Kevin Bronson on February 4th, 2019

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Rachel Fannan had a rough 2018. “Cosmic shit,” she calls it, though hellish might be a more apt description, as it involved a thorny divorce after a whirlwind marriage. Devastated, the singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist had friends rally around her. “I heard the usual supportive line ‘this will make for great music,’ but in all honesty I did not want to write about what was happening to me,” she says. “I didn’t want to give this tornado credit or attention. At least, not in a tell-all confessional kind of way.”

So Fannan — known for her projects Sleepy Sun, Only You and the Bomb, as well as a contributor to Kan Wakan, UNKLE, Entrance, Black Mountain, Wall of Death and Moon Honey, among others — practiced what she calls “loving the dream, hating the memory.” Last May, she started writing the album “The Marigold Experiment,” which she plans to unveil one song at a time over the course of this year. It’s an audiovisual project (she’s working with Rob Fidel and Aaron Eisenberg on the visuals) and tells a story she describes as “incredibly sci-fi … but sci-fi meets papier-mâché.” The setting for the eight-piece, eight-song album is an art gallery, where, Fannan explains, “someone has installed an artificial intelligence unit in the shape of a woman. She is frozen until a viewer approaches her display and activates her as an art piece.”

For now, there is the first single, “All In,” a stunning pop track produced by Alec Justice that sounds like a torch song you’d hear on the Holodeck while alien couples conoodle in tufted velvet booths. Fannan’s vocals are pure butter as she coos “I lean on you / I’m all in on you,” accented by the sounds of Bulgarian trombonist Bojidar Vassilev. It’s a strikingly different turn, if you know Fannan’s vocals from the bands she’s been in. “I’m from the rock world, and one day [after the break up] I was listening to this Sabrina Claudio track and started to cry,” she says. “I just thought, wow this is so sweet and pure, I need this channel in my life right now.”

From her life to yours …

||| Stream: “All In”