Paul Robert Fake is a songwriter of complexity and depth. He relays powerful human feelings thinly veiled behind a love of language and wordplay, drawing inspiration from classic poets Irving Layton, Charles Baudelaire, Leonard Cohen, Sylvia Plath, and Federico García Lorca, among others. That he is able to do so with such deceptively simple guitar stylings and tasteful, minimal arrangements only adds to his mysterious allure as a contemporary musical concern.
I have known Paul personally since 2018. We met at an open mic in Lansing, Michigan, where we both resided at the time. Each of us was using the low-stakes Tuesday night soapbox at the Avenue Café as an opportunity to woodshed some new material. We both arrived early, recognized each other for the outcasts we were, and started talking about musicians we admired. The aforementioned Cohen came up quickly, as did Bob Dylan and Nick Cave. We became fast friends, and I ended up playing bass guitar in his backing band over the following months. Since then, we’ve served as songwriting sounding boards for one another, bouncing demos back and forth through an ongoing text thread, listening and providing thoughtful, honest feedback when appropriate. He remains one of my best friends and greatest influences as a writer.
This is all to say that I consider myself intimately familiar with these songs, from their most embryonic sketches to the fully arranged forms that you’re hearing right now. I also know that Farewell to the Rose was a difficult album to make, chronicling Paul’s painful divorce from his ex-wife. Distance and time have healed some of the wounds for both parties, but these wounds were still very fresh when these songs were written. I consider Paul to be an author first and foremost—which is not to diminish his skills as a musician—and he details this experience with his words, masterfully striking a balance between obscure poetry and blunt force. He pairs this quality with his skills as a producer and arranger, relentlessly seeking out backing players who value restraint and minimalism above all else. The result is something neither layered and lush nor sparse and bare, akin to a monochromatic oil painting or a classic noir film, asking more questions than revealing answers.
If this all sounds difficult, I can only offer that Paul’s music requires patience, compassion, and an open mind. His aim is not to stimulate with instrumental pyrotechnics or compulsive jargon; he is far more concerned with delivering his message as free from distraction as possible. If I had to put it in a word, I’d call it careful music. Measured, steady, consistent music. This isn’t to say that Paul is averse to bursts of excitement—check the screamed vocals near the end of “There Is a Woman” or the quasi-psychedelic guitar interplay in “The Witness” for some easy examples of this—he is simply committed to cutting through the noise and doing his best to deliver even morsels of substance in an era that needs it most.
Farewell to the Rose is the long-awaited debut album by Paul Robert Fake—his first masterpiece, in this writer’s opinion. It is worth all the attention you can muster, and it’s probably better than Severance anyway. I send all my love to Paul and hope that he continues doing this for the foreseeable future, for all of our sakes.
Written by Jacob Simons
