fantasy of a broken heart is the New York City-based project helmed by Al Nardo and Bailey Wollowitz, who met in 2017 and started playing together in bands like Animal Show and Sloppy Jane. They’re also permanent live members of Artist Spotlight alumni Water From Your Eyes (the duo of Nate Amos and Rachel Brown) and (Amos’ other project) This Is Lorelei, and the pair began writing songs before fantasy solidified as a band. Their reference points, like the songs collected on their debut album, are chaotically disparate yet meticulously arranged: 70s prog rock, bedroom pop, jazz, freak folk, and musical theater are all filtered through and vie for space on Feats of Engineering. At once indelibly hooky, wondrous, and unpredictably bombastic, the record finds the sweet spot between these dramatic styles and largely inscrutable lyrics, weighty emotions and a winking sense of humour. The front of the album is loaded with some of its most alluring and memorable track before spinning out chaotically and cryptically on the second half: “Nobody knows what you’re talking about,” they repeat over and over; at the same time, if you know you know. “Catharsis of the heart/ Is a personal affair,” Wollowitz intones on the final track, but as a duo, fantasy open so many paths towards it.
We caught up with fantasy of a broken heart for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about the origins of the band, the influences behind Feats of Engineering, playing live, and more.
Who’s in your live lineup right now? I’ve seen that Nate Amos and Margaux have both joined you on tour.
Bailey Wollowitz: We’re performing as a trio right now – the two of us and Nate. We’ve been expanding and contracting the lineup this year. In Brooklyn, the band is sometimes a four, five, or six-piece, and Margo’s on bass for that. For this run, we’re just doing the three of us because of some scheduling, but also to see how it pans out because touring is pretty expensive. But Margaux is one of the grooviest bass players of all time. I feel like she really gets our music, even though it sounds nothing like the music she writes herself. Well, it doesn’t sound nothing like it, but you know what I mean.
Al Nardo: How long has she been playing with us?
BW: I think her first gig was almost three years ago at this point. She’s just phenomenal. I think just having the experience of playing in a lot of projects informs our own music a lot, so it makes perfect sense that with Nate and Margaux, who are also people who play in a lot of other projects, the whole thing really gels together. So many people played on our record, a ton of friends, and I really enjoy the spirit of the band being an open door, just getting to rock out with our friends, but having the music be the centerpiece and knowing that it’s going to sound and feel different with different people playing in the band.
Given that supporting other people’s bands inspires your own music, how do you know when to focus or reserve space for fantasy of a broken heart in a way that feels intentional?
AL: Particularly with Nate, we’re running a very interdependent calendar. It’s a symbiotic thing where, especially this year, we’ve developed a mutual understanding of when it’s time to do what. And we’re always busy.
BW: It’s like, we know when we have a month off from Water From Your Eyes…
AN: So we should record stuff at that point. Or, we get back from this tour this week, and then we have four days before leaving for another band’s tour – those four days need to be practice for the upcoming thing. So that determines what’s happening at any given time, and it’s been pretty functional.
BW: With Nate, the recording and live process for both of us are pretty similar in terms of how we interact with each other. We’ll all be on tour, we’ll come home, and Nate will go to his studio to work on the next Water or Lorelei project, and we’ll be together working on fantasy stuff. We just hang out with each other all the time, so we’re listening to what the other is working on, hearing about plans, and giving ideas, but fundamentally, we’re in our own spaces. And then it’s like, “Alright, here’s the song, Nate. You have to learn how to play this now,” or vice versa.
What were your ambitions individually upon arriving in Brooklyn, and how did they shift when things got going with fantasy?
BW: I think we came from very different places into New York. I’m from the suburbs north of New York City, so I grew up around New York City my whole life. I moved to play with a childhood friend, we had another band together. His name’s Sid Simons, he put out a really good record last year. I think for me personally, I always had a sense that this is what I wanted to do. I was a little kid dreaming of being a rock musician or whatever, in a really concrete way where, for better or for worse, at times it was like, “I don’t think there’s anything else that I can do.” Moving to Brooklyn was definitely like chasing the dream in that way, but certainly, upon arrival, I don’t think I had the confidence to be pursuing anything of my own songwriting at all. I was always writing stuff, but I was always more comfortable just playing in other groups, including some collaborative groups where I was contributing to the writing. But I think I had a very genuine sense, both of a lot of confidence when I was younger, but also some sort of earning your stripes thing, where I very much sought value in, or a necessity even, to be under someone else’s wing to figure out how it worked.
AN: I moved to New York to study journalism and instead found myself playing music, which was not the plan. [laughs] I’d been in a punk band in high school and joined a punk band in New York, for social reasons; I wanted to meet people. I joined a band off of Craigslist because I didn’t know anyone when I moved. I was 19 at the time, and I saw that this young girl was looking for a bassist, and that kind of stood out from the dads being like, “We want a drummer for our cover band. Must have practice space. Must be good.”
BW: “We sound like Pink Floyd, Arctic Monkeys, and The White Stripes.”
AN: That kind of changed my life by accident. But I would say that us starting Fantasy was really born out of: we were playing in a couple of bands together, we were living together, we started jamming, and neither one of us at that time was primarily a guitarist. Neither one of us was playing guitar in any bands in a significant way, so I feel like we were exploring songwriting and guitar-playing together in this way that felt very new at the time. That changed things for me because I liked playing in these punk bands, and that’s how I learned how to play music, but I don’t think that the traditional song format of that was so much something I enjoyed listening to as much as it was just a functional entry point for playing. We started writing these more complicated dual guitar parts, and that opened my mind up a little bit.
BW: Yeah. I came out of a punk scene in my hometown, too. The first band that we played in was just straight punk and a little bit of a garage thing; I was playing drums, Al was playing bass in that band. I think we bonded right away just liking a lot of different music the first time we hung out, we were listening to all sorts of stuff, and definitely none of it was punk, even though we met at a punk show. What Al was saying, getting into playing guitar together – a lot of my favorite stuff in music is bands that have this really nebulous guitar flow that loses the traditional lead guitar, rhythm guitar person. Specifically Palm and a lot of Deerhoof stuff, which were at the time the bands in the New York and Philly scene that were finding the most success playing the weirdest stuff. The philosophy of, instead of one person playing a six-note chord, it’s like two parts where each person is only playing one or two notes at a time, and those two things together make the whole thing. I think that was really a revelation as we started writing songs.
Over the past five or six years, since we started approaching fantasy as an idea, all the punk stuff has come back into it. It feels like a very happy gelling of all the stuff that we like to listen to and to play. It’s been cool, as we start to play live more, finding the balance between the sometimes pristine nature of the recordings – which are inspired from a totally third influence, which is just the classic, really gorgeous-sounding recordings, like Steely Dan or jazz recordings which are very clean and dry, and the song speaks for itself, and the arrangement is endless – and playing live. I think finding our sound as a band has been about recognizing that the sound can be a lot of different things, and that the core of the thing is really all that matters: just knowing that the song itself means something to you and that you can play it a thousand different ways.
There also seems to be a musical theater influence amidst everything else. Can you talk about what there is for you in making experimental music that has a theatrical or even operatic bent to it? What do you feel like that element serves on the album?
AN: It’s so funny because I feel like we worked on the music in this very insulated way for a really long time. In starting to have the music be heard by people, a lot of people have mentioned this theatrical element that I personally was not perceiving in what we were doing at all. So it wasn’t intentional, or at least the parts of it that are theatrical, maybe that wasn’t the exact thing that was trying to be hit specifically.
BW: Yeah, I think there’s something to be said about how you often don’t recognize what the mission statement is while you’re actually doing it, or the mission statement is something different once it is heard by other people. As we work on recording new material right now and are playing some new stuff live that’s not on the album, looking back at the Feats of Engineering stuff, I’m like, “Oh yeah, this is sort of our rock opera album.” I don’t think the next record we make is gonna sound like this one at all. We always described Feats as a story sort of record, but maybe more in a song cycle, disjointed way where there’s some sort of narrative thread inside of the thing for people to follow. But I reckon the reason why even now I can look back at it and recognize that there’s a musical theater element to it is that I was a musical theater kid in high school. [Bailey laughs] Which, by the time we made the record, it felt like I was very divorced from that being an influence at all. But it absolutely was a record written by, at the onset of some of these songs, 22-year-old us, which means that whether I was aware of it or not, I was at the time someone who was not too many years divorced from that.
How did you land on that line, “Nobody knows what you’re talking about,” as the sort of emotional thesis of the record?
BW: I think “Nobody knows what you’re talking about” is exactly the conveyance of what we were talking about before, which is like, it doesn’t matter what the song means to us – it doesn’t matter at all how we feel about it because someone listening to the song is gonna just take away whatever they feel from it. On an emotional level, but also on a textual level. A lyric to me that is, like, very clearly about this one specific day where something happened to us is just totally intangible to the listener, and the listener can try to decide what they think it means, or maybe that line just doesn’t even really stick out to them at all. ‘Tapdance 1’, which is just that line repeated over and over and over again, is meant to be sort of a debriefing from the first half of the record, which is a lot of these heavy personal songs. And then ‘Tapdance 2’, with the long spoken monologuing, is like, “And here are all the things that nobody knows about!” It’s just a laundry list of maybe us stepping outside of the emotional world of the record and positioning how I perceive that someone else would be perceiving the thing.
‘Tapdance 2’ is my favorite song to play live on this tour. Just as a song, it’s really fun to play, but I think because it’s not out yet, for people to hear amidst a lot of other material that is familiar to people now who are coming to the gigs, there’s just some lines in that song that I feel crazy saying on stage.
Like the one about reading Pitchfork reviews?
BW: Exactly. Because I’m like, “But you’re here because you read about us on Stereogum,” you know? Some of that tongue-in-cheek stuff about the state of music itself – obviously, we’ve been talking for an hour, we love to talk about that sort of thing. When it was written, that line was coming out of a place where we at that point in time already had so much interaction with music journalism – just from being in bands, and Al’s worked in music radio. The too many Pitchfork reviews comment, I probably I felt motivated to say something like that just to call in the fact that I think around the time another band we played in had gotten a Pitchfork review for the first time, and it was funny to see.
That being said, when we wrote it, fantasyjust didn’t exist in that way at all. I’m excited for the record to come out and for people to hear that sort of thing, but that line means something different because now we, as people and as this band, do exist in the cultural fold of what I’m talking about. Which was very different than the sentiment it originally conveyed, which was throwing some sort of neutral acknowledgment at the fact that we are making a record in a world where it will be consumed.
And perceived.
AN: Yeah, perceived. I feel like we were really lucky to get to make this album and doing a lot of the writing during quarantine – we just got to write a lot of it for each other, so it’s very different to think about all of it through the context of how other people are thinking about it.
Do you mind sharing one thing that inspires you about each other?
BW: Al is really good at – and by good at, I mean just naturally does it, doesn’t have to think about it too hard – making a total stranger feel very welcome and at ease. That translates in a lot of ways, but recognizing some insecurity in myself as a musician starting out, where I was really anxious to be perceived in any way at all – definitely over the years, I’ve gotten more social, but I’m a pretty relatively antisocial person – and being welcomed into the first band that we played together when we first met, being really seen and heard as a person between us personally meant quite a big deal to me. But outside of myself as well, both generally speaking but also as a musician, I don’t know if I’ve met anyone else that has the same charisma and ability to tap into where someone else is at and really enjoy that with them as Al. Sometimes we’ll meet a random person, and I feel like within a couple of seconds, we’re really good friends.
AN: Thanks, Bailey.
BW: No problem, yeah.
AN: That’s really nice. It’s hard for me to even unpack the ways that I feel inspired by Bailey, because more so than any band or any reference I could be trying to make, Bailey has completely shaped the way that I make music. And is definitely my number one inspiration when we’re making stuff together, or even when I’m doing things in my own corner. But Bailey has a really good sense of humor, and that inspires me. The most important thing, for me, in our creative processes, is that we laugh a lot. And Bailey makes me laugh a lot.
BW: Yeah, you make me laugh a lot too. I think so much of our relationship and friendship is based upon the premise that things are pretty serious all the time, and we’ve definitely been in some environments where things can be pretty severe. Severity is not a bad thing, nor should it be explicitly scary or something, because I think the people that are most inspiring to me, and who I recognize are the most “in it to win it” or whatever, are the people that take everything really, really seriously. But within that, you have to step back and giggle that it’s funny that you could be so severe about something as sort of floating in the wind as being in a rock band to begin with. [Bailey laughs] Yeah, we laugh a lot.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
fantasy of a broken heart’s Feats of Engineering is out now via Dots Per Inch.