Paul Fonfara of Painted Saints
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In all the bands I’ve been in, I’m the side guy who plays a ton of instruments," says Paul Fonfara, who played clarinet, cello, and guitar in DeVotchKa’s early years in Denver before forming his current band, Painted Saints, in 2001. He started with songs intended for DeVotchKa, and his sound shares that band’s penchant for Balkan brass, spaghetti-western scores, and klezmer, but his songwriting pulls it all in a particularly cryptic direction. (Fonfara’s also a painter, so his lyrics often emerge from bizarre imagery.)
In Painted Saints, Fonfara’s now the front guy who still plays a ton of instruments, looping his own guitar, bandoneon, viola, clarinet, and whistling, even when there’s a full band with him. Focused as it all sounds, the band’s never been Fonfara’s full-time project: The years have found him touring and recording with eccentric singer-songwriter Jim White, journeying to Spain, and living in Eau Claire. Recently, he’s found a more stable base in Minneapolis, along with a hectic schedule of gigging and teaching sax and guitar lessons. Out behind Painted Saints’ second album, 2007’s The Bricks Might Breathe Again, Fonfara told Decider about being in lots of bands and how songs can sound like antlers and rust-red.
Decider: You also play in the Minneapolis band Spaghetti Western String Co. Do you ever get burned out on playing so much spaghetti-western- and Balkan-inspired stuff?
Paul Fonfara: I guess so. I mean, Spaghetti Western is good, because they’re into a lot of stuff that I never even really got into. They’re into, like, bluegrass, and more intricate versions of it. I play in a brass band in town, the Brass Messengers, that does Balkan, gypsy stuff, and it’s fun because it’s kind of a drunken mess. I think a lot of people just scratch the surface of it. I’ve been listening to a lot of Romanian brass bands. Back in the DeVotchKa days, we didn’t really listen to that. We were getting it from Tom Waits, or learned a few harmonic-minor scales and just made it up. When you do get into the real thing, there’s a lot more to it.
D: Do you see Painted Saints as a band with a clearly defined vision, or is it more open-ended?
PF: I’m pretty defined about it. I guess the biggest problem is just trying to find a steady band. I’ve always had really good people in the band, which is great, but then they’re always playing in five or six bands, so it’s always difficult for us to play a lot of shows together. I’m actually playing in seven bands right now. I literally play all weekend. A typical Saturday is at least three gigs. I like to write songs, and [Painted Saints] is the only place I get to do that.
D: How did this album title come about?
PF: I’ll play a song for a while, I’ll be singing a melody, and usually I’ll get some sort of visual image of what it feels like, and that becomes the story behind it. Like with “The Fat Kid Rides His Bike In The Snow,” I just felt like it had this triumphant kind of feel to it, and I just had this visual image of this heavy snowstorm and a fat kid riding his bicycle. [Laughs.] It’s a really lonely song, I think, just this kid who wants to get away from everything. [The song] “The Bricks Might Breathe Again,” it felt like an assembly line, kind of a work song. When I wrote that, I’d been spending all this time waiting tables and paying off all this debt, and I was working 60 hours a week, and I felt like it was wasted time. That song just made me think of an assembly line and brick dust, so it’s kind of like breathing in this decaying, red-brick dust. All the songs felt really red to me, for some reason, like a rust kind of color.
D: You’ve said that your song “Tinder” is about taxidermy.
PF: Well, sort of. For some reason I saw a record cover on it with an elk head and antlers, so [the melody] sounded like antlers to me. I just got this image of a deer head on the wall, and the idea is basically it’s a stuffed deer head on the wall, and it’s basically the deer trying to find out where its legs are. [Laughs] I don’t know how most people write songs.
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