TLOBF Interview // Josiah Wolf

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Ahead of the release of his fantastic debut album, Jet Lag, Josiah Wolf talks to Leah Pritchard about the pressures of emerging from behind the drum kit, putting together an album in solitude, and how David Berman helped him rise above the comforts of his speaking voice.

The new album is stunning, which begs the question: how come it’s taken so long for you to put out a solo record?
Ever since I was a kid, and then in high school and college, I focused all my musical energies on playing the drums. I think that my brother (Yoni Wolf, of WHY?) had a large influence on me when I was living in New York. At the time, I was playing a lot of jazz, I was big into learning about styles of music. I felt like a lot of the scene out there wasn’t very inspired or original. I was riding around on the trains listening to his Reaching Quiet record and he was really expressing himself in a very emotional way through his music. It was something I wasn’t used to. So I don’t know, I just bought a recorder. I did one EP that was never released in 2003 but those were really the first recordings that I did as far as writing songs and stuff is concerned. It wasn’t very good, a lot of it, so I never released it.

So you guys weren’t playing music together while you were growing up?
Oh, I mean, a little bit. It’s not like there was one moment exactly. I helped record some of the cLOUDDEAD stuff with him when he was living in Ohio, like JimmyBreeze (2001). For a long time I never used my voice or thought about words in a poetic way so much. I was more interested in the sounds and the musical landscape of instruments. We jammed, but we were in two different scenes. I had my friends and he had his. We didn’t mix that often.

You isolated yourself whilst recording the record- was it the same during the writing or did you get people to jam the songs?
Everything was kind of done in solitude. Most of the writing happened while I was still living in California , but I would have to get away and go off into the woods. It was hard. It was a sort of epic and inspiring time and I was writing little things all the time.. I’d be out riding my bike with people, sing this thing in my head and then grab my tape recorder. For some reason, in those couple of years, I was constantly coming up with that stuff. Since then I’ve not been as inspired, but I’m sure, different times in your life, you know…

There’s a definite aesthetic to the record- I’m not sure whether it’s a place or a time period that it stems from, but was that a conscious thing?
I’m not really an electronic music person, I don’t know about MIDI or any of that. I only use computers to record. Any instruments on there were in my house, so I guess that’s why it sounds consistent. A lot of people nowadays have so many things to choose from that consistency sometimes falls by the wayside. I think that it was natural in the process. There were a couple of songs where I wished it were less consistent, that I had some sort of vocal choir or something, but it was just me.

You played absolutely everything on the record?
I did.

Wow. Have you been collecting those instruments together over the years?
Yeah! Yeah, just slowly over the years. Some of them aren’t even mine, they belong to WHY?, things we bought with band money that ended up with me because I have a sort of centralised place where we rehearse. I’m happy that I’ve got a little collection going. You always want more, but that’s the nature of us, I guess.

Do you find it daunting that all eyes are on you, that you’re entirely responsible for the music now?
Yeah, I’m used to not having to really worry about the attention and still reap the benefits. It’s a good experience for me to do something new, to branch out. The scariest part is playing in front of so many people doing this. Drumming is very different from singing your songs.

What can we expect from your live show?
I’ve made the songs much more simple. I think they work. I have a kick drum, or a tom-tom actually, I use it with a kick pedal. A hi-hat with some percussion on it. Then a bunch of pedals around to add different effects on the guitar. I had big ideas beforehand of doing some other interesting stuff with all these percussion instruments and vibraphones but I can’t sing the songs and play all that stuff. With the guitar, I don’t even have to look at my hands or anything. You’re just singing. Getting the vocals good is the most important part of doing it live. In Europe it’ll be just me but in the States I might add some other people, we’ll see.

With the lyrics, were there any particular writers or musicians that influenced your style?
I would say there were probably many. Obviously I would say my brother is one writer that’s influenced me. Leonard Cohen, I’ve listened to him a lot. David Berman from the Silver Jews. A bunch of poets I was listening to a lot- Philip Levine, I stole a little line from him. I meant to credit him in the thing, I hope I don’t get in trouble for that… With David Berman, he really got me inspired to write my own songs. If you heard me three years ago, I was really bad. I couldn’t even sing above my natural speaking voice, which is pretty low, but David Berman never sings above that either. I was like, “I can sing these songs!” and then, “I can play them,” because it’s always like two chords. It was just fun to learn because the lyrics were so good.

It was really cool, with their last album they included a chord sheet for all the songs.
Oh really? You know, I didn’t get the last one. I heard a couple of songs that I liked, and some that I didn’t like as much, but I should get it.

Having played everything on your album, is there any reason you didn’t mix it yourself?
It’s hard to mix anything that you were that close to. I needed to get some fresh ears on it. I’m not good at that anyway. If somebody gave me something I’d never heard and said they wanted me to mix it, I would be very intimidated. For some reason, I have a good ear for other types of detail, but not mixing. It’s not my thing.

Did you do all the recording yourself or did another engineer come in?
Our sound guy, Brent Benedict, he goes by Snake, recorded a couple of tracks, but that was just because he was at my house. He brought some of his own mics and he’s a bit better at placing mics than me- my brother had to do less work on the ones he did. I don’t know the science behind all that stuff. Especially with multiple mics, I did some bad things where Yoni had to go in and do some phase shifting. With one mic, it’s simple, it doesn’t matter really. You can’t really run into too many technical problems. If you have a good mic, that’s it.

Although your styles are really different, you and Yoni cover a lot of the same ground with your lyrics. There’s one line, “Do you ever tell little lies when explaining a dream” and then his lyric “Ashamed of sleep, I lie when a phone call wakes me” – it seems similar, looking at everyday things in an analytical way.
Hmmm, yeah. Sometimes I’ll write something, not realise it, maybe subconsciously I know he’s written it. Sometimes, I won’t even know. That one, I don’t know if I’d even heard that song by the time I wrote it. Yeah, we have similar brains. I would say a lot of in the instrumentation with WHY? is influenced by what I have, because when we’re recording, we use a lot of my instruments. The vibraphone, that stuff, I brought into the picture. We like similar instruments so I’d say that aspect of WHY? I have a little more influence over. As far as the lyrics and songwriting go, Yoni pretty much… well, that’s his baby.

Do you think your relationship with your brother would be different were you not in a band together?
It’s hard to say. We have a strange dynamic. We rarely sit down and really talk to each other, heart to heart. When we do, we can really get into some serious conversations. It’s very rare. I’ll listen to him doing interviews and learn more about his feelings and his life from what he tells strangers over the phone than what he tells me. Maybe I’m doing the same with the couple that I’ve done. It’s almost therapy for him to do interviews, he expresses how he feels about his whole life. He and I never had that closeness, although we’ve had some talks. I think it’d be the same, it’s how it’s always been. What makes it strange being in the band is touring together. Being in that close proximity can be difficult and causes some negative feelings to come out. It’s not just him, but everyone that you tour with. That can be tough.