Speaking from his home in Cincinnati, Yoni Wolf is describing the uneasy feeling he gets when delving into - and discussing - his own past work.
“I could come up with five favourite songs from a bunch of different bands,” he explains. “But when it’s your own music… it kind of harkens back to specific periods in your life, and you’ve sang those songs on tour for years. It’s just not clean, you know? It's like I'm coming in with all this residue.”
Wolf may enter our conversation slightly hesitant, but his band’s new album - The Well I Fell Into - is similarly full of reflective sentiments. The eighth studio LP from the beloved alt-rap project turned genre-blurring indie-rock outfit, it’s a record that sees frontman and creative leader Wolf ruminating on past love, loss of self, the uncertainty of the future and - at times - his own artistic legacy.
“Is this all I am now, your old best pal’s high school pet sounds?”, he wonders on the album’s third track, “Brand New”, adding a few lines later: “Just tell me what the work is, or have I outlived my purpose?”
Elsewhere on “Marigold”, he sings of that detached feeling that often comes as you grow older, “I’ve barely been in my body since Obama… I’m just riding on this bus ‘til I’m gone”.
Wolf recently described each WHY? record as a time for him to “really take stock” on where he is and how he’s feeling - “an opportunity for me to button up a period of my life”. When we meet, Yoni says that The Well I Fell Into ultimately documents the demise of a recent relationship - “A process of coming to terms with this mourning”, he tells me. “And coming to terms with the end of this relationship”.
WHY’s back-catalogue has never been short on break-up songs, but Wolf makes it a point of emphasis this time that the album shouldn’t be seen as some sort of "bitter kiss-off”. Indeed, there’s less score-settling or some of the wry punchlines of his earlier work.
Often the focus is instead placed on his own faults and failings, like on the gentle and shimmering “Later at The Loon”, which documents self-sabotage, or on lead single “The Letters, Etc.”, which sees Wolf concluding: “I acted like a fool… I guess it’s my own damn fault.”
Amongst all the self-reflection though, we also see glimmers of hope on the record, or at least acceptance. “There are moments of feeling everything's gonna be okay and this is how life goes,” Wolf explains. “And then there are other moments of feeling despair about it. I think it vacillates. It’s a broad emotional palette.”
Following on from 2019’s opaque but intriguing AOKOHIO, an experimental collection of 19 ultra-short songs that played out like aural vignettes, this latest LP feels like the most complete and focused WHY? record for a while. Its rich, expansive and layered sound expands the foundations laid on 2017's Moh Lhean, while Wolf delivers some of his most emotive and diaristic lyricism since 2009’s underrated Eskimo Snow.
“I think I wrote some songs that feel true to me,” Wolf says of the album as a whole. “It’s been really hard in the past 15 years - physically and with illness. I had this idea of a certain career trajectory that I thought my music would continue to take and the rug was pulled out from under me at some point. And now I'm finding ways to make it work with my new reality. I feel like I've finally come to [terms with that] and I feel like this album reflects that.”
A few days before our chat, Wolf put a call out to fans on social media to help him whittle down his Personal Best - five songs that sum up his career to date. “I found it incredibly difficult, actually,” he admits. “And the crowdsourcing did not help at all, because that's just their opinions. So I just had to go through my catalogue and choose different periods throughout.”
Wolf pauses for a second before adding: “And maybe I’ll have reasons for why I picked each song…”
“Early Whitney” (2003)
YONI WOLF: I probably wrote it in 2001, or 2002. This song was an early attempt for me at breaking away from what I had been doing prior, which was more rap and sample based. I had started listening to some more contemporary indie rock. So I was like, ‘Alright, I want to make something that’s guitar based.’ But I'm not a guitar player, really, so I wrote it and I was recording it sort of piecemeal, if I remember, where I would just loop a little riff and then add another riff.
I remember being really satisfied with how it sounded and really building in some dynamics in the way that you can only do if you're playing something live. The song felt really organic, and the recording achieved the emotional journey I was looking for at the time.
In terms of the song’s meaning, I'm sort of speaking to myself in parts. But I also have a couple of friends that I'm speaking to in parts of it. Maybe like many of my songs, it's about feeling maybe disconnected and isolated, and confused as to what's going on here - why I'm here, why anyone's here, that kind of thing. It's kind of big and existential… sort of nihilistic in a way. A very emotional song.
I remember recording the drums in the bathroom. And I had one mic outside of the bathroom. I believe I was trying to get this distant sound. I remember just fucking wailing away, and really getting this catharsis from it. That was the only respite I had from my sort of depressive mental health stuff.
BEST FIT: Not only did your sound change after this, but your songwriting seemed to grow too. Did this song feel like the opening of a new door?
Yes, and that's why it's included here. It was a new beginning for me. It was like, ‘Alright, I can write something that is melodic and emotional.’ It felt like a turning point in a way of doing a certain style. It's not like I stopped doing the other style, but I felt like ‘Okay, here's a new trick.’
The lyric “And I face the punching bag and do what I'm told” appears to be a Guided by Voices reference - fellow Ohio natives. Was that intentional?
Yes, it was. I'm glad that you caught that. I was just thinking that when you said it. But yes, that was intentional. I love those two Guided By Voices albums, Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes. I've listened to those endlessly.
“Early Whitney” has also long been played as the entrance song by Los Campesinos! at their shows. How does that feel?
I have been told that and I think it's incredible. I love those guys. I think I've met them twice. One time in San Francisco years ago at one of their shows. And then I think they came to one of our shows in Bristol.
But it feels amazing, that's huge. That’s how music evolves, you’re listening to stuff, getting ideas and getting inspired. It’s like what I did with Guided By Voices on this song and then they did that with us. I was just doing that last night with Frankie Cosmos, listening to a bunch of their stuff and kind of reinvigorating myself.
Los Campesinos! also have a lyric on one of their songs that goes: “If your hero told you to go huff a Sharpie, what would you do?”. I read that you’re the “hero” that they’re referring to - I’m guessing you never actually told them to “go huff a Sharpie”?
I don’t think so! [laughs] Unless backstage I was joking with them or something. I don’t have that good of a memory. But you have to ask Gareth [Los Campesinos! frontman] about that!
“The Hoofs” (2005)
YONI WOLF: This is, admittedly, a decidedly album track. You can see it as a shorter, throwaway track between longer, more important songs on the album, Elephant Eyelash. But this one always stuck out for me as one of my favourites.
I'm a weird listener - I really appreciate those little ditties. Like I mentioned, I got super deep into Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes by Guided By Voices, and one of the reasons I loved those two albums so much was that they would have 40-second tracks that were jammed up against each other. I’ve always liked that.
I feel like [“The Hoofs”] has this really singular, calm energy. And it actually embodies a sound that even to this day I'm going for, which is this folk-rock, chamber group [sound]. Almost like where it feels like you're very much in a space with a small group of musicians playing right in your face in a quiet way. This one really embodies that.
On the surface, there's a lot of little silly lyrics [on the track] that can make you kind of chuckle. The horse that “moves slow like an exercise bike on an airport walkway”. Even the title: it’s “The Hoofs”, not “hooves”, it's like incorrect English. But the lyric, “Listening for the hoofs of the rescue party”, is this idea that someone's going to come save me, and that's what I'm looking for, so it's actually quite serious. And the feeling behind it is actually quite desperate. But you have to kind of laugh about it. What's going to come and save me from myself and these terrible feelings that I have?
And it’s this set of horses that are going to come with tear traps built into the saddle, so you can cry it out while they’re taking you to paradise or wherever. In the end, there’s the reference to a “poster of some Asian mountains that says "patience" in a funky Italics”.
It’s the idea that things happen, these mountains are built and are destroyed over time, and you have to take a longer view of your life. I think it's a good juxtaposition between really goofy language and some kind of profundity, about just being alive on earth and sort of suffering through it. Having to laugh through that suffering.
BEST FIT: Before you mentioned its length, I was going to say that it’s one of your shorter songs - less than two minutes long. Why do you think brevity is sometimes an advantage to great songwriting?
I think in the same way that a haiku does - you have to distil the language and story into such a dense, powerful few words. That’s a real discipline - to do something like that and be successful with it. I think the opposite of jam bands, who will drag something out to 10 minutes or something. I prefer to zoom it in, and be like, ‘Alright, what's the most important thing we can say here, to get to the heart of the emotional truth of what we're doing here?’
You did a special tour for this album’s follow-up, Alopecia, on its 10th anniversary in 2018. This one, Elephant Eyelash, turns 20 next year - are you going to do anything to mark that milestone?
That's a good question. We haven't really discussed it at length. We have this new album to support but then maybe we should do something. But I feel like Alopecia was the album of ours that seemed to be adopted by the zeitgeist, so there was a lot of demand for that one. I don’t know if there’s as much for Elephant Eyelash. But it could be fun nonetheless.
“Fatalist Palmistry” (2008)
YONI WOLF: I think some people like this song, but it’s not like the number one track [that fans like from Alopecia]. For me, I'm not - and never was - happy with how the recording came out. And I was not happy with how the demo came out. I feel like if I was to go back and redo it, I would totally rethink the production and arrangement of the song, and maybe play it on different instruments or something.
But I think in terms of the song itself, if you strip it to just the words and melodies, I think it's a good example of me firing lyrically on all cylinders. It's a good heartbreak song in my style. And I think that it's the opposite of “The Hoofs”. That was distilled and minimal, this one really packs a shit ton of lyrics into three and a half minutes. It’s like a more maximalist approach to telling the story.
The story [also referenced in the song “These Few Presidents”] is me walking into my ex-girlfriend’s house and seeing this tea towel with her name and her new boyfriend's name embroidered on it. You know, the moment your heart sinks, and you realise, ‘Oh, it's really over’.
Everything else is spoken around that moment, and I thought it was really elegantly done. There are just some really great couplets on there: “Thrashing like a pet bird caught in a jet stream” and “You count them blessings because your net worth oughta be less cream in your best dreams”. Just the idea that she's going on, and thriving, and I am struggling constantly.
BEST FIT: The song’s chorus names said ex and her new boyfriend, Anna and Nathan. Have you ever had doubts about sharing snippets like this from your personal life in your music and has it ever gotten you into trouble?
I think we're about to find out with this new album, if it'll get me in trouble or not. Different person, different ideas, different feeling about how she wants to be out there or not. But the songs that were about this particular love [on “Fatalist Palmistry”], I sent her the album when we finished it and she was very chill about that sort of thing.
I don't think nowadays that I would name anyone in a song, but back then I was in my mid 20s and there was this almost angry, painful defiance. I also kind of obscured it, you have to read the lyrics to know what I'm saying. And that was intentional.
That’s true. If you listen to it, the “Nathan” part of the chorus is unclear. It's hard to decipher what you're saying there.
I had this tape of a guy called Bob Larson [American evangelist pastor] who would exercise demons live on the air on the radio. There would be some person who was possessed, and Bob Larson would then be like ‘In the name of Jesus, tell me when the demon entered your soul’, or whatever, and the person just could not physically get the words out. They were possessed by this thing. So it was kind of like that, where I couldn’t even say the guy's name because it hurt too bad. No offence to him. He's a good dude, as far as I know.
You released a record with Anna under the name Divorcee in 2014 and a lot of the songs featured Anna’s perspective on your relationship, sort of like rebuttals to this song and others from Alopecia. Where did this idea come from?
I feel like that idea of it being a “rebuttal” was something probably cultivated by publicists. But we had been working on music together since maybe a year or two after this song [“Fatalist Palmistry”] was made. I was still in love with her, so that was a tough process. But I was very happy with how that little record came out. It sounds cool. She did a great job with it.
Speaking of Alopecia as a whole, a poster of the album’s artwork features in the background in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. How did that come about?
Well, I'm friends with [Always Sunny creator and star] Glenn Howerton, who plays Dennis. I guess Glenn was directing and in charge of the set-dressing, of getting Charlie's apartment to look like how he wanted it to look like. He hit me up one day and was like, ‘Can I make a poster and use it?’. I was like, ‘of course’. That's one of the greatest honours bestowed upon an artist, to be featured in a show like that. That's been really cool.
Do you think the character of Charlie would be a WHY? fan? Or do you think he's just seen this surrealist poster of horses on clouds and thought that it’s a funny image?
I've thought about that. Like, was Glenn kind of surmising that this is the type of person who would listen to my band, or was he just trying to give me a little subtle shout out? I don't exactly know. But yes, I can see Charlie being a WHY? fan. He's slightly unstable and emotional. Yeah, I can see it.
“This Ole King” (2017)
YONI WOLF: I don't necessarily think it's the best writing on this album [2017’s Moh Lhean] but, similar to “Early Whitney”, I feel like this one opened a certain avenue, where I saw a new direction that could happen. Recording-wise and arrangement-wise, this one came out really well. I wanted it to feel almost tribal somehow. We recorded it at the tiny studio here at my house. We packed seven people into a 10-foot-by-10-foot room.
Then lyrically, I feel like I was able to get outside of myself. In this period in general, I approached songwriting from a broader perspective. I was able to be - and hopefully I'll get back to that at some point - less in my life or, like, ‘What's going on in my life? What's my heartbreak?’ I got outside of that a lot, and specifically on this track. And I like that about it.
BEST FIT: The song seems to be about focusing on the present, rather than the past or future. Is that something you find easy or difficult to do?
I would say that's true. I think in this period, when I was making this album, I was very focused on that, and meditating every day. I was still going through really difficult stuff, health wise and all that, but trying to see it all in perspective. I did some DMT a few times, which I think was what was going on for everyone in 2015 and 2016. So that's sort of where I was at.
I’m not great at [focusing on the present], I get anxious a lot, but I'm trying to try and have more of that.
It’s interesting that you talk about meditating a lot at the time. The way you repeat “One thing, there is no other / Only this, there is no other” in the chorus sounds almost like a mantra to me.
Yes, I think so. That is sort of me just reiterating that for myself. And trying to live with that assumption.
One review at the time said that “the most striking aspect of Moh Lhean is how beautiful it is.” Would you agree that this is one of your prettiest-sounding and perhaps least cynical records?
I think so, yes. It's not very cynical, if you compare it to Alopecia. That album is extremely angry and acerbic, but also kind of funny. This one's not so funny. Moh Lhean is more pretty and, um, earnest.
“The Letters, Etc.” (2024)
YONI WOLF: I think this is a good summation track for the new album. It sums up everything that you’ll be privy to throughout the rest of the record in terms of its story. It’s also the most plainly spoken version of the story.
I think, sound-wise, it came out really well. There are moments where it flourishes in the chorus and then comes back down. I think I did a pretty good job with that. I don't know, I'm just happy with it.
BEST FIT: The song seems to be accepting of your role in a failed relationship - is that a fair assessment? You don’t get that kind of ownership in a lot of “break-up” songs.
Yes, for sure. Even in my own many, many break-up songs, I feel like this one - and this album in general - has less of that anger or frustration. Less blame than maybe others in the past have because, honestly, when I think about this person, I feel only good things about them. I can sort of see how things crumbled, and it's probably largely my doing.
If anything, there's maybe some anger towards myself but even then, I'm just trying to accept that’s what happened. The last line in the song is “that's just life bro”. You know? So yeah…
Long-distance communication - whether that’s letters or phone calls - seems to be a running theme in your songwriting. Why do you think that is?
I never thought about it, to be honest. But I think that I always feel at a distance, so maybe that's a good representation of that.
Your lyric, “How strange to be strangers / After what we was” reminds me of some of the wordplay on the word ‘stranger’ from the Purple Mountains album by David Berman. How much of an influence had David Berman been on your writing over the years?
Well, I wouldn’t say that line is lifted from Berman, but certainly the first lines of the song [“Classic air is a vacuum where you are not / And I'm a can of Coke flattened by a thousand cars”] is a shout out to him. You know, from his book Actual Air and the poem “Classic Water”: “All water is classic water”.
I think that he influenced my work greatly. Especially back when I was making Elephant Eyelash and Alopecia. I think his work has weaved itself into the fabric of how I write, as have other writers, but he was very important to me back in that early 2000s era.
I think with that lyric, “How strange to be strangers / After what we was”, I changed it from “were” to “was” to make it rhyme with “a thousand cars”. I could have used “were”, but I thought about “was” as in [both of you] becoming one thing, this unit. So I used the singular there. And I think it feels appropriate.
Obviously some of the other songs you’ve chosen date back to over 20 years. What do you want your feelings towards this track to be in two decades’ time?
I think what I always want for my music is that it stands the test of time - that it feels relevant in 20 years, or at least honest. To be able to listen to it in 20 years and to still have some kind of emotional response from it.
And it doesn't feel like cringey dribble, or super era specific. I want that for all my music. And for it to speak from its own truth, that each song has its own little grain of truth that it speaks from.
The Well I Fell Into is released 2 August via Waterlines, WHY?’s newly launched label.
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