Newton Faulkner hits back at old label bosses with gritty new album

Dream Catch Me no more – Newton Faulkner is fighting back with a complete sound shift after his team continuously pressured him to stay inside his singer/songwriter box

Newton Faulkner has revealed he was under constant pressure to replicate his breakthrough hit Dream Catch Me.

The singer-songwriter says his team repeatedly urged him to play it safe — but he’s now fighting back with brilliant “grittier” new record, Octopus .

Newton told us: “If I had been given money every time they just asked me to write ‘Dream Catch Me’ again… I mean it wasn’t even subtle. They were like, ‘Can you just do Dream Catch Me again?’ There was no subtlety to it at all.”

He even tried to leave the megahit off his debut Hand Built By Robots. “There was a meeting about twenty years ago that I called. I went into Sony and said, ‘I don’t think you’re gonna like this, but I feel it’s probably better if Dream Catch Me wasn’t on it.’ And that wasn’t met well at all.”

Almost two decades later, Newton has stepped furthest away from his bohemian image with Octopus, out Friday. This time he’s embraced distortion, darker textures, and a more playful edge.

“With this album, I was very much like, ‘I am going to really mess with the vocals’ because the first track we made was totally distorted and totally insane, and then we made more and it was fun.”

It was met with some raised eyebrows, he added: “There were a few people on the team that were just like ‘no don’t mess with the voice that is the thing’, yeah there’s a place for it and records that have benefited from it but also there are records that I would have made more exciting.

“It’s that thing when there’s too many people telling you how it should sound, and you’re listening. It just slowly goes from like an interesting, spiky ball into a perfectly smooth ball, yeah it sounds nice but that isn’t the point, nice…”

“This album doesn’t sound nice, purposely, everything is a bit messed up, I really like the grittiness, that’s a place I haven’t been to.”

The shift has won over his toughest critic – his teenage son. “I played him Alright Alright Alright. He put the headphones on, listened to the whole thing, then listened again. He took them off, looked at me and said, ‘Father, that is the best thing you have ever done.’”