The new music follows her previous single and album title track ‘Shame’ being playlisted on BBC Radio 6 Music and her striking cover of Talking Heads’ ‘Road to Nowhere’ being used in the Official Trailer for Prime Video’s new series The Devil’s Hour, starring Peter Capaldi. With its delicate piano and softly treadling bassline, ‘Onion Brain’ has a timeless feel to it, echoed in Fable’s contemplative lyrics about loss and suffering; a subject she discusses with a reassuring acceptance, as she explains:
“‘Onion brain’ came to be one of my personal favourite tracks on the album. The main theme is the acceptance of loss, and the inseparable relationship of life and death. I titled the track ‘Onion Brain’ with a hint to the Buddhist idea that the suffering we perceive is caused by there being a sufferer, a noun. We believe ourselves to be nouns, static and separate, but as we peel away the layers we realise we are but verbs - living, breathing, digesting our experience, always flowing and affected by the world around us.
“I wanted to capture a feeling of helplessness in the opening line, 'tied to a lamppost barking at strangers'; a metaphor for how little free will we actually have in our lives. But it's not about trying to fight this, instead the song breathes a sigh of contentment with the worst to come. Coupled with a musical nostalgia for the Beatles and maybe a little flash of Fiona Apple, I wanted the music to invoke a kind of lugubrious joy. I wrote the track on an upright piano in my producer's second bedroom. If you listen closely you can hear an Amazon van reversing in one of the verses, but the take had so much truth in it, we kept it in.”
