For the past 10 years, or the entirety of what might be called his adult life, Barbarisms’ American songwriter, Nicholas Faraone has been living in Europe. After a couple years performing solo among the anti-folk scene in Paris, he landed in Stockholm where he met Tom Skantze and Robin Af Ekenstam. The two Swedes, who had been performing in tight and technical pop and post-punk bands, found themselves adapting to a songwriter who didn’t know which rules he was or wasn’t breaking. Barbarisms’ third album “West in the Head” is a destination record, each song depicting the frame of mind it took to get there. This unspecific “there” is a place called into question through the imagination’s will to rediscover what’s right in front of us. The album title is inspired by the essay “Exile” of William H Gass, itself influenced by Gertrude Stein’s reading of American Expansionism and the American Modernists in Paris. In the political-dadaist romp, the saying “Freewheeling through the old world” gets then reinterpreted: “When you reach the Pacific, there’s no place left but the West in the Head”.