British guitarist and singer/songwriter Brinsley Schwarz released his third solo album, Shouting at the Moon, in late 2025 via Fretsore Records, and with it built on the humor-lightened but serious subjects that we have found with his previous albums. He takes a hard look at the world around us, and often conveys the prevailing sense that we have a responsibility to try harder and do better.
Music lovers will recognize Brinsley Schwarz’s name from the designation of a significant British Pub Rock band, but Schwarz has also been a longtime collaborator with Graham Parker, and a foundational member of Graham Parker & The Rumour. For Schwarz, turning to his own songwriting followed a renewed burst creativity that arrived via some live performances. This dovetailed with his career as a luthier, repairing and revamping beloved guitars.
For Shouting at The Moon, the songs range from throughout Schwarz’s songwriting catalog, since he has always had more songs than could fit on previous albums. For the album, Schwarz worked again with Producer, engineer, and keyboard-player James Hallawell, who is another Graham Parker collaborator, and they geared all their efforts towards a warm, in-person sound that they hope to translate into vinyl format coming up. I was pleased to catch up with Brinsley Schwarz again for Wildfire, and discuss the writing and recording of Shouting at the Moon with him from his home int he UK.
Hannah Means-Shannon: One of the things that I’ve always appreciated about your songwriting, and I appreciated on this album, is that you don’t try to put a rosier tint on reality than is actually there. And yet, I think you handle difficult subjects in a way that’s approachable, and not totally defeatist. I feel I recognize life in your songs. Some people try to be cheerleaders, only reminding humans of the good things.
Brinsley Schwarz: I agree. When Covid arrived for us, I found it difficult not to be pretty angry, and not happy with the way things were going. But if you listen to all of the three albums, there’s as much anger showing in the first album as in the second one, and the third one. I worry about the lyrics on those songs. I want to wake people up to some of the things that are wrong with everything.
On one of the press handouts, I was asked to introduce the songs to the audience with one sentence, and I came up with a kind of warning. I said, “There’s a lot of hard stuff down the road, and we’re not ready. Just saying.” I tried to put a bit of humor in the seriousness because you can get a bit high-and-mighty and righteous when you’re writing serious songs.
There’s a song on this album describing two generals standing on a battlefield, saying there’s going to be a big fight, and thousands of people are going to be killed. The way that it’s looking, you have to wonder how long this so-called “peace” is going to last, and if it’s going to last. Not to be too political, but your president is not helping a peaceful cause!
HMS: That’s obviously true. Maybe he’ll just fall asleep and let everyone else get on with life. I took that lyric as figurative, but we still have the war in Ukraine going on. And predictions about China coming up, of course.
Brinsley: That song is “Hard To Change.” It discusses things that aren’t going to happen, but says it would be cool if they did.
HMS: That could be a very long song, if you let yourself list them all. The song “It’s Been a Long Year” also gathers together the frustration, the pressure, and the warzone-like feeling of life right now. I feel like there will be a point where people will say, “It’s been a long decade.” When we get to 2030 or so.
Brinsley: That’s a song where I’m really pessimistic, “Winter rains pour down, summer sun burns the ground.” It’s all happening, and not enough people are taking notice. You see political meetings and interviews as people try to get a handle on things, but you very rarely hear any of those people talking about climate change. If we don’t work out to handle climate change, it won’t matter what the other issues are. None of the world works unless we fix that. The lyric says, “We’ve got to stop what we’re doing. We’ve got to stop now.”
HMS: I feel like that could have been a Punk rager of a song in terms of sound, just based on what it’s saying, but it’s not. It’s this ballad that’s very medicinal, almost. It’s very calming, and lets you sit with these thoughts without freaking out. It could be demoralizing, but you create this welcoming musical space for thinking about. It’s a nice place to sit for a while and think about something difficult.
Brinsley: Yes. That song was released about a year-and-a-half ago as a single track. Everything was a bit quiet in the Fretsore camp, and I thought, “I want people to hear this song. If they don’t hear anything else, there’s this song.” What I’m really saying isn’t on the top of the lyrics, it’s lower down, deeper. “It’s Been a Long Year” was released with a video, and as that long guitar solo starts, the video cuts to three whales, who are a mother, father, and child, and they are just carrying along in the ocean. It’s saying, “This isn’t good enough. We’ve got to do much better.” I have things that I just want to say, and people cand do what they can, or want to do, or not.
HMS: When it comes to the music, do you write the music first, or the lyrics? How did the sound come together to fit with these ideas for this song?
Brinsley: I think the majority of the time, I’m sitting around, and I pick up my guitar, and I start playing something. It’s usually a Blues lick. That’s what I always play to start with. Then I just get an idea. Sometimes, something happens on TV, like a movie finishes and at the end, there’s some really good classical music. That makes me want to write something like that. The lyrical ideas follow on, mostly.
Or, it’s the other way around, and somebody says something in the room, or I see or hear something, a line, and think, “That’s a good line.” Which I try to remember, or scrabble for a bit of paper to write it down. The same thing happens while I’m driving, of course! It can happen on one journey, if it’s a boring highway. I’m often writing love songs, which are usually sad, though I’ve written a couple of happy love songs, and they aren’t very fancy. Sometimes it takes quite a while to write a song. You can be half-way through and have no idea how to carry on. There are a couple of those on this album. Then, I just have to sit down and think it out.
HMS: A problem that a lot of songwriters have is that they don’t finish things. A lot people get stuck and maybe set it aside to come back to later, and maybe they do, maybe they don’t. I’m always curious how people motivate themselves to keep chasing a song if it’s being a little squirrely. It seems like you make space and time in your life, if you think you’re onto something.
Brinsley: Sometimes it just all flows, and pours out, and is over and done with. But there’s plenty of time afterwards to change things around, if you think of something better, or are unhappy with some of it. But there is a point I’d like to get across. One of the songs on my album Tangled is called “Crazy World”. I just picked up a pen and wrote it, complete. It says, “Isn’t it a crazy world we’re living in?” It was deep Covid when I wrote it, and you weren’t allowed to go out of the house. We started going out of our houses at 7 o’clock in the evening, and clapping for the National Health Service, who weren’t able to stay at home. I think that went on for about a year.
We put that song out as a single, and it got reviewed, and most of the reviews talked about the song’s lyric, where it speaks about picking up a pen and writing a letter to a friend of mine. At some point, it mentions that the friend is female. Quite a lot of people said, in their reviews, said that “He seems to have a problem with a woman. It’s a male-female problem.” They missed the point altogether! The whole song was about Covid and what the National Health Service was having to go through to keep us safe. I don’t know how many people got that from it, but several people didn’t understand, and thought it was a relationship song.
HMS: I actually remember that song, though it has been a while since I’ve heard it, and I think it is about connection, communication, and community. You write plenty of songs that are overtly about relationships, but I didn’t think that song fell into that category.
Brinsley: That’s cool! Whew!
HMS: I think that people should be able to address gender without it being about a romantic relationship, in songs or in any form, but we’re not as used to that as we should be. You do have a couple songs that are more geared to various types of relationships on this album, like “What in the World”, which is about observing someone you care about struggling, and then “Falling Over Backwards”, which is a problematic relationship song.
Brinsley: “What in The World” started off with two or three lines, a long time ago, and I couldn’t take that song any further, even though I tried every now and then. I just couldn’t. There are a few of my songs that are sort of masquerading, and that’s one of them.
The English are besotted with their football teams, and “What in the World” is about a footballer, actually. In a game of football, and in a lot of sport, in one game the players and the fans, too, go through everything that life can throw at a person. There are all kinds of emotions, starting with expectancy and excitement, then the down parts, and ending up in a win or a lose at the end. I got stuck on “What in The World” song, but it worked out.
HMS: That really works for the “cheated, down, and defeated” line!
Brinsley: Yes!
HMS: That song is actually rather mellow and groovy. It reminded me almost of a Blues song, but in a different sound idiom. That works for sports as well, since it has that extreme element where if you’re down, you’re very down, and if you’re up, you’re very up, like the Blues.
Brinsley: Yes, exactly.
HMS: I’m curious about the song “Maybe One Day”, which is mysterious, but also has this big sound changeover, somewhat unexpectedly, and these big horns come in. How did that one come about?
Brinsley: In short, the song was first released on Unexpected, and it’s called “George”. It’s a short song, and it has the wild sax solo, but it’s only a couple of verses. I really enjoyed doing, and liked, the little Beatlish harmonies, and I wanted to see if I could do a little bit more with it. So I wrote a second chorus. The way that the drums end that second chorus, and go back what is on the original song, worked really well. When we did it the first time, we said, “Whoah! That worked.” So that’s one of the reasons that it’s on the album, was how well it seemed to work, what we were trying to do.
The other reason is more record-oriented. We’re releasing vinyl of this album at some point, I hope, and on vinyl, you can’t put more than 19 minutes on a side. A long time ago, I was in a vinyl album cutting, and I spoke to the guy doing it, and he said he was “limiting and compressing it.” I really like people who use valve compressors because it makes things sound really good, and it can go over the top, and breaks up in a really lovely, warm way. Whereas a digital compressor sounds broken when you push it over the red.
The lengthened version of “George” which I called “Maybe One Day”, fits in a place on the vinyl album which works perfectly. It follows stuff and fits in, but the song, lyrically, is about George, Mr. Bush. You can see how long ago it was that I wrote that, originally.
HMS: It can work for any time, really, that song, because this image of isolation, and the disconnected feeling, feeling stuck, is something that anyone can relate to. But then the energy of the music comes in, and I think it does provide a hopeful feeling, that maybe a change can happen in that loop of being stuck. I’m glad you’re thinking about vinyl format and planning for it!
Brinsley: James and I are old enough to appreciate vinyl and that influenced our approach. James has got a case full of old valve microphones, and he put one up the first day that I went to record these with him. He put one up in front of me, and I said, “What’s this??” He said, “It’s going to be great.” I sang one line, and it sounded really good. If you use proper stuff, it sounds proper. Even down to the bottom line things, like the microphones, James cares and he gets these things.
A major manufacturer is Neumann mics, and they were East German, and during the end of the war, the owners parted ways. One of them came to America, and the other one stayed in East Germany. That’s the company, and it’s still the same. You can buy a real Neumann valve microphone, probably made in the 1930s. The result of that is that you can get really close to a microphone, and really push it, and it doesn’t freak out. It just does this warm, lovely thing.
HMS: That does explain a lot of the texture and the warmth of this album, and also the feeling of the audience being in the room. It feels very “close up” for the audience.
