​Rank Your Records: Frank Turner Rates His Five Albums

In Rank Your Records, we talk to members of bands who have amassed substantial discographies over the years and ask them to rate their releases in order of personal preference.

First off, Frank Turner tells me, “let me get it out there that I think pitting records against each other is deeply immoral and like choosing between your children and all that shit.” That said, if he had to rank them, which we forced him to, he’d definitely single out his new album, Positive Songs for Negative People, as his favorite. The album, his sixth, feels more whole, more focused, more meticulously arranged, he says.

Positive Songs, like the rest of Turner’s catalog, is distinctly autobiographical. Each album is intimately linked to a specific point in his life, for better or worse. So in order to better understand the road that got him here (the road beneath his feet, if you will), we had him list his five previous releases in order of personal preference and talk a bit about where he was as a person and as a songwriter at the time.

(See also: Frank listing his ten favorite hardcore records and also dragging us to some weird-ass show.)

5. Poetry of the Deed (2009)

Noisey: Starting from the bottom here.
Frank Turner: This was a record I made in a hurry. The first two records came quick and easy and went well in an exponential way. So it was like, “Cool, time to do another record, let’s get the fuck on with it,” which is not a particularly artistic motivation for making an album. There’s also just the fact that the Sleeping Souls solidified their lineup. They weren’t called that yet and it was the first album I made with the band in the studio rather than the first two which were just Nigel playing the drums and me playing everything else. We had two weeks of rehearsals and then got straight into the studio to record the album in six days. Looking back, I don’t think being in a hurry is always a bad thing, but I feel like I rushed that record.

Why were you on such a time crunch?
I didn’t need to be on a time crunch, it was mostly me deciding I wanted to just get it on. We had just signed a deal with Epitaph, they were re-releasing Love Ire & Song outside the UK but I wanted to have a new album that was everywhere with Epitaph. There’s quite a few songs on that record which we’ve got arrangements of now, live, or I’ve got other ways of playing that I think are way better than what’s on the album.

Aside from “The Road,” this one seems to have your fewest hits of your records.
Yeah, “The Road” and “Try This at Home” are the take-home songs on this record, I suppose. There are some I’d like to rescue, like I think “Isabel” is a really good fucking song, but badly arranged on the album. But there are definitely some that are not very good. [Laughs]

Would you ever re-release different versions of these songs?
Not the whole record. Was it Kate Bush who re-recorded one of her albums? That struck me as gigantically pointless. I do think that records are moments in time and it’s slightly self-involved and fatuous to spend your whole life trying to redo things you’ve already done.

4. Sleep Is for the Week (2007)

A lot of people I talk to for this column say they cringe at their first album. Was there more or less pressure for you coming off a career as a frontman for a band?
In some ways, I wasn’t really thinking about it. In other ways, it gave me a springboard to push away from. It was definitely an attempt to not sound at all like Million Dead, which it doesn’t. I think “cringe” is too strong of a word for me. It just sounds very inexperienced in places to me. I did a thing the other day where I played the whole album live and in doing so in front of an audience, I realized there are quite a lot of throwaway songs, or at least ones that are less loved by me and my audience. Because it was one of those things that when I announced it to the crowd that I was playing the whole record, it was like, “Fuck yes!” And then I got about two quarters of the way through and everyone was like, “Oh this song is on this album? Fuck.”

You had a lower budget, I assume?
Yeah, me and Ben just kind of made it in my bass player Tarrant’s house. We had a live room in the basement and worked up in his bedroom which was on the top floor so we kind of pissed his mom off for a few weeks. It was a really exciting time, in a way.

The other thing too is that because I play these songs live a lot, because I tour a lot, songs keep growing after you record them. In some cases, it stays the same. In some cases, it changes a bit, and in some cases, in particular with this record… on paper, it isn’t enormously different from the recorded version, but it’s just got a feel and nuance that the recorded version doesn’t have.

What would you do differently if you recorded this today?
Well, I’d move the mics around on the snare drum quite a lot. [Laughs] No, I don’t know. I’d probably put one, maybe two, less songs on the record. I think it could have been a little streamlined. I don’t really enjoy thinking of it like “what would you have done differently?” because I learned how to do things differently by making this record. And I’d like to delete the song “The Ladies of London Town” from history for all time.

3. Tape Deck Heart (2013)

This was sort of a break-up record, yeah?
Yes. Tape Deck Heart is a very conflicted album for me in every possible way. It was about a difficult subject matter. It’s not a concept album, but it’s generally about a challenging time in my life. There are moments of time that I’m uneasy about. It was the first time where I had a big budget to make an album and the opportunity to work with a name producer. And that’s with no disrespect to the people I worked with before, but it was like, cool, you can spend six weeks tracking an album with Rich Costey in LA. I took the executive decision to use that resource. It would’ve been pointless to go into that situation and ignore all input from Rich and whoever. Why bother working with him if you’re going to tell him to fuck off on every suggestion? Having said that, I feel, looking back, I maybe took some suggestions—not just by Rich—a little too much, and there were some non-instinctive decisions made about the album that I look back on and wish I’d done another way. If I could switch out some of the songs that became B-sides, I’d be much, much happier with it.

That’s sort of the risk, isn’t it? When you get bigger, and the more and more hands you have on your music, the less distinct it becomes to what you started with.
Yeah, I think in retrospect, I leaned a lot of lessons from Tape Deck Heart about how to use resources and when to stand my ground. I’m glad I learned them, I think they made me a better artist. But there are some bits I love. I think “Tell Tale Signs” is one of my favorite songs that I’ve written and I feel very strongly that “Broken Piano” is one of the best songs I’ve ever written.

Let’s talk about “Four Simple Words.” It seems more… I guess you could say grand than your other songs.
Yeah, but my only reservation about “Four Simple Words” is that as an adult, I can put my hands up and admit there’s a degree of functionality to it as a song. It was written to be a song that would get a crowd completely in a frenzy live. There’s part of me that instinctively feels slightly uneasy about that because I feel like songs should be an ends rather than a means.

But you do tour a lot. You want to give yourself ammunition for your shows, no?
Yeah, I just mean that you should write songs to be songs, and hopefully you write good ones which means they fit into a set. There’s something about sitting down and saying “let’s write a sing-along,” “let’s write a mosh song” or whatever it may be… I’m not saying I 100 percent did that with “Four Simple Words,” but there’s more of that in there than any other song I’ve ever done.

Well, sometimes when you want your crowd to dance, you gotta tell ‘em that you want to dance.
[Laughs] Yeah, definitely. I remember I came up with that idea in Hamburg, hanging out with Brent from Social D and it was like, “What if you had a punk rock song that had a Vaudeville introduction that told you how the song was gonna go?”

2. Love Ire & Song (2008)

Let’s begin at the beginning on this one.
Yeah.

Do you get it?
Yes.

Did you get it, though?
Yeah, I got it. I got it.

OK, just making sure you got it.
Love Ire & Song, the fact that it’s so aggressively beloved by the older fans I have—and I hate to say it, but some of the more elitist fans I have—it’s a degree that almost makes me like it less. I kind of don’t want it to be my favorite record of mine because people will come up and say “that’s the last good record you did” or “that’s the only good record you’ve done.” And I want to go, “Well, fuck off!” And it’s not my favorite, but it is my second favorite. I am extremely proud of it. To me, it feels like the record where I hit my stride as me. As a songwriter. As someone who was doing something that wasn’t radically original but is at least kind of unique and charismatic.

Your songs have a reputation among your fans as being the type of throw-your-arm-around-your-friends, sing-in-a-pub songs. Sort of a communal element. This one seems to lean the heaviest on that.
It’s definitely a we record as opposed to me or I. And I think that’s cool, I like that vibe. One thing I like about it is it’s quite an unaffected record. I wasn’t trying to write pub songs or songs that one go in direction or another. I was just trying to write songs. There’s an uncalculated naivety about it which I think is cool. There are some things that annoy me. I think the way I sang some of the songs is slightly irritating to me. I love the song “Substitute,” but the way I delivered the vocals on the record is off.

How auto-biographical is that song?
Oh very. And I received an angry phone call from a recent ex when the song came out because she was clearly not the person in the song that I identified as “the last person that I loved” and she was annoyed because then by indication, I had met another. I was just like, fucking… whatever. [Laughs]

The song makes it sound like music is that one ex you always keep coming back to.
Yeah, absolutely. It’s not a particularly original idea, either socially or in song lyrics. But it’s just that idea that music doesn’t let you down. It’s Rancid’s “Radio.” It can be a more faithful companion than people.

1. England Keep My Bones (2011)

I feel slightly stupid for putting that as number one because it’s been my bestselling record and my most successful record and duh-da-duh-da-duh. But at the same time, if we’re not including my new one, I think it’s the best record I’ve ever made. I think it’s ambitious in a way that Love Ire & Song isn’t.

This one seems to have the most uplifting songs, or the ones that promote self-reliance, namely “I Am Disappeared” and “I Still Believe.”
Yeah, I think that’s true. There’s a sense of vision to it. I think about big things, about big themes on it, and I think successfully. It’s very possible to attempt doing that and coming off like an asshole. I think I successfully wrote songs about mortality and death in a way that was kind of interesting and personal and engaging, and it’s got some fucking good riffs on it, and some good lyrics.

“Glory Hallelujiah” is pro-atheism in a way that’s not done in a sacrilegious way, but more of a positive, self-reliant way. Is that right?
Yeah, definitely. You know Douglas Adams? He wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Total hero of mine. He was an atheist but what I enjoyed about his atheism is that it wasn’t bitter or negative. It just struck me as interesting to have an atheist song that wasn’t written by Emperor, do you know what I mean? A song that wasn’t like “fuck you, you’re an idiot if you don’t believe in god.” I don’t really care what other people believe in. And in a way, that’s not what the song is about. It’s about what I believe in. And to me, that’s a very optimistic view of the world. Like, if you discard all the bullshit about offsetting when it is you might deal with the moral implications of your actions and that kind of thing, then you can look around and try to do good things with each other and interact as decent human beings now, and not have to palm those responsibilities off on imaginary sky fairies.

Dan Ozzi is not the Dan in “Dan’s Song”… he doesn’t think, anyway. Follow him on Twitter – @danozzi