Lloyd Cole had to get creative during the pandemic, in more ways than one.
Deprived of touring income, the British-born singer-songwriter and longtime Easthampton resident turned elsewhere to keep paying his mortgage. He offered handwritten lyrics to songs dating back to his ‘80s band Lloyd Cole & the Commotions, and joined the crowd-funding site Patreon, where he offered guitar lessons, posted pages from his songwriting notebooks, and offered access to musical rarities, outtakes and bootlegs. All the while, Cole was working on a new album, “On Pain,” that comes out this week.
On eight new songs, Cole pushes deeper into territory he began exploring on his 2015 album “1D Electronics 2012-2014,” a collection of synthesizer experiments. He merged that sound with pop songcraft on “Guesswork” in 2019, which represented a sizable shift away from his earlier work: jangly pop with the Commotions, followed by an alt-rock sound in the ‘90s as a solo artist, and then a singer-songwriter vein that carried him through the 2010s.
“On these last two records, I’ve been trying to make the kind of music that I want to listen to,” Cole says. “I’ve been trying to sort of bring together my interest in abstract electronic music and see if I can make those textures work within the restrictions of songs.”
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Cole, 62, first started exploring synthesizers more than a decade ago as a way to step back from his computer, which he was using to record music and also to manage his day-to-day business affairs. Tinkering with modular synthesizers — metal boxes stuffed with circuit boards and wires, with knobs and switches on the outside to manipulate sound and input jacks to connect to other synthesizers — struck him as an alluring way to take a different approach to his music. On “Guesswork,” that often meant adding electronic sounds to songs he had already written on other instruments. With “On Pain,” many of the tracks started on synthesizers as loops or snippets of sound.
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“It sounds terribly pretentious, but a lot of it was actually constructed more like musique concrete,” Cole says, referring to a style of composition that builds from raw sound and often sidesteps the usual elements of melody, harmony, and rhythm. That’s not to say Cole’s new songs lack those things: “Warm by the Fire” blends synths with drums and guitar parts that Cole chopped up digitally and reassembled, while “The Idiot” boasts a melodic hook that rises over a bed of gently burbling synthesizers.
“He has very good taste,” says the singer Matthew Sweet, who collaborated with Cole in the ‘90s and again on Cole’s 2013 album “Standards,” and credits him with suggesting the title for “Girlfriend,” Sweet’s breakthrough single. “I liked a lot of British artists as a teenager, like Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello and XTC, and he had that jangly melodic thing that I was drawn to, but Lloyd really has always been his own thing.”
Teaching himself to use modular synthesizers is very much in keeping with a do-it-yourself mentality that Cole has developed over his career. When he wanted a website in the early years of the graphic Internet, and a Web designer quoted him an exorbitant cost, he learned how to code and made his own. More recently, he’s been actively involved in creating concepts for videos to accompany his songs in a way that he never would have predicted back when he was busy enough to leave that sort of thing to someone else.
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“I grew up imagining if I could be a pop star, what I would be doing would be performing on television, performing in concerts, being in magazines,” Cole says. “And the idea of the video didn’t exist when I was a teenager. And therefore, I didn’t apprentice in the way that, as a fan, I feel like I apprenticed for being a pop star, just consuming everything and knowing everything about my heroes.”
With a tour of Britain and Europe booked for the fall, and the possibility of US and maybe Australian dates to come, Cole hopes “On Pain” can continue the modest resurgence of interest in his music that had been happening before the pandemic forced him off the road in March 2020. After finding solo success in the ‘90s and 2000s, Cole’s career reached its nadir around the time he released his 2006 album “Antidepressant.”
“My career basically bottomed out,” he says. “ ‘Antidepressant’ was the least successful record I’ve put out, and that year, I performed in the smallest venues I’ve ever played.”
He had been building back up since then, watching the audiences grow from one tour to the next, aided in the mid-2010s by his “one and only — so far — retrospective tour,” comprising songs from the ‘80s and ‘90s. Even as Cole prepares to go on the road again, the idea of retiring someday is something he has started to think about.
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“I don’t think I will retire. I think I’ll carry on working,” Cole says. “But I I’d like it to be an option. I’d like to be able to think I’m doing this now only because I want to.”
Follow Eric R. Danton on Twitter @erdanton.