**FREDO VIOLA | MY NEW HEAD | REVOLUTIONARY SON | APRIL 9TH, 2021**

Bio:

Ugly beauty. Euphoric and fabulous.

Fredo Viola’s masterpiece My New Head (Revolutionary Son, April 9th, 2021) begins with the old head being pulled apart.

The album’s first single “Pine Birds” opens the record, following an introduction of Pavlovian bells ringing out from a jewelry box of fine cut rocks that represent the jagged edges of Viola’s mind. Brought to this renewed having overcome a five-year bout with Lyme disease, the music is filled with his feelings of gratitude, as well as the trepidation that comes with having to re-understand existence.

“Every bit of social, artistic and cultural framework that had kept me supported for so many years had come into question and I was beginning to build again from scratch,” he explains. “If you listen carefully to ‘Pine Birds,’ you will hear power tools pulling out old screws, hammering planks out of place; you can feel the rumbling vibration of a foundation ready to fall apart.”

Only “ready.”

Viola left the framing to build upon, fashioning and refurbishing, better than before. A new psychic home or at least the setting for a renewed life to unfold.

The influence of composer Kurt Weill looms lovingly over My New Head. His 1928 music for Bertolt Brecht’s “The Threepenny Opera” meets at a modern intersection with the theatricality of Kate Bush’s catalog, and suddenly, we are inside a series of stories, not just an album of songs.

“I was obsessed with his music for years prior to writing this album,” Viola says of Weill. “All of it. The German works, the American Theater works. I love the twists and turns, the odd kinks that his music always has. He always wrote catchy melodic material but is not afraid of the ugly. Ugly beauty. It’s euphoric and fabulous.”

Viola began on the piano as a child and the music on My New Head emerged from those hands, through the keys, with a stop to pick up bits of his long-held affection for composers and pianists, Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten.

In particular, Britten’s operatic, orchestral, and chamber pieces haunt My New Head’s darker moments, and the friendship the two composers shared isn’t lost on Viola, as a component of the theme of re-birth that runs throughout the album.

“There’s that non-frilly, bare-bones intelligence to Shostakovich’s arrangements, especially in their first forms for voice and piano. Britten did exactly the same, and I was impressed by the fact that they would mail each other their song cycle works like pen pals,” Viola says.

As My New Head magically manages to bring listeners so close to Viola’s inner workings in a mere 35 minutes, “In My Mouth,” one of the album’s closing pieces, shows us Viola at his most vulnerable. If there is no trust established by now, it’s Viola who is willing to suffer the consequences.

And now I wanna take a little bit of you in my mouth.

And now I wanna make a dream come over this house.

I only started to take you into my heart.

Because of pride my smile is purple orange

and it’s twisted in place,

with barbs and lashes at the edges

stretching open my face.

“These lyrics are perhaps the most vulnerable and uncomfortably honest I’ve ever written,” he says. “All of this honesty, vulnerability and nakedness is very new to me.”

It’s important to keep talking about the influences that led to Viola’s creation of My New Head. The work is so densely layered -- even in its quiet moments -- that discussing what we aren’t hearing becomes as relevant as discussing what we are.

“Arrangements by soundtrack composers such as Maurice Jaubert, Maurice Jarre, Alex North and Ennio Morricone have a very unpretentious creativity that has inspired me so much,” Viola says. “These scores are sparkling, surprising and imaginative, yet simple. I was also inspired by the 70s jazz recordings by Antonio Carlos Jobim. The nakedness of the writing, the directness and warmth of the recordings... this was a sound I was going for. It’s one of the reasons why I pared the arrangements down so drastically.”

These sparse pieces are the rich soil that Viola describes as being “tended lovingly with the aim of growing a brand new head between my two shoulders,” hoping for listeners to “identify with the dense weedy patches, the prickly overgrowth, the momentous but fleeting discovery of a rare flower, and, beneath the surface, the ever churning and eternal earth worms.”

Ugly beauty. Euphoric and fabulous.

My New Head, the latest eternal and internal work of Fredo Viola, arrives on April 9th, 2021.