London (UK) based Indie-folk artist, Fran Lusty, has just released her latest single, Flight of Your Mind, and we’ve been taking a few listens here at the Send Me Your Ears studio today.
It’s always interesting to read about the thought processes and inspiration behind an artist’s lyrics and with Fran Lusty, a pHd student of English Literature and music, you find an artist that draws her inspiration from the books that she’s studying.
Flight Of Your Mind is a gentle, acoustic guitar based folk song which draws inspiration from the diaries of Virginia Woolf. The song speaks to how her mind takes flight, exploring dark and unknown spaces in her psyche.
Starting gently on acoustic strummed guitar, Fran’s voice soon joins the party and we were treated to a high quality, characterful vocal with fantastic control and a spine-tinglingly good head voice. There were moments we were reminded of Adele or perhaps Silje Neergard.
Flight Of Your Mind has superb development. Drums and extra guitars and bass join the mix and slowly but surely a hammond and some lovely harmony vocals join in occasional spots to fill out the sound. This truly is a very creative track.
Lyrically, as you would expect for a pHd student of English Literature, this is intelligently written with some clever plays on words. We particularly liked “Morning, I’m tired of mourning”.
The song ends as it began, dropping back to a single acoustic guitar – the guitar sounding as though it is strummed by hand rather than with a pick – together with that superb vocal of Fran’s.
This truly is a beautiful, well written and well played track. The development and scoring has been carefully planned and executed.
From a production perspective, there is a noticeable ‘hiss’ on the acoustic guitar track during the intro and ending. This could have been caused by using too little gain on the mic and having to add gain later during the mixing process and therefore increasing the natural ’noise’ in the channel. It becomes less noticeable throughout the main part of the song so isn’t really too much of an issue. A slight EQ cut around 65Hz would balance out a slight peak in the low end where the bass and kick drum are competing for the same range. A wide cut centred around 600-600Hz would reduce some slightly honky tones in the overall track. The biggest difference can be made with a fairly large and wide boost across the high mids and highs centred around 8kHz. This would add to the brightness and clarity. Finally, a light compressor / limiter and some make up gain (5dB?) to add to the warmth in the track and bring the volume up to match that of similar releases.
Flight Of Your Mind by Fran Lusty is a beautiful singer-songwriter track which lends itself well to being played live. We’re excited to see Fran’s career take off. Her beautiful voice and intelligent lyrics have all the elements of great indie folk music.