Gruff Rhys has never been shy of an ambitious recording project – a concept album about the life of Welsh explorer John Evans, say, or making an accompanying theatre production of his 2007 album Candylion, or sneaking into a condemned recording studio to make a record in its final days. By comparison, his latest solo album, Sadness Sets Me Free, is a relatively back-to-basics effort. At the end of a tour in Dunkirk in 2022, the Welsh iconoclast and his band hot-footed it to La Frette studios on the outskirts of Paris and made a record in just three days. It reflected Rhys’s current ambitions, “to work as much in capturing moments as making pop confections”, he has said.
La Frette had seen its fair share of moments – Rhys and band dined with the founder, Olivier Bloch-Lainé, a Zelig of French pop who told them about working with Brigitte Fontaine and Jean-Claude Vannier, and revealed his massive collection of classic synthesisers. It was a prolific time, Rhys has said, absorbing this history and producing a series of songs that “feel melancholic or … deal with shit things” and which document the fertile interplay between Rhys and pianist Osian Gwynedd, double bassist Huw V Williams and drummer Kliph Scurlock, formerly of the Flaming Lips.
You can ask Rhys about the new record, or indeed his time in the Super Furry Animals, what it’s like to drive a massive tank, collaborating with National Theatre Wales, writing an opera, crafting the songs for a recent theatre adaptation of an Oliver Jeffers story, the fortunes of his beloved Bangor FC, working with De La Soul and Gorillaz, helping to bring fellow Welsh cult musician Cate Le Bon to light, or anything else you fancy when he submits to the Guardian’s reader interview next week. Post your questions in the comments by 10am on Tuesday 9 January.
