Grian Chatten on wordplay: dream/drink
Fontaines D.C.'s songs have often featured bits of wordplay, usually in the way Grian Chatten enunciates words. He's talked before in interviews about how he is conscious of how he enunciates words, and that goes beyond just his distinct Dublin/Skerries accent: the sounds have to serve a purpose and he too is someone who often chooses words for their melodic and rhythmic sounds and taste rather than for meaning alone.
He's also fond of the world between two words when it's not cut and clear which one it might be specifically. He leans into this in the liner notes of Skinty Fia. Here are the printed lyrics of Jackie Down The Line in the booklet.
Grian sings somewhere in between 'got a way with murder' and 'got away with murder', two different sides, perhaps of the same coin.
Another word pairing I've seen him lean into is the dream/drink conflation. During Fontaines' Artist In Residence stay on BBC 6 Music, Grian picked the Electric Prunes song 'I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night', playing on the phrase 'too much to drink'. I think they used that in a show dedicated to words and lyricism, but I can't remember now and those shows are unavailable right now (officially).
Grian has used this very wordplay on a number of Fontaines D.C. songs himself: 'Go to sleep/There's not a thing that can't be fixed with a dream' - Skinty Fia. A song that's pretty much about drug use in communities. The fact that that line sounds almost plausibly like it would be talking about substance abuse, but underneath hides a much more earnest hope that you might miss if you weren't listening for the quieter 'm' at the end of the line. Almost as potent as the rest of the song itself.
'Amazing stars from the dream/drink' - Death Kink. The first verse uses 'dream' and the subsequent ones 'drink'. Is that now a spark gone sour? A life once filled with dreams now overtaken by a desire to get away from it all? Has the life the narrator sought turned into a deathwish?
It's just a little pattern I've seen crop up a few times in Grian's lyricism, and I wanted to look more closely into it! What do you guys think, have you seen others that stick out to you?