Like most people, Kevin Henthorn had a rough start to the 2020s: global pandemic, job shift, pinballing from New York to rural Vermont and Arizona before landing in Los Angeles with his wife and his cat, Wednesday. Unlike most people, Henthorn, who records heartfelt, gently uplifting indie rock under the name Cape Francis, made good on it. “It gave me time to figure out how I wanted to write,” he tells Apple Music. “I feel like, in the past, I’ve written from a darker place. And this one, I really wanted to write from a place of joy.”
Don’t Let Your Heart Walk Away: It’s advice, but it’s also a command, a challenge to the self. Whereas past Cape Francis albums have had a yearning, saturated sound, Heart, which was made with longtime collaborator and producer Ariel Loh, has the mellow understatement of a late-night walk, with gauzy, atmospheric passages that give backdrop to Henthorn’s cyclic thoughts, from the agitation of “Fire Eyes” and “Is It in Your Head” to the acceptance of the title track and “When I Am with You.” “I feel like a lot of the songs in the front half of the album are really steeped in neurosis and self-doubt and things that are happening in your head,” he says. “And then, there’s more clarity as you get toward the end.” Join us on the journey, track by track.
“Fire Eyes”
“I feel like if there was a pitch for the album, it’s about stripping away all those neurotic tendencies that get in your head and get in the way of accepting love. So, we’re starting off in not a very good place, and we’re trying to break down why. And then, you know, you end up in a lovely house in Vermont with your wife.”
“Is It in Your Head”
“I was playing it like a standard indie song. Just, y’know, strumming a guitar. And Ariel’s production really took it to a different place. In the verses, we’re doing these very steady, rhythmic downbeats, and on the choruses, we open it up and you lose all of that. We were listening to a lot of Perfume Genius.”
“Even in the Dark”
“With Cape Francis, I feel like it’s enough to just get the songs and the lyrics to a good place, and then I work with Ariel to move it along. It’s not like I’m fully arranging everything and building it up from there. It’s usually on the fly, very collaborative. Like, ‘Even in the Dark’ was a completely piecemeal song—two separate songs that we put together to make a whole.”
“Hart Street”
“I was working a day job in New York City. And I had a band, had a practice space, was going on tours—all this stuff. It was really going. And when the pandemic happened, it disrupted everything in a pretty intense way. I realized that some of that wasn’t what I wanted to do. I have a very, uh, complex relationship with New York.”
“Gospel of Broken Arms”
“It’s a song about healing. And not necessarily a specific thing, but everything. It felt like a new chord progression for me, a new space. There’s so many things we’re all trying to heal from on a daily basis, especially over the last two and a half years.”
“Ludlow (Winter)”
“So, [Ariel] and I were building ‘Ludlow’ out and exploring if it could be something more than a guitar song. And we actually really wanted to preserve the sparseness of it. So, we had all this piano production we were putting in, and we realized we could separate the tracks out and use them like poles—like, to split the album up. Because it really is kind of a two-part album.”
“Nightwalker”
“It’s about not being able to fall asleep because you’re too depressed and trying desperately to pull yourself out of it.”
“So Bored”
“There was something about singing the simplest, stupidest sentiment about being so bored you wanna die that I really didn’t take the song seriously for a long time. It was just something I sang to myself to make myself feel better.”
“When I Am with You”
“We’d finished the song, but there was something missing. And we’d seen Oliver [Hill] play with his band Coco and had heard his other stuff and knew what he was capable of. So, in the back of our heads, we knew, like, ‘Oh, if we get Oliver in here to flesh out some string lines, it’s really gonna soar.’ And we’d never done string lines like that before. Anytime we’ve done it, it’s always been, like, Ariel playing the cello, but with Auto-Tune and a bunch of other processing—never anything professional.”
“Don’t Let Your Heart Walk Away”
“The intro was actually something [Henthorn and his partner, Michelle Birsky] were workshopping for a [film] cue. Not for anything specific, just working it out. So, if there was anything that had bled from composer world to Cape Francis, it was that. It was meant to be this grand gesture of choosing love.”
“Ludlow (Spring)”
“I feel like I’ve always approached music through the guitar first. So, ‘Ludlow’—I mean, I hate this, but it’s definitely a pandemic record if you’re gonna label it, just because of the conception. Like, what else were we doing? But ‘Ludlow’ was the first song. You know, March 2020. I was just staying up late and working out emotions through the guitar and was really obsessed with this one lick, and it was really challenging. It’s just one of those things that wouldn’t go away. You’re up until 3 am trying to nail what you hear in your head on the guitar.”