Fauvely

Pandemic life has left its scars on us all. Some have healed, and other wounds open up on a daily basis. Many will never quite leave, and the future will always be shaped by the last year. For Fauvely, the Chicago dream pop act headed by Sophie Brochu and Dale Price, it has scattered their members and halted a trajectory that would have seen them tour internationally for the first time, play South by Southwest, and continue to rise in an overcrowded local indie scene. And despite it all they came together last summer to record their debut full length. A darkly gorgeous record, full of Brochu’s hopes and anxieties, the allure of nature at night, and the seduction of the destination, Beautiful Places captures an enchanting feeling that transcends the everyday and our ever present scars. 

Perhaps Brochu put it best when we spoke ahead of their Audiotree session this Friday: “It started off as something that wasn’t conscious... It started with me trying to pair sound with colors. A lot of times people tell the same stories over and over again. Being in Chicago and being from Savannah, I started to romanticize this place I grew up, the darkness and the beauty. That paired with, because I can’t help what I write about, it’s a lot of anxiety and self doubt. It’s really hard for me to distill it into words sometimes. I guess I see it as place, mood, internal thoughts, atmosphere... Fauvely is nature. It’s a literal light in the dark. I think a lot of people will hear sadness in the songs, but to me songwriting has always been an optimistic act. It’s a duality of channeling grief and sadness into music, but having this uplifting outcome, because that’s what songwriting is. Any form of art. Any form of creativity is an optimistic act.”   

The deep dreamy quality of Fauvely wasn’t attained overnight. While finishing her graduate degree in creative writing Brochu knew there was more she had in her than fiction writing could attain: “I knew in my heart there was something else I wanted to say, through music. I started doing that, and it kind of spiraled into Watch Me Over Complicate This.” Her debut EP in 2017 launched a line of gigs joined by Price on bass as a duo, which eventually grew into a full fledged band. “I didn’t have a grasp on how I wanted to pursue this project.” Brouchu claimed, “Or what it would look like, so I had people coming in and out of the picture. I thought musicians were supposed to release albums after EPs… I had convinced myself that’s what you were supposed to do, so I released music I wasn’t very proud of, and then I took it down.” An exercise that taught the fledgling musician a lot, “I keep fucking up and making mistakes and that’s how my process has been.” she said, “I don’t know where these polished musicians come from and how they release perfect music for the first time, and I just keep revising and fucking up. My past mistakes is my process.”     

Price echoed the sentiments when recalling the early days of Fauvely: “In some projects, you take a backseat and do whatever serves the song, and in some you are leading. In this case some people had the wrong roles, and Sophie was pushed into serving the song, when she should have been leading the direction of it. We had to find the right personalities when it came to the core group of this band.” They found another core member in drummer Dave Piscotti, who joined for their second EP This is What the Living Do in 2019, helping to flush out the shoegaze style they had begun to develop. “It was through that EP that we really started to really form as a band, become a band, as opposed to Sophie’s silly little revolving showcase.” Brochu said, “Over these years, I feel like I’ve become a leader of this group. Instead of letting everybody else decide what it was going to be. And Dale is also a leader in his own right. This is a collaborative project. But before I was just letting people take the reins, and do whatever the fuck they wanted. It was hard for me, at least in the past, for me to say, ‘I want it to be like this, this is what I hear in my head.’ Because I didn’t really have the tools or the vocabulary to do that.” 

As they gained some attention locally and afar for This is What the Living Do and added permanent bassist Phil Conklin, tour plans were made to head to Japan in March of 2020, a SXSW showcase was booked, and then the bottom fell out of live music with the start of the pandemic. Brochu and her husband were in the midst of launching a restaurant. When covid hit, they were forced to default on their lease. And with the lease of their apartment simultaneously coming to an end, they began discussing leaving Chicago: “We were actually talking about putting our stuff in storage and getting an RV,” she said, smiling at the memory, “but it was too hard to figure out; I’m working remotely, what if I can’t get internet connections. So we just said we’re gonna go to Savannah and figure out how we’re going to land. We just needed to leave.” After recording over the summer she and her husband left Chicago in October for their hometown. 

They weren’t the only member of Fauvely who left Chicago, Price moved to the suburbs, and is currently in Westmont, but they have the Fauvely family to fall back on. “With the time that we had, Sophie wrote a few more songs.” Price said, “She would send mp3s of phone recordings to me, and I was at my girlfriends place in the deep suburbs at that point with just one guitar and a laptop. So we started to write bits and pieces that way, and we could flush them out when we could finally get into a room together. The album definitely benefited from that time that we had.”  

At Jamdek during the hot days of July and August they came together to lay down the tracks. Brochu recalled, “By that time, the way things were shaping up, with having to pull back from performing, and obviously we weren’t touring, and with the state of the world, I started to feel like we had to get down what we have, and we need to do it and let it be what it is. We were starting to talk about the possibility of leaving the city, with no idea of permanence, with so many unknowns.” As Price found comfort in the process: “There is definitely like a family thing.” he stated, “We had Chase (Wall, who also engineered and mixed the record) playing acoustic guitar and backing vocals, we had Mike (Altergott) playing keys, and then the core four of us as well. So it was just a little family unit putting together this thing, so that was kind of nice. We focused on people we trusted. People we knew would wear masks when they needed to.” 

As it shaped up into a full record, telling a very clear and interesting story they knew they had something special, “I see the Beautiful Places as an extended metaphor for your own inner world,” Price surmised, “Sometimes you can focus on the fact that it’s night time and there is darkness but there are all these glimmers of hope, these thoughts you have. Sometimes you might compare yourself or doubt yourself, but then every now and then you get a bit of praise and the light shines into your world. Trying to find those places in your own inner world.”  

Speaking proudly of her work, Brochu gave some insight on a few of the songs, “The title track ‘Beautiful Places’ is a song that I wrote for a very good friend who left this tumultuous relationship with this man. The person she was with had addiction issues. So the line was ‘demons like beautiful places,’ because wherever he’s going the demons are going with him. And that ties back into the topic of mental health and not being able to escape your thoughts wherever you go.” She continued on the album closer, “The initial melody 'Florida' came to me on a beach at night. It's about deep love, feelings of helplessness and wanting, and being there for somebody. It's this element of being in this beautiful place and this beautiful relationship and this undercurrent of terrible thoughts. In all of the songs throughout the album, I still consider it really hopeful. I still feel really happy listening to it.”

And it was Price who sequenced the record into a journey, “My whole vibe was that Florida is the destination,” he said, “but the intro is you can see it across the water and the lights and buoys and things, and you’re looking at the destination, that this is the start of my journey and Florida is the end.” 

A trip Fauvely hopes to stay on despite the complications ahead, “I think it’s going to be especially challenging for bands like us to recover from this.” she said, “Because right now releasing music is so competitive. It’s really hard to get heard right now. We're proud to be releasing this music on our own, but it's not without difficulties. Regardless, playing music together is a great privilege that we don't take for granted.”  

But Brochu is looking forward to playing live again. She hopes: “Somewhere eventually inside, where you can have really good sound. I won’t even be picky. I’ll play in your driveway. I’ll play in your bathroom. You name it, I’ll be there.”

-Kyle Land