You should check out Fazerdaze

 

I realize I'm just writing in fits and starts here lately. Increasingly, I'm seeing this blog as an outlet for stuff I feel I "can't" really write elsewhere, because this blog is my own thing and I'm not competing for eyeballs with a million other people. And most of my real friends don't even know about this, so it's ok if I just totally geek out on a subject. But honestly, I know that not a huge number of people are probably going to read this.

And that's ok! But if you are here, you should check out Fazerdaze, who's really New Zealand singer/songwriter Amelia Murray and not a band (as it may otherwise seem), but who goes by Fazerdaze for her music. Specifically, you should start with the song I've embedded above, "Cherry Pie", which is her newest (as of this writing, obviously). Because it's awesome, and I'll explain why. Music always needs an explanation, right? That's sarcasm, btw. Hey, I'm doing this because I want to. You don't have to read it. My goal here is just to make more Fazerdaze fans. Watch the video and be done with me here if that's all it takes.

I first "discovered" Amelia/Fazerdaze back in 2017, with this video, a solo performance in a coffee shop of her song "Little Uneasy". This is from her "Morningside" LP, and normally sounds like this, but someone in a guitar forum I read asked what specific guitar she was playing in the solo video and I watched and immediately knew that it was a Japanese Fender Mustang. This would turn out to be her preferred guitar for many years, although she seems to have since branched out to other, even more niche models.

Anyway, I was entranced(!) by that video. Who wouldn't be?? It's a very well produced video! And honestly, this 20-something New Zealander of mysterious ethnicity (she's Indonesian-European) playing a Japanese Fender Mustang and singing music that sounded eerily similar to stuff I had listened to in the 90's just seemed very intriguing to me in that moment. I had to learn more.

So I went down a Fazerdaze YouTube hole. I'm sure I watched every Fazerdaze video available at that time, and for years afterwards. This included her official music videos, interviews, fan-recorded live performances, etc. I discovered that her music, at the time, really was very shoegazey, at a moment when that was not in fashion. (It's since bounced back, and is again one of the more popular indie music genres. But it wasn't from about 1996 to 2023.) That alone made me an immediate fan, even if it was unintentional on her part, something I found out in some of the interviews she'd done. But in hindsight, she looks like a pioneer in bringing the genre back from the dead.

She'd actually done an EP prior to "Morningside" just called the "Fazerdaze EP", which, like a lot of first efforts from any musical artist, sounds a little more raw and a little less polished. But lyrically, the themes are similar throughout, mostly talking about relationships and the different facets thereof, and in fact a relationship with one specific guy. Amelia is not the only artist I listen to who has made a certain era of their music almost exclusively about one person. "Morningside", though, was a mostly positive album about the start of a relationship, with some obvious apprehension and anxiousness about the future here and there.

I was lucky enough to see her live two times during this period, both in New York City, where she seemed like she must have been scheduling shows around other things she was working on because she appeared twice in just a couple months' time. She seemed basically happy and was one of the most down to earth performers I've ever seen, even doing what amounted to a free meet & greet after each show. She said she wanted to know who her fans actually were, because she really had no idea who was listening to her music. I really wanted to go meet her but my wife was actually too nervous! My wife, who never seems to share my musical tastes exactly, still said it was a really nice time and that Amelia looked and sounded amazing. But she's even more introverted than I am and gets intimidated by "famous" people, although Amelia was not really famous. But she seemed like someone who should be, and probably would be if she wanted to be. It felt like it was mostly up to her.

Then for a long time, nothing happened. Amelia seemed to disappear completely. Nobody knew why. Very occasionally she'd post something on Facebook so people would know she wasn't dead. But she wasn't touring, releasing new music or doing anything of note. I was content to wait, because who knows what might be going on? It wasn't my or any of her fans' place to demand or even ask for an explanation. It was more of a "hey, I wonder what ever happened to Fazerdaze?" kind of thing.

But eventually, we got an explanation. Amelia posted a 15 minute video (seemingly taken down since then, as it served its purpose) about her absence, and what was coming next. It was, again, very well produced (she knows people who are good at this!) and I kind of wish she'd kept it up because it was way more than just her sitting talking into a cell phone like most people would do. It was actually kind of beautiful.

But long story short, her relationship went south, and she needed to take a break, which I can imagine probably would make you feel a little weird about your music if it had previously all been about the great start of this thing. She was releasing a new EP that would be a little harsher, a little darker, and not quite as dreampoppy as what came before. That came in the form of the "Break!" EP, which is about as on-the-nose as you can name something, and true enough, the songs on it are kind of angry, sometimes a little more punk, but occasionally very just straight-ahead pop/R&B, which was not a form of music I'd ever even considered she might be into before. It wasn't what we were used to from Fazerdaze, but I was still happy to have something new from her, and it served the purpose for me of broadening my ideas of what she could do.

Then, another hiatus. I was, again, content to wait. I had actually wanted her to become big and famous, at least as far as indie music artists go, but I figured at this point that maybe that's not actually what she wanted, and that was ok. She was making music when and how she wanted to, and living the life she wanted in between. I respect that 100%.

Another couple years went by, and I get an email from her (I'm guessing from her Bandcamp mailing list, but she had never used this before) starting like this:

Fast forward to yesterday, and the video at the top of the post hits. And honestly, it hit me hard.

If you hadn't guessed, I'm a little older than Amelia is. I've already gone through a lot of what she's gone through, and I can relate to a lot of it. But the relationship stuff in her music feels nostalgic for me; it's mostly in my past, trying to figure all that out. Some of it's still a little painful, to be honest, especially as I wonder about what might have been. So it resonates, but it's not generally the piercing, immediate pain of something happening at that moment.

But in "Cherry Pie", she's starting to realize that her youth is gone, the "years are going faster" and she's "searching for something else". This may or may not be universal, but in my experience, you get to a point in life when this is a constant. And it's not all that pleasant. So she and I are now at the same stage in life. (Maybe there's another point later where you're old enough to stop this search. I haven't gotten there yet.) There are some things in the lyrics of this song that also speak to me very specifically, which just makes it feel even more personal. But one thing that hits me hard is just that I've watched her, through only about the last decade, go from a youthful 20-something to someone who's singing about stuff I'm feeling, right now. This is a song about aging and it's a real thing that happens, to us and to our idols too.

The song itself has so many layers that I even missed the guitars completely the first few times I listened to it; now they're almost all I can hear. And I love her voice here, which sounds confident and strong. The chord that repeats through the entire song strengthens the pulsing downbeat and I think shows a level of songwriting sophistication that's new to this era. There is just a lot going on here.

Then there's the video, which is on a whole other level to any she's done before. It took me several watches to realize this, but it's telling a story that's darker than you might see on the first viewing, but that I think she means to be ultimately uplifting. I'm still trying to parse all of it but there's more there than meets the eye initially - I won't spoil my reading of it for you. Just watch it a few times - it's not just a bunch of random images of someone being driven around by an Uber driver.

Ok, I'm about up to date here. She deserves more fans, is what I'm saying. I've gotten a lot out of her music over the past 8 or 9 years, and I want her to be rewarded for that. Like her stuff! I command it.