De Augustine\u2019s song Time<\/a>, from his 2019 album Tomb, which also features Stevens, was used in Zach Braff\u2019s movie A Good Person. Time became De Augustine\u2019s most popular song, with more than 31m streams, but he was far too ill to capitalise on its success. As he admits: \u201cI\u2019ve had to completely change my life.\u201d<\/p>\ndouble quotation markMy only focus was on trying to be a great songwriter \u2013 and perhaps I paid the price for that<\/p>\n
Toil and Trouble was ultimately released in 2023. \u201cI probably pushed through way too much to make that album,\u201d he says. \u201cI couldn\u2019t lift things.\u201d In the three years since, De Augustine has undergone recovery and had to relearn to walk, talk, hear, play and sing. Those experiences have informed a new album, Angel in Plainclothes, filled with beautifully otherworldly reflections on life\u2019s transience.<\/p>\n
Several songs recall the wistful beauty of Nick Drake or early Paul Simon. The lovely Spirit of the Unknown reflects on the simple joys De Augustine feared he might lose for ever: \u201cAll my life\u2019s a distant memory \/ Apples on the tree \/ The sun over the sea \/ Another melody.\u201d Lead single Mirror Mirror finds him looking at his reflection but not seeing himself, which he explains is a metaphor for how he was feeling for much of the time. \u201cLike a ghost,\u201d he says quietly over a call from his studio, which he calls A Secret Place. \u201cYou see everyone living their lives and it\u2019s like you don\u2019t exist.\u201d<\/p>\n
Watch Can I Come Back to Earth?, a short film about De Augustine and the making of Angel in Plainclothes.<\/p>\n
Lately, he says, emerging research points towards what was wrong with him. \u201cObviously I\u2019m no doctor, but there\u2019s more science coming out about the role the central nervous system plays in all our functions,\u201d he says. \u201cSometimes when somebody is under a great deal of chronic fear and stress for a very long time they can go past the allostatic load: the nervous system\u2019s ability to self-regulate. The brain tries to protect itself, so it sends all these strange symptoms to your body. I felt like my whole body was shutting down.\u201d As to what might have caused his chronic fear and stress, he suggests: \u201cThe music industry can be very stressful, just trying to exist. But I never felt I was not cut out for this. It\u2019s all I know how to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
De Augustine\u2019s parents were musical, although his drummer father left when he was five, leaving his mother Wendy Fraser \u2013 a professional vocalist who sang on the Dirty Dancing soundtrack\u2019s She\u2019s Like the Wind \u2013 to bring him up on her own. Initially, De Augustine was all set to become a professional soccer player before injuries ended his playing days. Then music took hold. \u201cIt gave me a way to express myself, which most people don\u2019t have,\u201d he says. \u201cI didn\u2019t get lessons or learn other people\u2019s songs. I just started writing my own, which maybe makes them different.\u201d<\/p>\n
During his recovery he returned home to live with his mother \u201cbecause I couldn\u2019t even make dinner for myself\u201d, he says. Since then, progress has been: \u201cStop. Start. Get a little better, get a little worse.\u201d One early breakthrough was joining a local spa. \u201cI realised that when I was in water, the symptoms went away,\u201d he says, \u201cwhich was the start of realising just how stressed I\u2019d been.\u201d<\/p>\n
Also crucial was signing up to a daily programme of physical and mental exercises, prompting a \u201cslow but upward trend. It taught me to retrain the parts of my brain where wires had become crossed. For a long time, playing guitar and singing felt wrong and weird, but then very slowly, it came back.\u201d Once that happened he found he was able to write songs. The first, Empty Shell, opens the new album with the question: \u201cWhere do you run when your life\u2019s on the line?<\/p>\n
Whenever he felt well enough, De Augustine would start recording. Where he had generally made those previous albums on his own \u2013 playing and engineering everything \u2013 he wasn\u2019t fit enough, so brought in outside help: Kevin Morby strings arranger Oliver Hill, harpist Leng Bian, Tomb producer Thomas Bartlett (AKA Doveman) on piano and his mother, who is credited as a percussionist.<\/p>\n
LA musician\/producer Jonathan Wilson provided drums and his mountainous studio in Topanga Canyon for The Cure \u2013 a song which De Augustine explains draws parallels between illness and addiction, \u201can outside force that can have a real hold on you\u201d \u2013 and has since become a friend. \u201cI was going there a lot during my rehabilitation,\u201d says De Augustine. \u201cI was trying to find places in nature that I could go to that weren\u2019t far away.\u201d<\/p>\n
The album\u2019s ethereal beauty has also been shaped by use of antique instrumentation: a bowed psaltery and aquarion, as well as a Marxophone (a fretless zither patented in 2012), a bass recorder, a train whistle, a 1960s German guitaret, a miniature accordion and even a 1990s synthesiser version of a Japanese koto harp. Looking for new sounds is something of a hobby. \u201cI just found a civil war-era pump organ in a local store,\u201d he says, with palpable enthusiasm. \u201cYou can carry it in a suitcase.\u201d<\/p>\n
Slowly but surely, he\u2019s rebuilding his career. Last year, he played live for the first time in five years to see if he could manage it. \u201cThere were some difficult moments,\u201d he admits now, \u201cbut getting through that just felt amazing. You wanna take these little steps. You don\u2019t wanna go from zero to 100.\u201d Still not fully healed, he currently feels like a cross between \u201csomething like my old self\u201d and a different person, who no longer takes anything in life for granted.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m just really trying to find myself again,\u201d he says. \u201cFor so long, my only focus was trying to be a great songwriter and perhaps I paid the price for that. Now I\u2019d rather not have tried so hard. I just want to live a good life.\u201d When I suggest that Angel in Plainclothes is packed with great songs, he gently concedes, \u201cMaybe when we\u2019re not so fixated on an outcome, it can come to pass.\u201d<\/p>\n
Angel in Plainclothes is released via Asthmatic Kitty<\/a> on 24 April<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Halloween 2022, Angelo De Augustine was at home in Los Angeles when he suddenly collapsed. \u201cI got…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":379960,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[458,146,85,46],"class_list":{"0":"post-379959","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-israel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379959\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}