“Rummaging through the rubble/ I knew I was in trouble that morning,” Pete Francis sings in the opening lines of a new personal and unconventionally written album PTRN SKY!
The song’s refrain—“Tell me why I can’t get on with it / Tell me why I’m always stuck”—introduces a decades-long struggle for Francis, which he says he’s now ready to share.
Francis began his music career with Dispatch, an indie/roots group he formed alongside bandmates Brad Corrigan and Chad Urmston. Dispatch is something of an indie wunderkind, the college-campus-to-Madison-Square-Garden launch pattern many bands have since sought, but few have successfully imitated.
In 2019, Francis left the band to focus on his mental health; he had been playing and touring for years while struggling with depression. Francis was diagnosed as bipolar in 2006, when he was 31.
“I was dealing with major depression, and I was hospitalized,” Francis explains in a new video preview of the upcoming album. “Once my health got a bit better, I felt that there was now room for new roots to grow.”
PTRN SKY!, those new roots, is Francis’ first full-length solo album. Alongside therapy and medication, Francis said writing the album acted as a kind of cathartic exercise; the songs channel feelings of languishing, loneliness, and the isolation of pain.
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“There’s still a lot of stigma and shame when it comes to talking openly about mental illness,” Francis said, explaining the impetus for the album. While many artists fold their emotional struggles into their music, Francis followed a writing process that would keep these emotions as fresh as possible: sing first, write later.
Francis began recording in an almost improvisational format. “I recorded everything right from the start because there’s just something about those first takes that’s so fresh and pure and interesting to me,” Francis said. “You haven’t turned your internal editor on yet, so there’s an honesty and an innocence that you can’t ever really recreate.”
The result is a kind of free-form musical version of talk therapy. The lyrics are unpolished, a first-draft version of Francis’ more abstract ideas, which in their raw and lightly-edited form avoids some of the curated emotions of popular music.
Instead, the lyrics are plain prose to the extreme, lines like: “September it hurt so bad / She said we’re in a crisis / I can’t hide this anguish any longer.” And: “Why am I so broken / Why do I feel such pain.”
Francis, in fact, intended many of the songs to be addressing himself—rhetorical self-talk before a mirror; however, the album would be an address Francis wanted to share with others, like reading aloud from the darkest pages of his diary. “Sharing what I was going through publicly came with a sense of relief,” he said. “I was met with so much compassion and love and support from everyone that it helped give me the strength to do what I needed to do.”
Sharing becomes the album’s unspoken mantra and Francis’ own articulated philosophy: “When we share our emotions and our experiences in real and constructive ways, we invite others to do the same, to feel less fearful and isolated, and there’s something really liberating about that.”
You can listen to the album here.
Assistant Editor
Joshua St Clair is an Assistant Editor at Men’s Health Magazine.
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