An Interview With Musician Frank Turner

His style is tough to pin down, with folk and indie rock blending with punk and hardcore roots. WatchMojo.com speaks with singer/songwriter Frank Turner about his influences.

An Interview With Musician Frank Turner Rebecca Brayton: Thought provoking and even controversial, this singer songwriter brings his personality to his performances, hi I am Rebecca Brayton and welcome to watchmojo.com and today we are speaking with Frank Turner. Tell us a bit about you know your upbringing and how you originally got into music? Frank Turner: I was brought up in the countryside in the U.K. many miles away from all the civilization. I was about 10 I found out about Iron Maiden and everything kind of got different after then. I feel like they were kind of like first in last out kind of band, you know I mean it is like I think I'll probably fall out of love with all other types of music before I start loving Iron Maiden and then I fully intend to be buried in an Iron Maiden coffin. You heard it here first. I toured in punk bands for very long a time and then kind of got bored at the medium, but I wanted to stay on tour and started playing an acoustic guitar. Rebecca Brayton: Any songwriting icons? Frank Turner: I mean Bruce Springstein is a really big deal for me and Townes van Zandt has always been kind of for me the absolute undisputed master of kind of economy with words and music like he says everything was so little. Rebecca Brayton: To you, what makes a good lyric? Frank Turner: for me a great lyric uses something very small to say something very big it picks up on a tiny detail and with it says everything about the world. Rebecca Brayton: If you wanted to describe your music to -- let’s say my grandmother, how would you do so? Frank Turner: I would say that it was angry folk music. A lot of people believe that the word folk should refer exclusively to traditional songs and I have to say I have no time for that opinion, but that mentioned, Bob Dylan wasn’t a folk singer because he wrote his own material. So if you just put that slightly to one side yeah I call myself a folk singer. The fact that I grew up with heavier music shines through what I do and just put my best efforts. Rebecca Brayton: Would you say you have transitioned stylistically from you know of the harder bands that you’ve been in like Million Dead? Frank Turner: It also felt organic to me, I mean a lot of people when I left my old band were like you are totally out of your mind. And at the time I thought that they just didn’t get it. But looking back at it now it seems they might have made kind of a point more than I realized. It was a pretty radical left hand turn. I think it’s funny because in recent years the whole kind of like folk-punk crossover everything has become more kind of common. I think that’s nothing but a good thing but I do get slightly defensive just in the sense it’s kind of like it wasn’t kind of a beaten path when I was doing it and I'm quite proud of the fact that I stuck it out.