\n<\/p>\n
The revered record producer Rick Rubin once asked me if I was ready for a change. My band Thursday<\/a> was coming off our third album, \u201cWar All the Time.\u201d We had just cracked the Top 10 on the Billboard album chart by producing anthems for the very same post-hardcore genre that we had helped to shape, but Rubin was clear: The creative clock was already ticking. At a certain point, staying the same meant fading away.<\/p>\n With \u201cFlora and Son\u201d (streaming on Apple TV+<\/a>), the writer-director John Carney arrives at a similar question. His scrappy debut, \u201cOnce\u201d (2007), had been an unexpected sleeper hit: a no-budget, boy-loses-girl story familiar to every musician who\u2019s ever picked up a guitar to try to win someone back. His second, \u201cBegin Again\u201d (2014), was a disappointing sophomore slump at the hands of the Hollywood movie machine, a situation that songwriters <\/span>face at the hands of the major label machine. Think U2\u2019s \u201cOctober\u201d or Bad Religion\u2019s \u201cInto the Unknown.\u201d Where \u201cOnce\u201d trusted the audience, \u201cBegin Again” spoke every subtext aloud. Was the success of \u201cOnce\u201d beginner\u2019s luck or simply sparks cast off by one of its leads, Glen Hansard, <\/span>Carney\u2019s longtime bandmate in the Frames?<\/p>\n A critical success, \u201cSing Street\u201d (2016) answered one question by posing another: yes, Carney could successfully make movies about lovelorn boys with guitars, but was that all he was capable of? Would his next film be a total reinvention, or would the song remain the same? When Rick Rubin posed that similar question to me, I told him that I wanted our next record to be \u201cless real and more true.\u201d Indeed, much to the dismay of our audience, we abandoned our own realism and shot to the moon with \u201cA City by the Light Divided,\u201d produced by Dave Fridmann.<\/p>\n