People In Cars is the sonic shrine to a year in the life of Felix Bechtolsheimer; a year in which he lost his father, uncle and ex-partner, while also dealing with the gulf that was opening up in the band due to the covid-19 pandemic. Left alone with a swirling mixture of grief, loss, uncertainty and nostalgia, the German-born, London-based musician began to write again.
Sombre and psychotropic themes of drug abuse, death, danger and depression swirl around People In Cars, mixed in with tones of The National, Wilco, Lee Hazelwood, Leonard Cohen and The War On Drugs, all the while staying true to Curse of Lono’s rich new alt-country vapours.
In June 2020, an initial version of People In Cars was recorded, with each band member – guitarist Joe Hazell, drummer Neil Findlay, keyboardist Dani Ruiz Hernandez and bassist Charis Anderson – recording their parts individually. But, having lost his father in April, Felix began writing more songs for the record, digging deep, and recorded them stripped down with Bayston, Harvey-Whyte and Boxed In drummer Liam Hutton early in 2021.
The album itself is named after Mike Mandel’s 2017 photo book, capturing people through the windows of cars at an LA intersection in 1970. Bechtolsheimer explains his relationship with Mandel’s work: “I love the idea that in each car there’s this whole story or a whole family’s story, but we’re all in these bubbles. It’s like the support bubbles in lockdown.”
Bechtolsheimer formed his own collection of motion-blurred snapshots from the unlit backstreets of his own life within the album. Lost friends and errant lovers; long drives to Miami with Stones on the stereo, when the methadone withdrawal got too much; the ex-girlfriend on the run after her extra-marital fling died of an overdose on a surreptitious lost weekend.
Some memories-turned-songs flooded out in stream-of-consciousness; such as, the oceanic, string-stroked piano lament ‘Man Down’ and the nine-minute closer ‘Timeslipping’. Both were instinctive reactions to the loss of his father touching on grief, emptiness and life’s immutable brevity.
“I pressed record and I recorded this thing that went on for 20 minutes,” he says. “All that I did afterwards was transcribe the lyrics. The night that my dad passed away, I’ve never seen anyone in so much pain. I still can’t write about that, but I could just let it flow out.”
Others were prompted by unthinkable news. Word arrived that Felix’s one-time partner had run off for another drug-fuelled weekend affair, tragically resulting in his ex’s lover overdosing on heroin. By last August she too had met a mortal end, and Felix had a new song, ‘So Damned Beautiful’, a sordid and visceral pulp semi-fiction of lust, euphoria and bloody fingernails pumping at a breathless chest. Felix plays the ill-fated antihero, Canadian singer Tess Parks his grainy, traumatised paramour.
“I wrote the song from the point of view of the guy, who I didn’t know, of that dirty weekend, and that overdose. When you OD on heroin you do feel pretty great until it goes wrong, so that stuff came back into the picture.”
Opiated flashbacks emerged, like flashbulbs through passenger windows. That duplicitous best friend, himself thirteen years dead, became the focus of ‘Alabaster Charlie’. The lustrous ‘Let Your Love Rain Down On Me’ captured a man driving nowhere just to “kill the pain”, like Felix would twenty years ago, taking road trips across Florida to drive away the withdrawal.
Elsewhere, on the pre-lockdown songs, People In Cars finds some much-needed distance from the woes of 2021. Another Hunter S Thompson reference, ‘Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride’ was inspired by the story of Gilles Bertin, the “French Sid Vicious” of cult punk band Camera Silens, who became a heroin addict, stole €3 million from an armoured truck depot in 1988 and lived in hiding in Portugal, officially ‘dead’, until finally handing himself in in 2016. Felix commented, “I wanted him to be on the album but sadly he passed away before then”. ‘Don’t Take Your Love Away’ recalls the thrill and insecurity of meeting his wife for the first time.
As a final sign off to the album, Felix tell us that, “Right now I can do what I fucking like. I got a record that’s my favourite record I’ve ever made by a long way, and it’s the record I needed to make. I lost my dad, my uncle and my ex-partner last year, and my band, but I’ve got this record and I almost look at it like a bit of a shrine.”
People In Cars’ road to redemption may be dark, but its twists and turns are breathtaking.
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