Tenderness is in terribly short supply.
It’s a thought I kept having as I spoke with Conor Mason about the songs on his most recent release as Man-Made Sunshine, the glittering and gutting EP LOVE WINS FOREVER.
And not because his demeanor had none – it was the opposite. Has anyone ever handed you a glass of water you didn’t know you needed?
More popularly known as the frontman behind the barnburner sounds of band Nothing But Thieves, Conor found another voice burgeoning inside himself, brought out by the pandemic, batshit politics and personal exploration.
While Nothing But Thieves offers no shortage of inventive, incisive lyrical work, Man-Made Sunshine represents an expression of Conor’s impulses that’s more introspective, poetic, and yes – tender.
Listening to him tease out the radically vulnerable roots of his new release, I realised how locked in we are, day-to-day, to a cutthroat modernity. Inauthenticity is currency. Cruelty is baseline, pervasive. So many souls gone numb in reaction to the frenetic social fallouts of the moment.
What a stunning digression Conor’s new work is from all of this.
Rich guitar tones, brought forth from a Gibson Country Gentlemen acoustic Mason fell in love with, give the entire EP a depth of spirit. Within 30 seconds of revelatory opener “I Have More Than One Soul”, one can sense the opposite of pretension: it’s empathy.
Mason’s EP is rife with it and begins with him extending that empathy to himself – or the multiple versions of himself. He accepts – even celebrates – that his soul is, and always will be, various.
It’s a strikingly simple concept expressed more beautifully, perhaps, than ever before. It’s also elegantly transgressive. From the day we’re born, we’re inundated with the concept of the soul as a fixed, singular thing. Every one of us, at some point, brays against that concept – feels the need for more space, more grace.
It’s incredibly universal, but that universality is illuminated by Conor’s willingness to be so personal. In fact, it’s so relatable precisely because it’s so personal.
That’s the emotional core of LOVE WINS FOREVER. This is the sound of a songwriter going all-in, drawing together the threads of his heroes to brave tender new territory in his own art and psychic range, whatever the cost.
The central reactor, of course, is the title track, a sober reflection on worldly cynicism that explodes in a defiant anthem, an against-all-odds banger. “Don’t let them take your heart away / it’s all that’s left today,” he sings, and it makes me want to hold onto every ounce of myself I may have left. I suspect every listener will feel the same.
After our conversation, though, I found myself listening to the song back, wondering: Is he right? Does love win… forever? If you stopped me on the street and said it, I’m not sure I’d believe you.
But when Conor sings it, my gut says: you’re goddamn right it does.
An abridged recap of my time with Conor Mason is below.
The Cold Magazine: When did you feel the need to branch off and write these songs? When did you know Man-Made Sunshine need to see the sun, so to speak?
Conor Mason: I was just writing so much during the pandemic, and I think I’d finally got to quite a still place where I’d realised I needed to confront some baggage from my past. And I’ll be frank, I was doing therapy at the time, and I think I had so much I wanted to say, but it was coming out in a different artistic fashion.
I’d shown it to the boys in the band. I said, I don’t really know what I’m doing. And they were just like, this sounds so you and the most personal thing you’ve ever done. They were like, why don’t you do something with it as a release, a side project.
I started using it as an escapist tool to really get personal with myself. It’s like I’m trying to write myself into the next stage of myself.
With this EP, I just wanted to get as strong as I could with the songwriting without any production. It was all just acoustic guitar based. I wanted it to be as simple and as raw as possible, but mainly wanted to make sure I had the best sort of songwriting I could possibly get without any tricks.
Cold Magazine: Do you feel comfortable sharing some of your influences for that sound and approach?
Conor Mason: This EP, I just really wanted to write in the style of my heroes, whether it’s Bob Dylan or Nick Drake or John Martin or Joni Mitchell. And then more recently, I think the one that really ticked me into the project was Adrian Linker’s Bright Future. That record just blew me away.
“Sadness As A Gift”, that song, I was just like, if I can get anywhere near to a song that’s that beautiful and sounds as simple as it sounds, even though it is really complicated, that song, but it sounds simple and it sounds so beautiful. And that was like my beacon. I just want to write something as good as that.
I just bought a 1960s country and western Gibson and I just played it all the time and fell in love with it and kind of found a harmony with it and then found the songs through that sort of relationship with the guitar.
Cold Magazine: The concept of having multiple souls, like you sing about on the first track, feels so intuitive – but it’s something we never talk about. People talk about the soul as this rigid thing that everyone has one. And you immediately break that idea apart with this beautiful sounding guitar. There’s this real kind of immediate liberation. And I thought: of course I have more than one soul. And I’m wondering if you’re hopeful other people hear it and have that reaction?
Conor Mason: I always write for myself. I think that’s genuinely the only way you can write. But I always think if I’m honest and I think any artist that is directly honest and true with themselves, it’s going to react with someone else because we’re not that different.
With that song, that was the first song I wrote for this project. And after that song, I thought, oh, okay, I’m on to something here for myself, I’m on to a direction, I’m on to something I want to say and a sound and a feeling that I want to convey.
For me that lyric represents really understanding that it’s okay to be more than one thing and multifaceted and not perfect and being not that scared of being exactly who you are. I think we all are multiple things all at once for different reasons. And it’s just not the case for me.
Cold Magazine: The emotional output as a whole from the project is positive but very grounded. You’re dealing with some melancholy in the songs but they continually ascend to a level of hope. Is that just kind of in your nature?
Conor Mason: I think that’s the human condition. I hope. One of our biggest strengths is we have imagination, and we have hope of something being better. Hope is always a thing for me of a desire or a change. It’s always there, but presence is also just as powerful.
I realised that I cannot be the shiny front man, the charismatic thing that I work very hard to be all the time. And that’s kind of what the song led from. I’ve struggled and it’s OK. I can be multiple versions of myself. I can be multiple things. But always hopeful, always.
Cold Magazine: I like the way you talk about it because throughout there are these big ideas, right? Obviously, a title like “Love Wins Forever” is this anthemic title. And you reach these big conclusions, but it’s always in this realistic conversation with yourself. I love the opening line, “they’ll take your dream and sell it back to you.”
Conor Mason: I think that this is like the brightest song on the record but written from the place of the most despair. You can’t even have your dreams anymore without someone taking it away from you.
I was watching the Trump-Zelensky first meeting and the way he bullied Zelensky in the office. It really made me so emotional. I was thinking, what is going on? Where is the heart? Where has the empathy and the kindness gone? It just feels like we’re in an epidemic of lack of heart and lack of kindness.
I was at a gig and one of our fans, they were trans and they were telling me how they had to move states because they felt unsafe. Imagine having to uproot your life because you don’t feel welcome and loved and safe.
This song for me is like all about hugging your fellow neighbor, hugging your fellow human. Remembering that is really powerful.
Cold Magazine: You said there’s no other way for you to write rather than to be completely honest. But when you go to put words together, does the music come first or the language?
CM: With Man-Made, it’s always lyric first. I never force anything. I always wait for it to hit me. You’ll get a thought, a lyrical line, I write it down and then I leave it. And then if another thought comes that expands on that, I’ll develop it.
Cold Magazine: Do you feel, over the process of a project like this, that it changes you?
Conor Mason: I’m writing in this state of pure presence, not overthinking, letting it flow through. And then I find it can be as late as six months to a year later, I’m like, holy shit – I’m almost writing my future. I’m writing what I’m stepping into. I’m writing my soul’s desire.
With the first EP, I changed so much and got so much better mentally, health-wise, everything that I was dealing with. It was like I was writing myself into that and it happened and felt great.
Some things you can’t change, some things that you want, you can’t change. And that’s also beautiful to just learn to observe and surrender. Sometimes it can just be as simple as I surrender to this, you know, I am powerless to this, but that’s also a beautiful lesson in strength and letting go.
Cold Magazine: As a work of art as a whole, what do you hope the primary thing that leaves people with is?
Conor Mason: I always generally want people to feel free and safe within themselves and free and safe to be exactly who they want to be. Love being at the forefront, loving yourself and finding a way to find that love and self-belief.
You have to find a way to love and accept exactly who you are. And then your output and your abundance of love grows so much because you want other people to feel the same way. You just want your friends, your family, people you meet, just to feel happy and safe and loved.
You have to accept and have your arms around yourself first. And I think that’s what I’d hope people can do is find that way to accept and love themselves for exactly who they are. Because you’re the only version of that person in the world.