Today is a great day to share the latest single and visualizer video from LA-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Nick Flessa, called “Medicine Hat City Slogan.” The song comes from Flessa’s forthcoming new album, A Different Kind of Energy, that will be released everywhere on April 17th via Anxiety Blanket Records. The fully instrumental album showcases Nick Flessa’s ability to convey a wide range of emotions without uttering any vocals. If you’re enjoying the new song, please consider pre-saving A Different Kind of Energy here.
”Medicine Hat City Slogan” references a place deeply tied to your partner’s family, while much of the album was written in Wonder Valley, California. How do those two landscapes—emotional and physical—interact across A Different Kind of Energy?
A Different Kind of Energy derives its name from the actual city slogan of Medicine Hat. The song title “Medicine Hat City Slogan” came first, and the city slogan itself became the eventual namesake of the record. Wonder Valley is an area of the high desert in California, where I live part-time, about fifteen minutes away from Twentynine Palms and Joshua Tree National Park. A place with dirt roads, wide vistas, starry nights and remarkable quietness. It can feel like being at the bottom of a vast, emptied ocean. But sometimes the quiet is interrupted by low sounds and rumblings coming from a nearby military base. While there is some variety to the geographic inspiration for the record, much of the writing was informed by being in Wonder Valley. Emotionally, its rugged beauty combined with its direct proximity to a large military center creates a dissonant sense of endless possibility alongside the unnerving feeling of potential destruction or violence around the corner. Regarding Medicine Hat, there’s a sense of healing conveyed in the name. As you mention, my partner’s family has ties there. She is an abstract painter whose parents are both geologists, one of whom is from Medicine Hat.The city is located at the edge of Alberta’s prairie and badlands. That region is geographically distinct and archaeologically rich, while also being a significant hub for Canada’s oil and gas industry. Musically and conceptually, “Medicine Hat City Slogan” alternates between steady, soothing sections resembling a prairie and harsher, driving sections reminiscent of the badlands. Throughout the record, there’s often a restorative power derived from these iconographically Western landscapes, which is nevertheless tempered by their proximity to industry and the fraught history of Western Expansionism and conquest.
This is your first entirely instrumental album. What led you to step away from lyrics, and what did working without words open up for you creatively?
My last record was lyrically focused and mouthy – a cathartic moment of having things to say. Ahead of that release, I did a performance where I sang over the instrumental backing tracks, karaoke style. I found myself frequently returning to listen to those instrumentals and enjoying them in their own right. That’s part of where the idea for A Different Kind of Energy came from. Otherwise, creatively, I’m sort of pleading the fifth with the gesture of the record (I think of the lone instrumental track on the Silver Jews album The Natural Bridge, entitled “The Right to Remain Silent”). Given the verbal emphasis of my last record, The Politics of Personal Destruction, I felt that I had recently put into words everything that I wanted to express in that way, at least for the time being. Removing the language factor opened up a greater emphasis on space in these new recordings, as well as the physical experience of listening. Since there are no words in the songs, the song titles also take on their own conspicuous lyrical quality.
Much of this record was recorded live and quickly, with an emphasis on the musicians connecting in the same space. How did that immediacy and sense of spaciousness shape the energy and sound of the album?
I approached the record as a documentary, or even a loosely scripted narrative. While not exactly improvisatory, I provided a series of relatively simple compositions/frameworks for the band to build upon while we recorded. This blossomed into the songs in their current form, elevated by contributions from a group of strong supporting players who had free reign to fire on all cylinders within the given compositional frameworks. The end result is a high fidelity document of that interaction. Within that, there is a level of spontaneity and human error captured that give the record its own distinct energy.