Stereo Embers The Podcast: Jim Fairchild (Grandaddy, Modest Mouse, Small Isles)

“Everything On Memory”

The Fresno-born, Modesto-raised Jim Fairchild got his start on guitar as a teenager and in the mid-nineties became the lead guitar player for the indie rock outfit Grandaddy. That would be enough to make a resume’ shimmer, but Fairchild was just getting started. He was the touring guitar player for Giant Sand, he worked with everyone from Hawaii to Dappled Cities and he took over for Johnny Marr in Modest Mouse in 2009 and played lead guitar for them until 2021. Fairchild fronted the band All Smiles, he was selected to lead a project at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2010 and started a new project called Grace Meridian in 2020. But that’s not all—Fairchild currently is the Director of A&R for Dangerbird Records and he’s scoring films like the documentary Common Ground and Bee The Change, which is narrated by Ellie Goulding. And we haven’t even talked about Small Isles yet. Their new EP Everything On Memory has been described by Fairchild as, “written as the imagined score to a Christopher Nolan-directed movie I dreamt about in which Donald and Steven Glover wrote a script in response to Modest Mouse’s “Third Planet”. To my ears, Small Isles’ new release is a moody blend of spellbinding cinemascapes, arching crescendos, soaring distant melodies and futuristic percussion, all of which adds up to one of the most spellbinding releases of the year. Fairchild recently scored the documentary film Common Ground (Donald Glover, Laura Dern, Woody Harrelson, Rosario Dawson, Ian Somerhalder) which won the Tribeca Film Festival “Human/Nature” award. He is currently working on the follow up, Bee The Change narrated by Ellie Goulding, which will premiere at COP 28 (United Nations Climate Change Conference).

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