If the songs on Bryan Ferry's new album, "Mamouna," sound fragile and overwrought, it's because they are.
In an interview by telephone from Chicago, the 49-year-old English singer said he'd been working on the album for seven years. "Perhaps I was trying too hard to write a masterpiece," he said.Ferry labored ad infinitum on the album, which he had originally planned to call "Horoscope," adding layers of instruments, revamping rhythms and, most laborious of all for Ferry, adding words.
"Most of the songs I do start off as abstract instrumentals, and they sometimes exist like that for a quite a few years," he said. "Writing lyrics is the most difficult part of the process. You feel the burden of the European literary tradition on your shoulders, even though you're trying to write something much more street and immediate than that."
The album might still have been a work in progress if guitarist Robin Trower hadn't come along in 1991. With Trower as producer, Ferry took a break from "Mamouna" to record an album of other people's songs, "Taxi." That album took him only a year to record, probably because he didn't have to write any lyrics.
"Before I hitched up with Robin Trower," Ferry said, "I was working without a producer, which proved to be not the best thing for me to do, especially since I didn't have a manager at that time either."
Now Ferry has a manager, David Enthoven, who used to manage Ferry's former band, Roxy Music. In the 1970s, Roxy Music, which also included Brian Eno, helped move rock out of the streets and into the art schools with its avant-garde synthesizers, genteel love songs and stylized approach to 1950s rock.
Eno left the group in 1973, nine years before it recorded its most successful album, "Avalon," and broke up because of internal dissension.
"Mamouna" reunites Ferry and Eno for the first time since. The two wrote the song "Wildcat Days" together, and Eno is credited with "sonics," "sonic emphasis" and "swoop treatments" on several songs.
- Neil Strauss