TEENAGE FANCLUB SHARE NEW SINGLE “THERE WAS YOU”

Taking its title from Blake’s wryly named “I Do Not Dare To Dream,” the album gently pushes back on hollow optimism while still embracing a quietly hopeful outlook. “Those ‘dare to dream’ sentiments are kind of ridiculous,” Blake explains, “I don’t think the world works that way.” Instead, like its predecessor ‘Nothing Lasts Forever’ the record is grounded in resilience, taking stock of an uncertain world without succumbing to despair, and finding clarity and comfort in everyday moments.

Recorded at Black Bay Studio on the remote Scottish island of Great Bernera, the album captures a band deeply attuned to collaboration and place. Great Bernera is the band’s most remote recording location yet, which helped the band focus on the work but also put them in a place of awe, surrounded as they were by the crashing sea and ancient ruins. Teenage Fanclub likes to take advantage of what a studio has available to use, and at Black Bay the band found a Domus church organ (prominently heard on many songs, including “Over And Over”) and a lot of different synthesizers.

Joined by longtime members Euros Childs, Francis Macdonald and David McGowan, this quintet has played together long enough now that neither of Teenage Fanclub’s principal songwriters and guitarists feel the need to fuss over their songs or work up arrangements before they enter the studio. They’d rather wait for the rest of the group’s input. The result is a collection of songs suffused with the proper perspective of musicians who have been around for a while, recorded in a place that has been around even longer.

As Blake puts it, “I think what happens is you just move from one thing into the next and before you know it, 30 years have passed.” McGinley adds: “Yeah, it’s been a while since we started doing this thing we do, but to us it feels like no time at all. In the place where we made the record people would have been singing thousands of years ago. Life is short, but music is eternal.”