Zion Lambert: "The World Is Too Loud, So I Built a Quieter One"

A conversation with Zion Lambert about The Piano Fountain, daydreaming, and why he still records the old fashioned way

Interview for Barbican Records

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Zion Lambert arrives twenty minutes early, which he apologises for twice. He chooses the chair furthest from the window, orders tea he barely touches, and spends the first few minutes of our meeting looking at the piano in the corner of the room the way other people look at an old friend across a crowded party. It is clear he would rather be over there.

The pianist and composer, raised in a small seaside town where the tide kept better time than any clock, released The Piano Fountain in 2021. Thirteen short pieces, nineteen minutes in total, and his first full statement to the world. It opened doors he still seems slightly startled to have walked through. He speaks quietly, with long pauses he doesn't seem embarrassed by, and when a question interests him he closes his eyes before answering.

Zion, thank you for doing this. I know interviews aren't your favourite thing.

(laughs softly) No, they're not. Talking about music always feels like describing a colour to someone over the phone. But I'll try. The music says it better than I do. I've made peace with that. If I could say it in words, I wouldn't have needed the piano.

Let's start at the beginning then. The Piano Fountain was your first album. Do you remember the moment you decided to actually release it, to let people hear it?

I remember the moment I almost didn't. (pause) I had the recordings for months. They lived in a drawer, more or less. For me they were finished. I had played them, they existed, and that felt like enough. Releasing them felt like opening the front door of your house and letting strangers walk through your rooms.

But a friend said something I couldn't argue with. He said, "You keep telling me the world doesn't speak your language. Maybe that's because you've never spoken to it." So I sent the recordings out. Quietly. I think I hoped nobody would notice, honestly.

People noticed.

They did. (long pause) It's strange. I spent my whole life feeling like I was standing slightly outside of everything. School, work, the daily machinery of life. It never felt like it was built for me. And then this album, which is really just me sitting alone at a piano, became the thing that connected me to people. The most solitary thing I've ever done became the least solitary thing I've ever done. I still haven't fully worked that out.

You've described yourself as someone who daydreams a lot. Where do you go, when you drift off?

(closes his eyes) Somewhere slower. That's the main quality of it. Slowness. In my head there is no balance to keep between work and life, because work and life are not two separate things fighting each other. There is just living. Nobody is performing their day for a camera. Nobody is afraid of the news because there is no news, only weather. Things take the time they take. Bread takes hours. Conversations take all evening. A piece of music takes as long as it wants.

I know how that sounds. Escapist. Maybe it is. But I don't think of it as running away from the world. I think of it as visiting the version of the world I wish we'd built.

Is The Piano Fountain a map of that place?

That's a nice way to put it. Yes, maybe. Each piece is a room in it, or a view from a window. "In the Mountain" is exactly what it says. The feeling of being somewhere high and quiet where your phone doesn't work and, more importantly, you don't mind. "Ice-skate Fun" is a childhood memory that I've probably polished so much it's half invented by now. But invented memories are still yours, aren't they? You made them too.

Some titles are heavier. "Fixing the Past." "Counting Days." "Walking Dead."

(nods slowly) The imaginary world isn't only pleasant. It can't be, or it would be a postcard, not a place. "Walking Dead" is about the days when I did take part in normal life. Commuting, scrolling, replying, hurrying. I was doing everything correctly and I wasn't there at all. Present in body, absent everywhere else. A lot of people live like that, I think. They just don't have thirteen tracks to admit it in.

"Counting Days" is quieter. It's about waiting without knowing what you're waiting for. I wrote it in one sitting and never changed a note, because changing it felt like lying about how that waiting actually felt.

The album is remarkably raw. You can hear the pedal, the mechanism of the piano, the room itself. In an era of polished, layered production, that's a choice.

It's the only choice I know how to make. (smiles) I like real things. Real instruments, real rooms, real mistakes left in. When I record, it's essentially the old school way. A piano, minimal tools, as few things between my hands and your ears as possible. If my chair creaks, the chair creaks. That creak is proof a person was there.

So much of what we see now is created digitally and so fast that I'm not sure we can call it real. It's assembled, not lived. The Instagram life, where everything is curated and everything is instant. I don't want my music to belong to that world. I want it to sound like it was made by hands, in an afternoon, by someone breathing. Raw and simple. But simple things can be majestic. The sea is simple. It's water doing one thing repeatedly. Nobody calls it boring.

You grew up by that sea. How much of it is in this record?

All of it, probably. When you grow up with waves, you learn that repetition isn't the enemy of beauty. It's the source of it. "Never Ending Cadence" is basically a wave written down. It resolves and begins again, resolves and begins again. Some listeners hear it as unresolved. I hear it as honest. Life doesn't cadence neatly either. It just keeps returning to the tonic and setting out again.

"Feather on the Wind" and "Autumn Fall" feel like they belong to the natural world too.

They do. I trust nature as a composer more than I trust myself. A feather falling has perfect phrasing. It hesitates, it turns, it lands exactly when it should. I just try to transcribe things like that. When people say my pieces feel like landscapes, that's the highest compliment, because it means I got out of the way successfully.

And "Unbelievable"? The title stands out. It sounds almost like disbelief at something.

(quiet laugh) It was disbelief at myself, actually. It was the first piece where I played something back and thought, did I write that? It didn't feel like mine. The best pieces never do. You feel less like an author and more like someone who happened to be sitting at the piano when the music walked past. My job was just to be there, and to not be on my phone when it arrived.

The final track, "One Piece Remembered." Is that a goodbye?

More like a hope. When people finish the album, I don't need them to remember all thirteen pieces. If one melody follows someone home, hums itself while they're washing dishes, then the album did its work. One piece remembered is enough. That's a modest ambition, I know. I have modest ambitions. They're the only kind I can carry.

The album opened doors for you. More records followed, a label, listeners around the world. Has success changed your relationship with the "real" world you find so difficult?

(long pause) It changed the shape of the door, not my hesitation at the doorway. (smiles) I still find the everyday world too loud and too fast and too photographed. I'm still the person at the party looking at the piano. But The Piano Fountain taught me something important. I don't have to take part in the world the way it's usually offered. I can take part in my own way. The music goes out and lives among people, shakes hands, travels, does all the social things I'm not built for. It's my ambassador. I stay home and write the next letter for it to deliver.

Last question. If someone is about to press play on The Piano Fountain for the first time, what would you ask of them?

Nothing difficult. Just nineteen minutes. That's all it asks. Put the phone in another room. The phone will survive, I promise. Let the album be slow at you. And if, somewhere in the middle, you catch yourself daydreaming, if you drift off to some quieter place of your own, please don't apologise for it, and don't come back too quickly.

That was the whole point. The fountain isn't there to be watched. It's there to be sat beside.

The Piano Fountain by Zion Lambert

The Piano Fountain by Zion Lambert is out now on all streaming platforms via Barbican Records.