The track continues to build anticipation for the artist’s upcoming debut album Shame.
With the release of her debut album Shame just one month away, the hype around UK artist Fable has been simmering around those in the know, and the artist looks set to release her most complete and realised body of work to date, a showcase of her thoughtful, and often impactful sound.
The latest release from the album is her new single, the delicate and effortlessly captivating ‘Onion Brain’. The track provides a stark contrast to the artist’s last release, the album’s title track ‘Shame’. The swaggering R&B sound and slick beats are replaced with lush pianos and a soft bassline. The cutting edge is replaced with a sound that feels more timeless and transcendent, as the artist candidly explores themes of hopelessness, loss and suffering. The arresting release is likely to be among the most emotionally wrought and personal on the record, and alongside ‘Shame’, the tracks really showcase the versatility of an artist who is rapidly establishing herself as a special talent.
“‘Onion brain’ came to be one of my personal favourite tracks on the album.” Fable says of the track. “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.”
