INTERVIEW: The Fool’s Agenda talk new single, sound evolution and Massachusetts music scene
On August 15, the Salem-based band The Fool’s Agenda released their latest single “Dumb (Take Me Out),” a critique on the increasingly performative nature of art and music. To combat this trend, the “grunge pop” quartet is seeking to write and perform with nothing short of raw authenticity and honesty. I sat down with lead vocalist Rhiannon Raine to discuss the band, the single, and their upcoming sophomore album, to be released this October.
New England Sounds: Congrats on your new single! Can you tell me more about it and the tension you discuss about between being a musician and a content creator?
Rhiannon Raine: It’s not necessarily just being a content creator as being in any kind of performing arts scene. I feel like there always ends up being a level of care about the perception more than care about the art at a certain point. That was a big point that we hit a few years ago. All of a sudden people were asking us what our genre was and what direction we were trying to go, and we didn’t really have answers because we were just making art. It led me down this enormous rabbit hole of overthinking and trying to find a niche, find a place, find labels, and make sure everything looked professional and cool. It stopped being about being real and making art, and it started being about this performative aspect of creating a brand for other people to buy into. Once I realized that was what was happening, I looked around at a lot of the people I was following online and some of the bands we were playing live with and realized that a lot of people were also falling into this trap. It just made me laugh, because it’s so unserious. We’re all just making rock and roll.
NES: Who are some of your current musical inspirations and influences?
Raine: That’s so hard. Right now, I’ve been getting back into early 2000s Avril Lavine. I used to love her when I was younger and, going back to the whole unserious thing, I definitely thought it was cringy to listen to her when I was in high school. I’m reentering a phase where I’m taking everything that I thought was cringy and I’m having fun with it again. I’ve also been super into a lot of early 2000s pop punk, like a lot of the stuff that I would have listened to when I was younger. And just across the board, I love Soundgarden. I listen to them all the time.
NES: You’ve mentioned “Dumb” is the finale to a larger emotional and sonic arc on your upcoming album. Can you tell me more about what that arc is going to look like?
Raine: This album is years in the making. And it has chronicled my time and relationships from age twenty-two to twenty-six. Which I feel like is a huge, second puberty, where you really have to relearn who you are as a person and how you are interacting with the world. A lot of the songs on this album go from being very unaware of myself and the perspective that I had at the time when I was twenty-two or twenty-three. And you can hear kind of the sonic progression of the loss and the misunderstanding of relationships from not knowing how to balance them properly through gaining the self-awareness of my own faults. Then it comes full circle with “Dumb,” which is basically making fun of the way that I used to act.
NES: Your sound has evolved from a Fleetwood Mac, classic rock-inspired style towards this more gritty Avril Lavigne punk alt-rock sound. What sparked that sonic transition for you guys?
Raine: Honesty. And some lineup changes. But I think it came from a huge place of authenticity. When the band first started, it was me and my roommate and two of our other guy friends at the time, and all four of us were theater people. We were all in college for theater, and when we started the band, we had this very theater-esque perception of what putting together a rock band would be. We basically cast the rock band and said, “this is going to be the show that we put on.” And then we tried to write music to match that show that we were trying to put on. When my roommate and our first guitarist left the band, we lost half of that theater mentality. Now we have our drummer and our current guitarist, [and] neither of them are theater people. They just wanted to be real. We transitioned for a couple of years, really trying to figure out what the balance was between the classic rock and the grunge sounds. I feel like we’ve finally hit like a sweet spot within the last year or so. We’ve been calling it grunge pop, because it’s not quite hard rock and roll in the way that people think about rock and roll nowadays, but it’s not bubblegum pop. It’s definitely catchy, but it’s still grunge and punk.
NES: How did that shift towards more emotional authenticity affect your live performances?
Raine: I have learned to become so much more open on stage. I used to be terrified of audiences. I used to never know what to say in between songs, and I would think that people wouldn’t care about the stories behind songs because I wasn’t being me on stage. I was the performer, the singer in The Fool’s Agenda. It’s been very cool to look at audiences dead in the face and say, “I wrote this song because I had a really hard time. And if you can relate, then I want you to sing along, dance, whatever.” It’s helped us connect with a lot more audiences. And it’s helped me connect with a lot of girls. We just opened for Pearl a couple of weeks ago, and the amount of teenage girls that I ended up talking to after the show who resonated with the music was so freaking cool. I write it for my inner teenager, for what I would have wanted to hear when I was that age, so to hear it being received is something that I never had experienced prior.
NES: You guys are quite involved in the Massachusetts music scene. What do you think makes that scene unique right now?
Raine: The Boston music scene is really cool because it’s very DIY. It is not quite the same as somewhere like LA or New York or Nashville, where artists go to intentionally develop themselves because there are a lot of professionals there. There are quite a few professionals in Massachusetts, but they’re usually doing a lot more ear to the ground, underground work than trying to push artists into the mainstream. It creates a really cool community with the people who are here because everybody is kind of working to create this scene together as opposed to building out what’s already there.
NES: What is one thing you hope that listeners take away from your music and performances?
Raine: It is okay to be authentic and weird and dumb and foolish. Whoever you are and however you choose to show up that day is perfectly acceptable. It is more than acceptable. It is beautiful.
Featured image courtesy of the band
