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Album: Epcot Starfields "Are you disappointed?" Matthew Thomas Dillon asks. "You sound disappointed." Dillion — the endearingly self-deprecating British musician who performs as Windmill — and I are discussing his sophomore LP, Epcot Starfields, his concern providing a telling glimpse into the heart of a singer-songwriter still adjusting to sharing his music with the world. Indeed, whether it's filled with thundering drums and lush strings or minimalist keyboard, there's something intensely private about Dillon's music, in which he wrings out his emotional laundry with high, fragile vocals. In fact, it took him more than a decade to let anyone hear his stockpiled homemade recordings. "If I just kept my songs to myself, they could always be good," he says. "I didn't have anyone telling me that they weren't, which I figured would happen."
As it turned out, a host of U.K. critics heralded his 2007 debut, Puddle City Racing Lights, and he's since gained some footing in the British musical landscape. Still, Dillon has always felt somewhat at odds with his local roots. Though he grew up in what he considered to be a creatively barren suburbia, he didn't yearn to be part of any London artistic scene — and while most of his friends dove headfirst into the Britpop of the '90s, Dillon sidestepped Blur and Oasis for American indie greats like The Flaming Lips, Clem Snide, R.E.M. and Eels. "It felt really exotic," he remembers. "I just felt like it was more mine because no one else was listening to it—that I knew, anyway."
Those bands still resonate with Dillon (who's now based in London — "right in the center, in a little red phone box, with a mouse detective"), and their influence is clear in his navigation of common themes like love, loss and growing up, his unconventional phrasings sung in a delightful whine. And for his second album, out now, he found further inspiration Stateside — at Disney World, no less. Wanting to make a clean break from his debut, he turned down an album advance and studio time for the seclusion he needed to pursue an off-kilter concept album inspired by a childhood trip to Disney's EPCOT Center. His memory of the the park—its dated futuristic imagery and cosmic theatricality, and the picture-perfect family - fun he had there before the shortcomings of adulthood set in — had stuck with him for years.
"This record," Dillon says, "it is an ideal, and it's about embracing the perfect moment before you realize that actually you're supposed to be cynical about it, and you're supposed to not appreciate such a thing." Composed on little more than a computer and keyboard, the songs drift from stark and haunting to warm and euphoric — all while engaging the limitless nature of people's creative goals, no matter how far-fetched. And although Starfields will likely cement Dillon as a rising U.K. songsmith, you still won't catch him attached to any particular London scene. "I'd kill to be running around in skinny jeans and long hair and everyone thinking I'm cool, but I'm not," he laughs. "I've got to sit in the dark and write about Disneyland. That's my life. It's weird."
© Copyright 2012, Christian Science Monitor
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