Pitchfork

Photos by Kathryn Yu

Forget the 1,000 words. For Beirut wunderkind Zach Condon, a picture can contain an entire album.

Take the yellowed snapshot that graces the cover of Beirut's 2006 breakout debut, Gulag Orkestar, in which a pair of young women recline, perhaps mid-roadtrip, on the hood of a car parked on the side of a rural byway. (It was taken, as Condon later learned, by Russian photographer Sergey Chilikov.)

"I found that photo, and I took it home with me," Zach told Pitchfork recently. "It was hanging on the wall the entire time [I wrote and recorded Gulag], and I always kind of felt like, 'It's got to sound like that. It's got to sound the way that looks.'"

As Condon prepares to put the finishing touches on the Gulag follow-up-- which is about to receive string treatment in Montreal from arranger-of-the-moment Owen Pallett (of Final Fantasy and Arcade Fire) and mixing/mastering in Chicago from Griffin Rodriguez (aka Blue Hawaii of Icy Demons and Bablicon)-- it turns out a visual from a bygone era once again provided inspiration.

"I'm thinking about calling [the new album] The Flying Club Cup," Zach revealed. "Back in the early 1900s, like the 1910s or 1920s, there used to be this hot air balloon festival in Paris-- it's titled after that and after this very bizarre 1910 photo I found [by Leon Gimpel]. It's one of the first color photos ever made, at the World's Fair, and it...shows all these ancient hot air balloons about to take off in the middle of Paris. I just thought it was the most surreal image I'd seen in a long time.

"Immediately it was like, 'this needs to be the album cover for the next album,' Zach continued. "So it's been hanging on my wall in front of the computer for the whole record. There's a lot you can take from a weird image like that."

Appropriately, the Gimpel photograph helped conjure musical ideas that are decidedly less Balkan than Beirut's previous output. Indeed, The Flying Club Cup-- which Zach hopes to have out in September via Ba Da Bing in the U.S. and 4AD overseas-- doesn't sound Balkan at all. "I think [people]'ll laugh if anyone says that about this album," said Condon.

For the new album, Zach has gravitated to the sound of lushly-orchestrated baroque pop. "It's a new obsession every year, a new obsession overcomes me and that's all I can do. "

"I was listening to a lot of Jacques Brel and French chanson music-- pop songs shrouded in big, glorious, over-the-top arrangements and all this drama-- and that was in some sense unfamiliar territory to me. So I started buying new instruments and relying on things I wasn't necessarily comfortable with, like French horns and euphoniums, carrying these big, epic big brass parts that I used to do all on trumpets, and working with accordion and organ instead of all ukulele-- very much throwing myself in the world of classical pop music, I guess you could say."



Condon also noted the influence of newfound musician friends, including A Hawk and a Hacksaw's Jeremy Barnes (who plays on Gulag) and Heather Trost. And he's thrilled to have Owen Pallett aboard. "I've never worked with a musician that amazing at arranging before," Zach enthused. "Just five seconds and he's got this orchestra coming out of four violins."

Among Condon's Flying Club Cup favorites is "A Sunday Smile", "this organ grinder sounding song that I did on this ancient, half-broken Farfisa organ in New Mexico. Half of the keys work, half of them don't, so I had to write the songs around the broken keys, but...I'm in love with the sound."

Another favorite, "Guaymas Sonora", includes "a drastic drum change in the middle of the song that builds into something quite epic."



While Flying Club is shaping up to be quite a treat musically, Condon hasn't slacked on vocals or lyrics. The singer, who once called his evocative croons on Gulag Orkestar "happy accidents," has noticed improvement. "I'm finding that my voice is developing a little bit more, and I have a feeling that might have come from singing so much on tour, using my voice so much. I mean, I've never taken a vocal lesson in my life, so I really was just playing by ear.

"I'm still pretty strict about trying to get the first take right. The only thing I tend to mess up on is the lyrics, so if I get the lyrics right, I keep the first take, because no matter how many times you do it, nothing's as good as the first take vocally. Especially when the song is still so fresh and exciting to you."

Those lyrics will once again find Condon exploring places and feelings from times long since past, times he's only able to experience through stories and photographs.

"The entire idea behind a lot of these songs and many of the stories that may come behind them is really just trying to completely throw yourself into another world. I don't know why it is that I do that, and I don't know why it is that that's so attractive to me to hear songs like that, but you scan through my iTunes, it's all old, nostalgic music; it all comes from this other era and this other time, and it's an obsession of mine. That doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever. There's no reason for it, other than that's how it seems to work."



After two more nights in New York, Beirut breaks for a bit before a relatively light summer festival schedule the includes stops at Glastonbury, Roskilde, and Primavera Sound. In general, Condon hopes to rest up a bit-- one album into his career and he's already had to cancel part of a tour (last fall) after exhaustion landed him in a Paris hospital.

"It felt like my body was falling apart while I was completely out of control of it," he said, describing last fall's incident. "I remember there were some hilarious things-- in hindsight. I mean, at the time it was the scariest things imaginable: I couldn't see moving cars, my cellphone was ringing in my ears 24/7 even though I'd left it back in New York before I even went to Europe. All these strange things were happening-- it was almost like a psychedelic trip into the unknown.

"I was in Europe and I didn't know where I was. I think I walked on stage in Dublin saying, "Hello, Cleveland" or something! It was absolute insanity."

Condon's not the only young performer to suffer exhaustion of late-- both Lily Allen and Lady Sovereign, among others, canceled dates recently for the same reason.

"It feels like the indie world-- if you can call it that-- has changed so drastically over the past five years," Condon mused. "We're throwing these people that are used to playing grungy little clubs in Williamsburg or wherever their home town is, and all of a sudden [they're] treated like rock stars and being traveled around the entire globe and the most grueling schedules. I mean, these are schedules that the Backstreet Boys used to be doing! Not kids that recorded records in their bedroom...I feel like everybody in my position is all of a sudden feeling quite overwhelmed by the fact that, well hell, this is all blowing up in our face.

"And you can't complain about that, because that's exactly what we wanted, but it sure as hell is hard to wrap your head around."

Overwhelmed or not, Condon's prepared for the Flying Club Cup aftermath, which will likely vault Beirut even further into the indie spotlight. "This will be a situation that is, once again, entirely new to me," he offered. "So all I can really do is shorten the tours, sleep a little more, drink a little less, try to treat myself like a 40-year-old, instead of...you know."

Beirut:

05-07 New York, NY - Bowery Ballroom *
05-08 New York, NY - Bowery Ballroom *
06-01 Barcelona, Spain - Parc del Forum (Primavera Sound)
06-22 Dublin, Ireland - Tripod
06-23 Pilton, England - Jazz World Stage (Glastonbury Festival)
06-26 London, England - KOKO
06-28 Malta, Poland - Malta Festival
06-30 Istanbul, Turkey - Radar Festival
07-03 Paris, France - Café de la Danse
07-05 Berlin, Germany - Postbahnhof
07-08 Roskilde, Denmark - Roskilde Festival
07-10 Athens, Greece - Vrahon Theater

* with Final Fantasy