With his new album Columbo out now, singer-songwriter Bruno Major tells us all about his ‘drunk tweet’ revelation, Abba’s influence, and the moment his ego died.
A few days before our interview, Bruno Major takes to Twitter to make a statement. It’s to the point and provocative.
He looks cautious as we raise it tentatively over Zoom. Wary, even. “Was it one of my drunk tweets? I have this thing about drunk tweeting, and I nearly always regret it,” the singer-songwriter pleads. We reassure him he’s not going to get cancelled. His tweet simply said, “I just realised Abba are the best thing ever”.
“It was one of my drunk tweets,” he replies with a smile, palpably relieved. “That was one of the less embarrassing ones. I was a metal kid when I was young. I loved Meshuggah, Mastodon, and Lamb of God,” he reasons. “So as far as I was concerned, Abba were the worst thing you could possibly imagine, but I had this moment on the dance floor at one in the morning where I was like, ‘Oh my god, Abba!!’. It’s just, objectively, high quality music: the songwriting and the production. Everything is perfect. They’re the Mozart of pop.”
I just realised Abba are the best thing ever
— Bruno Major (@MrBrunoMajor) March 11, 2023
Although Major is late to embrace his Abba voyage, this is not because he has contemporary bias. This is a man comprehensively schooled in jazz, a one-time session musician who has spent his first two albums summoning the spirit of the music made in the 40s and 50s. “My first few albums were [influenced by] Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein…just old American Songbook stuff,” he concedes.
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He now returns with his third album, Colombo. And first things first: it’s a truly fantastic, exhilarating record. His best to date. An album that quietly distances itself from what he has done before without losing the craft that’s underpinned by catchy confections such as ‘Nothing’ and ‘Easily’. Furthermore, it hangs together like the best records do, ushering you into its orbit and enveloping you with its full-blooded, heartfelt emotions and beguiling textures.
Bruno Major – Credit – Neil Krug
But like many great artistic achievements, Colombo emerged from a cocktail of misery and misadventure. First, there was the solitude of lockdown, and then an over-compensation by way of a wild six-month ride in LA where he crashed his classic Mercedes (nicknamed ‘Colombo’ after the TV detective), and plenty of sore heads, hazy memories and ultimately, a regained sense of self.
Like many of us, lockdown provided a tough period of reckoning. “That whole process forced us all to figure out who the fuck we are when we’re not doing what we fill our time with,” he posits, realising the wider philosophical concept he’s just touched upon. “We’re all kind of running away from the silence, I think. At least, I am.”
Like many others, Major sought to stave off the fear by seeking succour at the bottom of the glass. He admits he drank “lots” during this period. “I worked so hard for so long to become this idea of who I wanted to be. I wanted to be a brilliant guitar player, I wanted to be a successful musician, I wanted to write great songs, and I wanted to tour around the world.
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“And then, you get to the point where you’re doing it, you’re being validated all the time, and everyone’s like ‘You’re great’. Then you go home and realise, ‘Wait. None of that was real’. Who you are is just a person. You’re living in your parents’ house. There’s no validation, and so, who are you now? Because all that stuff is gone. And it was always temporary: it was ephemeral.”
He defines the experience as akin to an “ego death”. And when restrictions lifted, having been “starved” of experience, he headed to LA to drink all the life he could get his hands on. He rented a classic Mercedes and jumped right in. “I was going to all the parties, falling in love with everyone, taking everything,” he recalls. He now looks back on the experience as something of an extended lost weekend—a time when he swam a little too far out to sea.
It was a chapter that didn’t so much fizzle out but jump-cut to an abrupt conclusion. One evening, whilst driving through an intersection at the Lower Grand in LA, he ploughed into another vehicle and ‘Colombo’ – which had become Major’s “symbol” for “renewed autonomy and freedom” – was written off. At the same time, a relationship with an old friend (documented in the track ‘We Were Never Really Friends’) also ended.
Major came home and, departing from previous albums, which had both been composed on piano, he turned to the guitar. Songs poured out of him over a year spent in the studio with his regular co-producer, Pharoah. Together, they finessed the tracks that make up this set, coating the music with the fireside warmth of the singer-songwriter boom of the early 70s. It’s a sound that reflects Major’s musical diet during that time, which featured plenty of Billy Joel, Tom Waits and David Bowie. You can certainly hear shades of solo Beatles (‘The Show Must Go On’), Paul Simon (‘Colombo’) and Queen (‘The End’) too.
Whereas his lyrics had historically been a mixture of the personal and the fictional, this time around, he admits it’s “pretty much a straightforward diary of stuff that happened” to him. And on that note, even away from his LA scrapes, there are highly personal lyrics elsewhere. There’s a track dedicated to his dearly departed grandmother (‘Tears in Rain’), a song about his childhood friend who committed suicide (’18’), and the first song he ever wrote (‘You Take the High Road’).
To tell the latter’s story, we must return to 2011, when Bruno was a talented twenty-something jazz guitarist waist-deep in musical theory, coveting dreams that he and his brother would one day form a Kings-of-Leon-by-way-of-Bedfordshire rock group and take on the world. A time when fate intervened. His brother, Dominic “Dot” Major, was making great strides with his own group, London Grammar, and things were about to go big. He was about to be prised away.
Bruno Major (Credit: Neil Krug)
Bruno penned ‘You Take the High Road’ in response (‘You take the high road and I’ll stay here below/So long as you can see so clear/I’ll see clearly too’, go the lyrics). “It was actually a letter to my brother,” he reveals. “I was so proud for him, but I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t realise that I had an artist career in me or that I could write songs.”
‘You Take the High Road’ was an attempt to “explain” to Dot how he felt, which was “pride, coupled with a bittersweet realisation that the Kings of Leon of us was never going to happen”. It was the first time he’d expressed himself emotionally in the form of a song, and he didn’t look back.
“I sent it to him [at the time], and we both cried our eyes out for about three hours. And then we never spoke about it again.”
Fast-forward twelve years, two rapturously received Bruno Major albums, millions of streams, and an “ego death” later, and this song has found its way onto Colombo. “When I finished this album, I sent it to him again,” he continues. “And it was this beautiful thing because there had been an element of sadness when I wrote it, but now we’re both there, and it’s a wonderful “full circle” moment. I think that’s why I felt comfortable putting it on this album 12 years later.”
By his own admission, reaching this point has not come easy (“I definitely don’t believe that I’m a super talented person. I just have a good brain. I have the ability to absorb information…[and I was able to] build myself into the musician I wanted to be eventually.” he says of his journey).
Colombo counters such modesty by revealing an artist on course to achieve the ‘legacy artist’ status of his heroes should he keep going. The sky’s the limit, and Major knows it: “I’m really proud of albums one and two, I really am, but I’ve managed to put together the best songs I’ve ever written [with Colombo]”.
One thing’s for certain. You don’t have to be LA’s most famous TV detective to suss the truth from that statement. The evidence is there for all to see.
