With a sweeping, melodic, pop-oriented sonic palate, infused with innovative sounds and a futuristic take on the traditional electro-pop genre, Toronto duo Featurette continue to mark themselves out as having a unique creative statement with the release of their latest single Don’t Know Me Without You.
It is a tour de force of melody + meaning, wherein the words that accompany the often bright and upbeat music are steeped in tones that are decidedly and sharply more introspective and darker. It’s a melange that makes for a particularly immersive and arresting experience, especially in a live setting, as Featurette has crafted a stage show incorporating a large, lighted letter F that ‘behaves’ as almost a third member of the band.
Visually, compositionally, and melodically, there is depth and exceptional craft on display in every song released thus far from the talented duo.
Don’t Know Me Without You is the second single off a planned album that Featurette members Lexie Jay and Jon Fedorsen hope to have released early in 2020. It was released Sept. 6, and is a follow-up to the song Million Things, the video for which was released in May.
“The album is totally written, recorded and mastered. Now that Don’t Know Me Without You is out, we’re probably going to follow up with another single, our third, in November, before putting the album out in January. We have been working on this full album off and on for two years and I think it’s important for an artist to put out an album early in their career. It’s like a stamp of, ‘hey I did this thing.’ It’s not just an EP, it’s a collection that we thought through and worked through from start to finish. We want fans to have something that they can get now when one of the songs is exploding, and also go back to and discover some other songs they like,” said Jay, who plays keyboards, performs lead vocals and co-writes all the Featurette songs, particularly lyrics and melodies.
“I think it’s more about us having a bit of change in our direction in a sense too. We were doing a lot of live shows, a lot of tour support, including with Scott Helman and for other amazing artists, and we were demoing ideas that could be songs and testing what could work during those shows. I think we felt that we needed to change our approach, so it took a little longer in our writing process to find our stride,” added Fedorsen, who plays drums, and triggers other keyboards during live shows, as well as composing much of the music for the duo.
“If you listen to some of the songs on Crave, our first album which we put out three years ago, and compare it to Million Things and Don’t Know Me Without You, the songs from before, while not low-fi per se, but what we’re doing now it like a cut above as far as sound engineering and the depth of the product that we’re trying to create. It’s very future oriented, there are almost no past references at all.”
Featurette is bucking a recent trend amongst newer synth oriented pop acts by intentionally not trying to sound retro or incorporating the more analog style sounds that dominated pop music in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
“With electro-pop people love to go back and use those 1980s sounds and stuff like that. We’re trying to not do that. We’re trying to do the opposite of that and think forward and create sounds and a tone that people haven’t heard before. We are thinking along the lines of more electronic based bands that don’t have the pop format, although we do – we have verses and choruses and pre-choruses, all the standard pop storytelling elements that you can find in any traditional song. That’s why we think electro-pop works well as a very general description. We’re not shiny, we’re not EDM, we’re a little different,” said Fedorsen.
“You look at the Billie Eilishes of the world and she broke out in a really unique horror pop way. I think that’s the branding she is using, because it’s darker and its pop because its ear-wormy as hell, but it doesn’t have a pop sheen per se. So, Featurette is a lot like that: it’s dark electro-pop, but it uses the pop structure and format. And it uses sounds that are not pop and it uses themes and words that are not pop, so dark pop is probably another appropriate tag,” added Jay.
The time since the release of Crave were well used by Featurette as they continued to hone their sound and experiment with different recording and engineering techniques to keep their sound fresh and incisively forward leaning – but always incorporating an unsettling sense of darkness.
“If you look at the video for Million Things, there’s a lot of beauty. There’s a lot of gorgeous, amazingly beautiful rich mansion shots in that music video. But then there’s a creepy troupe of four dancers with even creepier bunny heads on, or flower masks, or cat heads – whatever it is that I built up in my mind and then created the night before the shoot,” said Jay.
“We do want it to be uncomfortable. It’s got that edge of like, okay we’ve seen people do that rich mansion vibe in pop songs, how can we take that and flip it on its head and bring it to our universe? I really like horror and horror movies, but even more than that, even outside of film, I think there is a lot of darkness happening on the planet right now. It’s happened before in world history, on a mass consciousness level, on the hive mind level. I think there are a lot of people who are just feeling new fears, and so we go darker and darker down that path and have all these Netflix original films and things like that exploring all these themes. There is definitely an appetite for it, because I think it’s a really prevalent theme all around us.”
Jay said she has created a sort of on-stage ‘character’ that she writes about and personifies, known as Featurette Girl. Many of the songs are about the life, loves and experiences of Featurette Girl – some of which mirror those of Jay herself, but just as often are delightfully fanciful.
“I am not completely confident and fearless and deep as our music is, but she is. She is ‘on’ all the time and I aspire to be her. So, Don’t Know Me Without You is part of her story. The songs that we write are a collection of Jon’s experiences and my own, and we meld them into Featurette Girl’s life. She’ got her own stories to tell, which is think is a really nice outlet as a musician and songwriter to have a place to just share fantasy sometimes. It doesn’t have to be a Taylor Swift ‘I dated this guy and now here’s what sucked about him’ song. I don’t have a lot of those experiences to necessarily share, so I try to pull from some other corners of my life and emotions and conflate them into a whole story for Featurette Girl,” Jay explained, as she talked about the genesis of the new single, which has developed a deeper, more esoteric meaning that originally intending when first composed.
“It’s the story of a relationship. There are imperfections in the relationship if you listen to the lyrics and it’s like, ‘maybe you’re wasted,’ ‘ maybe you couldn’t cope.’ It’s a back and forth, push and pull, tug of war between these two people, but at the end of the day they come back together because, ‘I don’t know me without you.’ And the more I thought about that song the more I thought, well who the hell am I writing about? And maybe there is a twist we can thrown on this, and it was a lightbulb moment that totally happened for the director and I when we were coming up with the music video. Don’t Know Me Without You is about the angel and the devil on your shoulders. It’s like the dark and the light, the yin and yang within yourself. It’s more like saying ‘I don’t know me without the dark side of myself.’ So, what we have come up with is really the ultimate version of that song.
“It sounds like it’s about a relationship between two people, but really it’s about the relationship between you and your worst self and knowing that those two parts are pulled into one to make you who you are. It’s like on Instagram where there is one thing and in real life, there is another side to me. I was looking at it initially as someone not feeling complete without the other person, regardless of how messed up they are. But I realized the more powerful idea was that you’re nothing without your other self – but what if your other self is your darker self, and not wanting to give over to that side. For the music video we went with a black and white treatment which is going to be a first for us, because it shows all that darkness within yourself and really gives an empowering aid to the lyrics.”
“I think the devil in you is often the reason why you are still in a bad relationship or got into a bad relationship in the first place. It explained why you are in a situation where you’re giving so much that you’re losing your own self. So, there are many ways you can relate to the song,” added Fedorsen.
Million Things is another insightful message wrapped up in the glossy sheen of a well-composed, hypnotic and highly memorable synth pop song.
“It’s about having everything you’ve ever wanted but then in the end if there’s nobody to share it with, then what’s it all for? It’s sort of that concept of the social media take on the world right now and how everyone shows us their best, most-Instagramable life. So, all of the shots we had in the video were incredibly Instagramable. At the end of the day, you put all these things up and they you go home and wonder what’s it all for, what’s the point? The ‘stories’ are all gone within 24 hours – they’re wiped away into the archives. So, it’s like, ‘what the hell, I’ve got to do it all again tomorrow; put all that makeup back on, put on my best face, live my best life for Instagram,’” Jay said.
“At first glance when people listen to that song, they misinterpret it. A former manager of ours was listening to that song as said, ‘you guys write really happy music.’ Yeah, but did you really listen, though? The lyrics are far from it. That’s what we like to do, use the pop format wrapped up in the darker tone. The song is very happy sounding but at the end of the day, has super sad lyrics, which is a call for help that people often give on social media.”
Featurette has a smattering of shows this fall, primarily in Ontario and Quebec, where fans will be able to witness a show, as alluded to above, that is definitely different than the expected synth pop experience.
“It’s typically just the two of us on stage. In our most recent show, we were thinking about adding another keyboard player in there to support some of the heavier songs just with onstage bodies. Not to say we can’t do it ourselves, because we absolutely can. But we already also have a third member of the band who is a robot,” said Jay.
“I built this giant eight-foot tall LED wall called ‘F’. it’s like a light show that we can take with us and it rolls up, which is ingenious, so we can take it on tour wherever we go. It’s kind of our third member of the band because we have spent countless hours programming that thing, and programming the light show to go along with our songs. So now when you hear the bass, yes there’s no bass player or any keys player supporting the bass line, because they’re tracks. We wrote the tracks for the robot, and they’re not meant to be played by humans. But you can see it visually in our light show. It’s shaped like an F, so the next day, all you can do it think about us because there’s this giant F burned into your brain. People ask us all the time if F is coming on tour with us or not. It’s very cool.”
Featurette is playing Mills Hardware in Hamilton on Oct. 2, followed by a show at the Gordon Best Theatre in Peterborough Oct. 3, and at The Diving Bell Social Club in Montreal on Oct. 4, with an engagement at The Cinq Hole in Ottawa the next night. On Oct. 18, Jay and Fedorsen are at The Rec Room in Toronto.
For more information on tour dates, on the already-released singles and forthcoming album, visit the band’s various socials, or http://featurettemusic.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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