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'Comfort In Sound'
"Before we start, I just want to say one thing. I know you want to talk about Jon and stuff, and that's fine. But this is the next chapter of what we are as a band, and I want to make sure that people realise that. Please be positive about it, otherwise it's very hard for us to carry on doing it."
Grant Nicholas in Kerrang! magazine, 3 August 2002.
"Come back around, I miss you around."
Whether or not Grant Nicholas is in fact singing about his friend of decades and Feeder drummer Jon Lee, who committed suicide on 7th January 2002 in his Miami home, will no doubt become largely irrelevant. In the modern era context is all, and the context that Feeder find themselves operating within is one that relatively few bands in the history of rock have had the misfortune to experience. How do Feeder avoid being known as "The band with the drummer who killed himself"? Writing and recording an album as strong as 'Comfort In Sound' will help...
2001 proved to be Feeder's finest year commercially. Their slow-burn career took full flame as their third full-length album 'Echo Park' and the radio-mugging single 'Buck Rogers' both entered the UK national charts in the Top 5. Sold out tours through the UK and Europe, major festival appearances and three singles including December's 'Just A Day' (the band's biggest ever single) completed a brilliant term. Real highlights included a week spent in South Africa - Feeder are huge in South Africa - filming a video for 'Seven Days In The Sun'. The promo clip for 'Just A Day' featured a number of the band's fans miming along to the song in their bedrooms - becoming the stars of the video in the process.
At the very end of 2001, Grant confessed that despite the breakthrough success of 'Echo Park', he'd already written ten songs he considered his best ever. 'Comfort In Sound' is the result of six months' studio productivity - Grant and bassist Taka Hirose chose to work with Gil Norton (Pixies, Foo Fighters) for the second consecutive album, whilst old friend Mark Richardson, ex-Skunk Anansie, has filled in on drums. The songs are huge and 'Comfort In Sound' is the most apposite title for a Feeder album ever. Regardless of the year's events, if there was ever a place where Grant Nicholas could be said to be the most at home it would be bathed in waves of glorious guitar noise and mercurial melody lines.
'Comfort In Sound' is, as Grant suggested at the turn of the year, comprised of Feeder's best songs yet. It is an album in which no note sounds out of place and no song seems a second too long. The single 'Come Back Around' is a powerful precursor for a record that is more varied than any other Feeder album, that features more adventure in hi-fi than the band has attempted before, and comes armed with Grant's best set of lyrics.
The interpretation of these words will no doubt fuel discourse on the band and album for months to come. "There's a lot of emotions on this record. There's love; there's tragedy... Certainly on half of this record there are a lot of lyrics that were definitely fuelled by emotions that I felt. Every song on this record really does mean a lot in terms of both the content and the mood of it. That's what we've always tried to do. But in a sad way, there's more ammunition to play with on this one."
