Faun Fables

PopMatters ran my Faun Fables piece today…it’s pretty stale, they’ve been holding it for, I think, five months. But it’s good to have closure, I guess.

“When I was living in New York City, and almost having a breakdown from stress and stimuli, I really discovered a kind of a solace in the kitchen,” says Dawn McCarthy, the songwriter behind psych-folk-theatrical Faun Fables. “It sounds really simple, but it was really one of those survival moments, you know. It was really what worked for me, as I got into basics, like using herbs and cooking things from scratch.”

That battle—between the threat outside and the warmth within—runs right through McCarthy’s fifth full-length album as Faun Fables. In some ways, Light of a Vaster Dark is a continuation of ideas she laid down in 2007, as part of her EP A Table Forgotten. In others, it’s an expansion of By the Light of the Kitchen Table, a musical theater piece she developed for the Idylwild Arts Academy in southeastern California that same year. Yet it’s also a summary of where her life has taken her over the last several years, away from the seedier parts of Oakland to the rolling hills of Sonoma County, out of a self-directed, autonomous existence into marriage and motherhood. Last year, she married her partner, Nils Frykdahl—also in Faun Fables but best known for heading Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. They now have two daughters, Edda, who is two, and Uru, who is six months old.

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