Hamblin, Lucy
Ferraby Lionheart
Issue #33
The story of a boy with a curious name
By Kristina Francisco
Published: September 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
There is a boy called Ferraby Lionheart who lives in Los Angeles and plays songs that sound like early Rufus Wainwright. The 29-year-old grew up in Nashville, where people had a hard time pronouncing his name. Lionheart was interested in art, and after high school, he left Nashville to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
“By the time I got to art school, I was already pretty serious about the music I was making,” Lionheart says on the phone from Los Angeles. “I was trying to make records that I could interest labels with.” So when he was 20 years old, Lionheart recorded an album and shopped it around to various companies. One actually offered him a deal, but Lionheart turned it down. “They wanted me to make certain commitments in terms of a record deal and there was very, very little money involved,” he explains. “I was sort of a naïve and overly ambitious kid, and I had a fancy lawyer in L.A. who was shopping me around to bigger labels. So I just sort of walked away from it and kept working on stuff.”
Lionheart tired of Chicago’s weather and wanted to focus solely on music, so he left the Art Institute and moved to the land of sun, sand, and movie stars seven years ago. For a few years, he regretted turning down the record deal and felt like he’d made a bad decision.
In Los Angeles, Lionheart toiled away in a rock band called Telecast, but soon, he became uninspired, so he recorded some of the stripped-down, folk-inspired songs that he’d been writing by himself. He posted them on MySpace, and next thing he knew, managers, booking agents, and labels started contacting him. “It was kind of ridiculous how easy it was,” Lionheart muses. “I mean, I’m a hard worker and I sort of learned the [music] business through Telecast, and I was implementing the things I had learned, but this was way easier.”
Eventually, Lionheart signed with Nettwerk to release his debut, Catch the Brass Ring, an album of airy and pretty songs that perfectly soundtrack a day of playing in parks and on swings. “Making it in the entertainment business is a long road — a long, slow road,” Lionheart says. “I sort of have gone full circle. What I was doing back then when I was 20 is not that different from what I’m doing now in certain ways. It was just me, an acoustic guitar, a drum machine, and a keyboard, just making simple songs.”
So where does the name Ferraby come from? “I was named after a man named John Ferraby,” he says. “He was sort of a prominent figure in the Bahá’í faith, which is the religion I grew up in. I was supposed to be named after my father’s father, Nicholas, but when I was born, my mom changed her mind, and she felt that I didn’t look like a Nicholas. I don’t know exactly how you decide that, but she changed her mind.”
Comments
Please login to be able to comment on this article.
more