We're excited to finally share Fran's debut album "A Private Picture" due out this Friday November 15th on Fire Talk. Hype Machine has the stream & says "Chicago-based project Fran began when artist Maria Jacobson taught herself guitar as a way to process change. Following a disillusioning season as a theatre actor and a few failed relationships, Jacobson took a job teaching English in Mexico, which afforded her the downtime to write. Returning to Chicaco, she formed a band—vulnerable, honest indie rock—which Buffablog recommends "for fans of Alvvays, Hop Along, or Jay Som." Their debut LP sees release on Fire Talk Records."
The trick is to make a confession entertaining. A Private Picture, the debut album by Chicago’s Fran, delivers a collection of extremely personal experiences that have been distilled and abstracted to the point that you can see yourself in their imagery, find analogs to your own emotional history in their scenarios –when you hear them, it’s a conversation. It’s therapy, if therapy was allowed to turn you on and make you shake what you got.
Maria Jacobson began writing songs during a time of great personal upheaval. Working as an actor at a summer repertory theatre in rural Indiana after a disillusioning stint in the Chicago theatre scene and a series of failed relationships, she bought a guitar and taught herself to play. Through this instrument and her voice, she discovered a way to process the pain of recent events and draw ambiguities closer to conclusions.
Landing an English teaching job with sparse hours in a small city in Mexico afforded the time and space to develop as a songwriter: playing and writing all night until it became clear that a body of work was forming.
Maria returned to Chicago and kept a cool head while navigating the general hassle that is getting your first band together. She employed the help of friend and bassist Atticus Lazenby to form the band and arrange their first EP called More Enough. It was through the release of the EP on Chicago tape label Lake Paradise that she met Jake Acosta. Jacobson remembers, “We met for beers at this weird bar that doesn’t exist anymore in Humboldt Park and were so happy to have met each other. That is sort of where everything changed.”
At its core, Fran’s music is about sharing a truth -–telling it, confessing it, yelling it—in the service of human connection. Or, as Jacobson puts it,
“I feel that I am a songwriter for the same reason I wanted to be an actor. I want to tell the truth. I want to challenge myself to get closer and closer to the core of an experience, an emotion- I want to say it, sing it, in a way that says exactly what it is. I cry when I write songs because I am constantly making discoveries, about myself, about the world, about the best way to convey and connect and get closer.”
Pre Order: https://ffm.to/franaprivatepicture
Track List
01. Now
02. Company
03. So Surreal
04. Time and Place
05. In My Own Time
06. (I Don't Want You to Think) I've Moved On
07. A Private Picture
08. Desert Wanderer
Fran - Company (Official Video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrG1o68A_DQ