Badly Drawn Boy

Until 2000's The Hour of the Bewilderbeast, Damon Gough could make his music without a fuss, which is clearly the way he likes it. Since the beginning, he's cultivated a look-at-me anonymity, like a superhero with a secret identity, conspicuously hiding behind his trademark knit cap and beard. But after Bewilderbeast’s lullabies and wide-screen melodies won him, among other things, England’s Mercury Music Prize, people know who he is. Have You Fed the Fish?, then, is an after-the-gold-rush record, where Gough reacts to his sudden, minor celebrity and tries to find himself again. “Sometimes you’ve got to rewind to go forward,” he sings, and he sounds as though he’s looking in the mirror.

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More About

• Badly Drawn Boy
• Kurt Cobain
• John Lennon
• Jeff Buckley

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By song three, he's "Born Again." Halfway through Have You Fed the Fish?-- Badly Drawn Boy's second soundtrack of the year; call this one About a Badly Drawn Boy -- Gough puts it all in perspective: "I remember doing nothing on the night Sinatra died/And the night Jeff Buckley died/And the night Kurt Cobain died/And the night John Lennon died," he explains on "You Were Right." "I remember I stayed up to watch the news with everyone." And though he considers himself a fan of those artists, not a peer, the songs on Have You Fed the Fish? beg to differ. The five-minute "How?" is a pocket symphony, jumping from feel-bad folk to hip-shaking horns to here's-where-the-strings-come-in grandeur and back again, and "Have You Fed the Fish?" is an unlikely anthem, with a chorus that gives your heart a hug. "Don't want to be obvious," he sings. Still not a problem.