Frank Viele photo by Donato Biceglia
Frank Viele – “Putting Out Fires” and “The Trouble With Desire”
New England based rock artist Frank Viele has a new album on the horizon, The Trouble With Desire, which is set for release on February 7. On the journey with this album, Frank has crafted a unique concept – he has fused the songs together with video gaming. Many of the videos he’s released of the songs on the album are set in a sequence as a video game series, with each one representing the next level of the game. The video game started at level 1 in the video for “Mountains We Climb,” presented level 2 in the video for “Necessary Evil,” and for level 3, there was the classic “Trainwreck.” In combination with the release of The Trouble With Desire, Frank is sharing level 4 of the video game via the song “Putting Out Fires” simultaneously with the fifth and final video game level, which is the lyric video for title track “The Trouble With Desire.” Americana Highways has the honor of premiering both tracks here along with a chat about the songs and the video game concept. The videos appear just beneath the interview.
Americana Highways: The video game-style lyric videos are such a unique concept. What inspired the idea to incorporate a video game narrative into your music releases?
Frank Viele: When I was writing the songs on this record, they all came from a similar place and a very unique and powerful point of my journey. As a result, when it came to making music videos, I wanted to be able to tell a story that tied a lot of the songs together.
But in all honesty, as an independent artist, the budget just wasn’t there for a big time animation or cinematic music video so I was searching for a way to make it happen. Then my music started to make some noise in South America which connected me via social media to a talented freelance artist from right outside Mexico City named Alberto who had started his own 1 man company called Telos Animation. He makes Nintendo style 8-bit videos and short reels in between working a whole bunch of other jobs like a lot of us indie artists do. We started talking on WhatsApp, struck an immediate connection as two artists trying to find a way to showcase our art, and built a strong friendship over the process of making the first video for “Mountains We Can Climb.”
It was such an amazing experience making that video with him that I wanted to make more. The story started to formulate in my head and I realized that the Mountains video could be the beginning of a longer story. I would find myself in the back of my tour van while on the road writing scripts for these characters pulling from the heart of the record, remembering old Nintendo games I played as a child, and by the end of it all I really felt like these characters were truly helping to tell the story I was trying to convey with this album. Alberto did an incredible job bringing my ideas to life and adding in his own ideas. I couldn’t be happier with how they came out!
AH: How did the song “The Trouble With Desire” evolve into the album’s title track, and why was it chosen to represent the record as a whole?
FV: After some introspection, it became obvious that “The Trouble With Desire” summed up the overall message of the album.
When my producers Jimmy Nutt, James LeBlanc, and I sat back and listened to all of the songs we had recorded, we all had different favorite tracks. But “The Trouble With Desire” was instantly a song we all felt strongly about.
But it became the title track when I realized that this song epitomized everything about my journey to date and was the culmination of a very introspective time in my life. A time where I was actually off the road due to the pandemic and was essentially forced to slow down after 10 years of touring.
I had released an EP called Time Is A Thief prior to this album that was written during the earlier part of the pandemic right before this one. In retrospect, the tracks on that EP were me trying to finding perspective inside of everything I had done in my life to that point.
The Trouble With Desire album was written with the perspective I had found during that process, discovering true empathy, the power of it, and the double edge sword within. Finding strength inside the darkness, and seeing both the pluses and minuses of the drive and determination I had carried with me for so long.
The album on the whole talks about key moments in my youth, the process of learning who I truly am as a person, and how love, love loss, overcoming obstacles, and focusing on results can lead you to lose sight of your purpose as well as all of the beauty along this journey you only get to travel once.
I think the message there and interwoven across the entire album is that there truly is a “trouble with desire” in that it sometimes takes too long to realize our time here is short. So while we all should pursue our dreams, follow our hearts, and never give up; we need to make sure that we don’t have blinders along that journey and we need to learn from our mistakes and gain perspective along the way.
AH: What is the most exciting aspect of finally releasing The Trouble With Desire in full? What do you hope people take away from this album?
FV: This album is about hope, perspective, love, and the thin line between desire and loss. We’ve released singles along the way off this record and I’ve been so humbled by folks reaching out telling me they danced with their mom at their wedding to “Trying To Raise A Man” or even an incredible couple I met on tour that found each other later in life and framed the lyrics for my song “Hearts We Left Behind.” They then hung it up in their dining room and tagged me on Facebook because they believe the song truly tells their story.
But I think the album, in its entirety, in the order we sequenced it, takes the listener on an even deeper journey. I spent so many weeks just working on that aspect. The track order, the common thread, the journey inside the songs both lyrically and sonically. I honestly just can’t wait to see how people react to the album as a complete work.
This album is the best piece of art I’ve ever brought to life and I’m so grateful it exists and that my journey led me to Muscle Shoals to make it on those musically sacred grounds. It rings through the record in a way I’m not sure you get listening to the album single by single.
Thanks very much for chatting with us, Frank, about this exciting work of art. These songs are powerful, uplifting, and hopeful – and the whole project is genius.
Musicians on both songs (“Putting Out Fires” and “The Trouble With Desire”) are Frank Viele on vocals and guitars; Tom Barraco on drums; Anthony Candullo on bass; James LeBlanc on guitars and backing vocals; and Jimmy Nutt on percussion. They were both produced by Jimmy Nutt & James LeBlanc and engineered by Jimmy Nutt (Nutthouse Recording Studio/Muscle Shoals, AL).
Both videos were animated by Telos Animation with video storyboard by Frank Viele.
Enjoy our previous coverage here: Song Premiere: Frank Viele “Sleepless Nights Alone”
Find the music here: https://linktr.ee/FrankViele
Watch both videos here, and just beneath them is a video recounting the story of the project:
