclusionist about it, I'm proud of the fact that England is the birthplace of parliament and the birthplace of liberty and all that. And I think it's sad that we've got this wonderful 800-year tradition of resistance to state intrusion in our lives and we've now got completely the opposition. You've got the CCTV cameras in every corner, national databases, ID cards all this shit, and I'm angry about it.

The "Sons of Liberty" thing is something that's supposed to sound English, and it's about England; hopefully it has a universal feel to it, but it's about England. It's interesting because a lot of the American colonialists during the American Revolution actually identified themselves as the guardians of English liberty. Their whole idea was that [with the ascension of the] German King George, the English had let their birthright slip away from them. The Sons of Liberty, at various points, considered themselves to be the ancient English. .... You look at guys like Tom Paine and other people who were very important for the development. The drumbeat and chord progression are very English.

"The Road"
It's a song about traveling and staying on the move. I guess I was kind of careful to make sure it wasn't that much about touring with the music, partly because I think it's tedious when bands constantly write songs about being in bands, also because it's not just all I'm talking about. Live a life in transit, a life on the move, a rich varied life — and you don't have be a guitarist to do it.

"Faithful Son"
This is a song I still haven't played for my mum yet, and I'm slightly nervous about playing it because I know she's going to get all funny about the fact that it kind of calls her out by name. My parents are cool; they are pretty traditional. My mom was a teacher and my father was a banker, and when I first started playing music it was a hobby as far as they were concerned. And when that hobby became something long-lived, they didn't get it at first. I think it's simply a thing of generational misunderstanding, but I guess I just wanted to write a song about how parents have to let go of what their children are doing, and trying to explain that to my parents. ... I guess the sort of key lines are, "I'm not doing this to piss you off." I'm doing this because it seems like it's the best idea. And one of the things, for me, is that it seems like my parents instilled me with really great values and just got dismayed when my application of those values meant I didn't choose that. In the long run, I just want to be grateful to my parents for raising me to be honest, hard-working and instill me with self-belief, all those sort of things.

"Richard Divine"
The kind of direct inspiration for that song is not one individual; it's kind of two, actually. But I was quite careful to not make this a song about one person, because that's kind of sandbagging people like that. I get kind of angry when people have gone down that route [suicide], and it's a song about how I think it's a weak option, and a selfish option, and if people think about it harder. ... That song went through an awful lot of drafts lyrically, because I wanted to not piss people off who were closer to the individuals concerned.

"Sunday Nights"
"Sunday Nights" is about drinking on Sunday nights and how that's always an excellent idea. Whenever everyone's sitting around still in the bar, and you're still hammered from Saturday and somebody goes, "Aw, we've got work tomorrow; we should go home and go to bed," I'm always the guy who's like, "Fuck that, dude." If you're going to have to turn up and clock in, you might as well have a hangover as you do it, because fuck spending your free time feeling terrible. You should spend your work time feeling terrible, and your free time feeling amazing.

Halfway through being written, there was this bar called Nambuco, this bar which was really important to me, actually burned down. When writing the song, the bar at Nambuco was where my mind's eye was picturing the conversation in that song taking place. It's my own personal tribute to that place and kind of a lament for its passing.

"Our Lady of the Campfire"
So, we'd finished rehearsing all the songs for the album, and this song didn't really have any lyrics. It had a couple of lines, I wasn't very happy about it, and I was trying to find the subject. I spoke to my friend Carina, who is one of my oldest friends, and one of her standard bitchy lines is that she's all pissy because I never wrote a song about her. She's getting married, so I decided to call her bluff and write a song for her. So, I guess it's a song about the fact that she's hilarious when she hits the bar: It's just kind of a military operation, she goes out and makes damn sure that everybody knows that she's arrived in the bar and she takes over. Back in the days when she was single, she would just walk into the bar, announce that she wasn't paying for any drinks and guys would buy her drinks all night. ... She heard [the song] and she was very touched; her hard exterior crumbled and she got all dewey-eyed about the whole thing.

"Journey of the Magi"
"Journey of the Magi" is a poem by T.S. Eliot and so I guess that's where the title comes from. It's funny about that song because I started with the Moses verse ages and ages ago, and I just couldn't take it any farther because I couldn't think about how to move it forward. So, then I figured I should just introduce new characters instead of progressing Moses. It's a song about tragic figures, people who had great power, great opportunity and didn't quite succeed in what they were trying to do. Moses didn't make the Promised Land; Odysseus got home and everything was fucked; and then, more to the point, more controversially, Balthazar kind of travels all the way from Iran, arrives in Bethlehem and goes, "Is this it?" The point is that its not the success that matters, it's the journey.

Written by Express' Nathan Martin
Photo courtesy Xtra Mile Recordings Limited / Epitaph Records