Le Moribond? Pas du Tout: Zach Condon returns rejuvenated for Beirut's sophomore album

by Arthur Javier

Zach Condon is to blogosphere as Paris Hilton is to Thirty Mile Zone.  He is obsessively covered, interviewed and reviewed as a homegrown weblog rock star.  His first show in New York drew 200 people who expected to witness history.  Condon didn't deliver the Beatles on Ed Sullivan that night or any other night.  How could he?  He didn't know how to put on a live show.  He was just a kid from Santa Fe who dropped out of high school to see Europe and record songs in his bedroom.  But still, the shows and the crowds continued until, finally, on a tour designed to take him within spitting distance of every blogger in the world, he collapsed from exhaustion, sending him back home to Santa Fe and the bedroom that made him a star. 

Condon had recorded music before, but it wasn't until he made an album under the moniker Beirut that he actually had to tour.  "I almost never played shows," Condon recalls of his first experience on the road.  "And this constant blur of audiences and cities and 8 o'clock mornings and flights and stuff like that was new to me.  It kind of crushed me at first.  I couldn't even believe that humans could put themselves through that."

It was the length of the tour that shocked him the most, causing him to complain that indie artists were being subjected to the kind of tours that were once reserved for the Backstreet Boys.  "The distance, traveling, the amount of time just out on the road and working, working constantly," he sighs.  "The whole thing was just very surreal to me.  Because music to me-- it was two different worlds.  It was me alone in my bedroom recording and writing songs and the pure joy of that.  And then there's the live show which is just a completely different world for me and something I've had to grow into, something I've had to get used to and something I've grown to enjoy.  But, my God, at first I was so naive with it."

His approach was to say yes to everything that the record company suggested, not because he assumed he could handle it but because he honestly didn't want to let anyone down.  "I didn't really know how to say no at the time.  I still have trouble saying no," Condon admits.  "If somebody wants me to play in Iceland then I really want to play in Iceland.  It's just the fact that they asked.  It's hard to say no to something like that for your own sanity or health or whatever."  The decision would put both his health and sanity to the test. 

"It was after the U.S. tour," Condon recalls.  "[But] this was all one continuous, long tour.  I think it was like two and a half months in, and we had flown to Europe and I don't know.  It was like serious jet lag and some other stuff [that] all came together to the point where I just didn't feel right at first.  And then it was like weird anxiety problems that I've never had before in my life.  Then that actually kind of went away because I was like, 'Well, I'm just gonna keep going.  I'm just gonna get over it.'  But something else started happening, which was kind of like a mental thing.  I remember actually, I wouldn't see cars [while I was] crossing the street . . . My vision was going haywire.  I would walk around the street and suddenly get such a horrible case of vertigo that I would just kind of like stumble to the ground.  That's actually when I went to the hospital." 

He canceled the rest of the tour and went home, where he could work on his own schedule and with his own equipment.  The return to Santa Fe would mold the shape of the second Beirut album, almost immediately.

"When I went back [home] from the tour," says Condon.  "My little brother had just [moved out] and he had left behind all these photography books and that's where I found the photo."  The photo, by Leon Gimpel, captured Paris' hot air balloon festival in 1910 as a number of balloons prepared to launch from the middle of the French capital.  It would inspire not just the album's title, The Flying Club Cup, but the album's obsession with chanson and baroque pop.   

"It's something I've always been obsessed with," Condon explains.  "[Then] all of the sudden it was like all roads led to France.  The obsession just overwhelmed me.  I just remembered how much time I spent there and how much I loved the place and the people there.  And all the movies I'd seen as a kid and all the songs I'd listened to over the years suddenly started to make so much more sense to me."  The album is distinctively French in its themes and settings, its audio sampling of Brigitte Bardot in the film Le Mépris and its melodramatic orchestration, which is immediately reminiscent of the melodies that played behind Belgian crooner (and David Bowie favorite) Jacques Brel.

The album is a return to the music that Condon grew up with, the music that made him want to leave his bedroom and see Paris.  And while a rattle of keystrokes and mouse clicks may have made him a star, he is still most comfortable hanging out in his bedroom and writing songs. "I haven't come to terms with being considered a professional at what I do.  Y'know what I mean?  It still feels like a hobby that I do."

Beirut plays at Avalon on October 10.