Q&A: The Academic Give Their Very Best On ‘Sitting Pretty’
“WAKE UP NOT FEELING TOO PRETTY” — opens Irish band The Academic’s recently released sophomore album, Sitting Pretty. The line suggests a slow awaking, an easing into the album, which comes five years after the indie-rock band’s debut. But this is a bit misleading — Sitting Pretty is a high-powered unveiling of The Academic’s ripened boldness and sureness of where they’re headed.
Lead vocalist Craig Fitzgerald describes the process of developing the sophomore album as open and flexible, explaining, “We all trust each other completely as far as music goes.” Such trust makes for a refined body of work that displays the confidence to venture into new sounds while retaining the band’s distinctive personality: fun and charismatic with space for tenderness and introspection.
The first track, “Pushing Up Daisies,” might “wake up not feeling too pretty,” but it soon gives way to assertions such as “don’t make me question my vision” and “I wake up feeling so pretty.” The second song, “Don’t Take It Personally,” is a breakup anthem with little remorse. Drummer Dean Gavin delivers a potent boom to the chorus that empowers and drowns out any back talk as Fitzgerald assures, “I can get by on my own.”
Alongside the album’s courage, however, The Academic clears room for meditations on moving through your twenties. Fitzgerald describes the sound of Sitting Pretty as “emotional, up, and down.” The downs examine being “stuck like glue” on a past relationship, such as in “What’s Wrong With Me,” or wanting to make hardships better for another, such as in “My Very Best.” “Homesick” is mesmerizing with its delicate cymbals and Stephen Murtagh on a mild bass that manages to fully lead the song.
The album ends with “Buying Smokes,” a breakup track accompanied by regretful keys that leaves listeners on a subdued note: “I’m done with confrontation, I’m done with hesitating, I’m done with all the crazy things you do / I’m done with all your laughter, I’m done with happy ever after, I’m done with all the crazy things you do.”
In a press conference hosted by 1824 of Universal Music Group, we had the pleasure of hearing more about the process of creating Sitting Pretty during a pandemic, The Academic’s hopes for their upcoming North American tour, and the inspirations that have shaped the band’s own musical tastes. Read the interview down below.
LUNA: Some of your songs really acknowledge alienating feelings that music is able to uncover and present as something shared. “My Very Best” does this, “Homesick,” and one of your older songs, “Northern Boy,” too. You’ll be on your North American tour soon — what’s it like when you perform these kinds of songs, the ones that are loved so personally, live with everyone together?
FITZGERALD: I think it’s an interesting way of looking at music when you live with the track for so long in writing, recording, and then mixing and mastering. It becomes difficult to love the connection you have with the song so much that live is the thing that we cherish at the end of this whole process. I heard someone say that a song is never fully finished if you’re touring it — you’re always learning stuff off it and you share the experience with crowds. That’s what we like to do at our gigs. We don’t want this rock ’n’ roll wall where nobody can get over it. We try to break that barrier and let everybody in and experience the song alongside us. With this album, it’ll be really interesting to see what way it develops live and how people react to it because a song like “Northern Boy” has become, over the last couple of years, such a euphoric kind of thing at gigs where you can see it means so much to somebody, even if it’s just two people. That still gives you the strength to play it. I’m super excited to see how people react and what stories they create from hearing the words, how we perform it, and what we evoke out of people.
LUNA: Do you have any songs or artists that you turn to yourselves?
FITZGERALD: Yeah, lots! (Laughs)
MATT MURTAGH: It’s a tough question because I think all of us are listening to so much music all the time. It’s hard to pin down one. I’m actually listening to a lot of Art Garfunkel recently. I didn’t know how weird some parts of his career have gone so I’m finding him interesting to delve into at the minute.
STEPHEN MURTAGH: I got completely obsessed with that Ethel Cain album [Preacher’s Daughter] last year. I know she’s quite popular in America but I don’t think she has been heard as much on our side of the world. I got completely drawn into that album and how cinematic it was and how you can nearly smell and touch the world that she paints.
FITZGERALD: There’s an old band called The Blue Nile, which I found a lot of comfort and warmth in listening to. Mainly because I’ve always put off listening to them, but they don’t have that many albums and they’re really short and concise. You kind of hang on every lyric and that’s what I’ve been into over the last few weeks.
GAVIN: I’m back on — not as profound as the other guys — Bruce Springsteen. I like getting lost in his stories and songs.
1824: How did the recording and writing process for Sitting Pretty differ from Tales from the Backseat and your other previously released EPs?
FITZGERALD: Very differently because our first album was pretty much the four of us just in Dean’s dad’s shed. We didn’t really know much about the music industry — we just wanted to play music and write songs like our heroes of that time. So when it got to the first album, we had a lot of songs already road-tested and we knew which ones we would want on the album. When it came to [Sitting Pretty], we unfortunately can’t talk about this album without talking about the pandemic, and we couldn’t get into a studio so we made a couple of EPs out of the respect of the album because we respect the album process so much that we didn’t want to do something “from home,” let’s say.
So this album was a lot of patience around the songwriting and then we were able to book [studio] time, and we weren’t too worried about the arrangements — we were kind of making it up in the room. It was definitely very different to our more pre-produced approach to going in and making an album. I think with time, we’re all a lot better with our instruments and we all trust each other completely as far as music goes, so this album was very much like an open field where we could just take the songs in loads of different directions. [That] wasn’t what we were like maybe five years ago where we were like a 4-4-2-indie-rock band, for anyone who’s into soccer (laughs).
1824: You’ve opened up for The Pixies, you’ve presented Ireland at the Eurosonic Noorderslag, and you signed to Capitol Records. What is the moment that you feel most proud of as a band?
MATT MURTAGH: When we supported The Pixies, we were really young and we were just an upcoming band. For me, The Pixies were a huge influence, especially when I was a teenager. Getting to open up for them was a huge deal for me — like, welcome to the music industry, you know? That was a shell shock, lovely moment for me.
GAVIN: I’ve always regarded making albums as a huge milestone. I always wanted to get one body of work out there when I was younger, when I started drumming. I think to do that first album was a massive milestone. Obviously now, doing the second one, is another massive thing. I think just putting out full albums is huge and you get to look back proudly.
STEPHEN MURTAGH: For me, it was probably the moment that the first album went to number one in Ireland. More so because of how we did it rather than actually looking at chart success. We did the first album completely independently and I don’t think there were a lot of independent bands topping the charts at the time in Ireland. There’s been a million since, so that really felt like an amazing achievement. It was like a justification for all the years of hard work as an independent band.
FITZGERALD: Mine is probably around the first album as well. It was such a payoff when it happened, but it was actually when it got nominated for album of the year in Ireland. I have a memory of, just when I started getting into playing guitar — I was driving with my dad. They called it Choice Prize Awards and they used to put it on the radio. I remember we were listening to it as it was happening and they were reporting on who won the album of the year. I was thinking, it would be cool one day to even be involved in that, and we were nominated with [Tales from the Backseat], so that was cool to be considered amongst Ireland, which has an amazing background of music and modern-day music.
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