Building on a career that spans over 17 years with a history that includes Seattle, New York City, and everywhere in between, Jon Fickes proudly debuts his most ambitious album yet, Closer to a Ghost. The album, a release by his newest musical endeavor, A View of Earth from the Moon, is “everything I’ve always wanted a record to be.”
The album’s twelve songs exhibit everything from blind irreverence to crippling obsession; from selfless love to complete emptiness; from boundless joy to unshakable regret. Recorded in Seattle and mixed in L.A., Closer to a Ghost is meant for an audience that likes loud and unapologetic rock ‘n’ roll. The album celebrates being “over the top” and many of Fickes’s influences are unmistakable.
Fickes grew up in farmland Eastern Washington where he couldn't suffer the region's distinct lack of a music scene or any real culture at all, so he got a degree in music and moved to New York City for a couple years, playing folk music in Williamsburg -- "chasing the ghost of Bob Dylan around Greenwich Village," he says. "I came back to Seattle to join a band. That band broke up, then a couple more bands came and went, now here I am. Plus all my family lives here."
Evoking his adoration of ambitious bands like Oasis, Tom Petty, Beck, Tame Impala, The Beatles, The Flaming Lips and others, and revealing years spent in the Seattle indie rock scene with To the Sea and The Fraidies, Closer to A Ghost is A View of Earth from the Moon's bracing debut. It is full of rafters-rattling maximum power pop and lush, fully flowing romantic threnodies for people who have been aching for a big-sounding broken hearted new masterpiece for a while.
There was an audio issue with the final song that prevented it from being included here. -ed.
